Photography, Knowledge and the South Kensington Museum

This thesis argues that the South Kensington Museum, through its governing body the Department of Science and Art and its neighbouring institutions in Albertopolis, formed a sophisticated photographic infrastructure. The photographic infrastructure extended beyond the official remit of the Museum and embedded it within wider structures of state power and imperialism. The pivotal roles in this infrastructure of the Royal Engineers barracked at the Museum created what I term a military-cultural complex. Comprehending the photographic infrastructure necessitates understanding Albertopolis as a totalizing entity formed of smaller institutions and societies across the arts and sciences. Albertopolis’s inhabitants interacted in personal, practical and political ways. I show the involvement of the Royal School of Science (now Imperial College London) and the National Art Training School (now the Royal College of Art) in the photographic infrastructure. I discuss how, through the Royal School of Science, key figures such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Galton, William de Wiveleslie Abney, Norman Lockyer and H.G.Wells were present within the Museum complex and involved in the photographic infrastructure. Through this photographic infrastructure, the South Kensington Museum was involved in both cultural diplomacy and knowledge synthesis, and new hybrid technologies were developed. I argue that photographs were extended’ through methods such as hand-painting, photomechanical reproduction and projection. The National Art Training School students were the audience for the Museum’s photography collection, and their later careers in press illustration indicate how the ‘South Kensington System’ was disseminated. I examine how the products of the photographic infrastructure were used as political objects by the Museum’s first director Henry Cole, using a case study of photography of the Raphael Cartoons. I show how the photographic training of the Royal Engineers was deployed globally to gather state information, and how photographs made and/or collated at the Museum were used to bolster the position of the British Empire. In this regard I discuss the presence of the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Solar Physics Observatory at the Museum. Through a case study analysing photographs of two men from the Torres Strait, Garicha and Boyguda, I show how the Museum shaped public opinion on race and science as well as art and taste. Since the 1850s, photographs at the Museum have been relegated, ‘submerged’ and rediscovered. This thesis analyses the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Photography Collection as an entity and the wide-reaching effects of the Museum’s photographic infrastructure.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ravilious, Ella

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/1d575dc8-5a23-424a-8dbf-63c10a506e72/download