Preface  xi

Acknowledgments  xiii

1. "Sacred Monuments of the Nation's Growth and Hope": Amateur Photography and Imagining the Past  1

2. "A Credit to Yourself and Your Country": Amateur Photographers and the Survey and Record Movement  31

3. Unblushing Realism: Practices of Evidence, Style, and Arachive  79

4. "To Be a Source of Pride": Local Histories and National Identities  123

5. "Doomed and Threatened": Photography, Disappearance, and Survival  163

6. "To Quicken the Instincts": Photographs 7. Afterlives and Legacies: An Epilogureas Public History  209

7. Afterlives and Legacies: An Epilogue  243

Appendix  259

Illustrations  269

Notes  273

Bibliography  305

Index  321

”This is the only comprehensive monograph on the survey movement, for which Edwards has identified 73 surveys, or regional bodies of work that were focused on particular towns, counties, and cities. Her analysis of the pictures is commendable as she describes the ‘historical imagination’ that these amateur photographers articulated through the surveys. . . . Serious researchers on this topic will appreciate the thorough work offered here, which is well documented in notes and appendixes.”—Eric Linderman, Library Journal

“This is a great book on a great subject by a great author (and, yes, by a great publisher as well, for the amount and quality of the often never published images in this well designed and impressive volume is exemplary). . . . If good history is a dialogue between past, present and future, then The Camera as Historian is best history.”—Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews

“[A] fascinating and remarkable new book. . . . It is also a pleasure to use, being beautifully produced, with (as would be expected) a wonderful collection of photographs, magnificently reproduced—and. . . it is outstandingly good value.”—Alan Crosby, The Local Historian

“The Camera as Historian provides a dense amount of information about the photographic survey movement, as well as aspects of Victorian and Edwardian Britain that shaped the survey movement. . . . But the content and ideas are interesting and provide an original perspective, making any extra effort in the read a tremendously worthwhile venture.”—Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram

“Probably because of the scope, British survey photography has lacked extensive studies, so this thoughtful analysis by Edwards of a complex set of practices and narratives is welcome. . . . Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above.”—S. Spencer, Choice

“... the book has to commended for its outstanding comprehensive depiction of the cultural values that gathered around the abstractions of history and national identity and induced a sweeping domestic movement to reify them in visual form.”—Laurie Dahlberg, CAA Reviews

“The Camera as Historian is unquestionably a major work of the new photographic history. As I have indicated it is now the benchmark study of mass photographic practice; it is inventively conceived, meticulously researched, and full of new ways of thinking about photography, history, and many other things.”
—Steve Edwards, Oxford Art Journal

“If you are an archivist interested in the connection between popular history and photography then this book will appeal to you. It is a complicated reminder of the tension between the desire to photograph and the social forces that fuel that desire.” —Deirdre A. Scaggs, Views

”This is the only comprehensive monograph on the survey movement, for which Edwards has identified 73 surveys, or regional bodies of work that were focused on particular towns, counties, and cities. Her analysis of the pictures is commendable as she describes the ‘historical imagination’ that these amateur photographers articulated through the surveys. . . . Serious researchers on this topic will appreciate the thorough work offered here, which is well documented in notes and appendixes.”—Eric Linderman, Library Journal

“This is a great book on a great subject by a great author (and, yes, by a great publisher as well, for the amount and quality of the often never published images in this well designed and impressive volume is exemplary). . . . If good history is a dialogue between past, present and future, then The Camera as Historian is best history.”—Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews

“[A] fascinating and remarkable new book. . . . It is also a pleasure to use, being beautifully produced, with (as would be expected) a wonderful collection of photographs, magnificently reproduced—and. . . it is outstandingly good value.”—Alan Crosby, The Local Historian

“The Camera as Historian provides a dense amount of information about the photographic survey movement, as well as aspects of Victorian and Edwardian Britain that shaped the survey movement. . . . But the content and ideas are interesting and provide an original perspective, making any extra effort in the read a tremendously worthwhile venture.”—Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram

“Probably because of the scope, British survey photography has lacked extensive studies, so this thoughtful analysis by Edwards of a complex set of practices and narratives is welcome. . . . Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above.”—S. Spencer, Choice

“... the book has to commended for its outstanding comprehensive depiction of the cultural values that gathered around the abstractions of history and national identity and induced a sweeping domestic movement to reify them in visual form.”—Laurie Dahlberg, CAA Reviews

“The Camera as Historian is unquestionably a major work of the new photographic history. As I have indicated it is now the benchmark study of mass photographic practice; it is inventively conceived, meticulously researched, and full of new ways of thinking about photography, history, and many other things.”
—Steve Edwards, Oxford Art Journal

“If you are an archivist interested in the connection between popular history and photography then this book will appeal to you. It is a complicated reminder of the tension between the desire to photograph and the social forces that fuel that desire.” —Deirdre A. Scaggs, Views

"In this magnificent study, Elizabeth Edwards approaches the photographic survey movement in England above all as a practice: a relation between photographers, photographic technologies, photographs, and the material traces of the past in landscapes. This practice, as Edwards shows in rich detail, was extensive, amateur, public, local, and reflexive. With its empirical depth and conceptual reach, this book enhances immensely our understanding of the mediation of both history and geography by photography."—Gillian Rose, author of Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment

"The Camera as Historian offers groundbreaking insights into the entangled relations of photography and history, the recording impulse in modern British history, the complex links between visual practices and the historical imagination, and the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame representations of the past. It is significant as the first in-depth look at the fascinating and important work of the British survey movement: its participants, driving impulses, economies, audiences, values, and successes and failures. The book is made all the more important by Elizabeth Edwards's insistence on attention to the ways that photographs were produced and translated, and her demonstration of a mode of historical interpretation that not only links critical theory and archival practice, but illustrates their inseparability."—Jennifer Tucker, author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science

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