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In the mid-1860s Arthur J Munby began to collect the first mass-produced photographic images of working-class women in England, recording fascinating details about the women, the places he purchased the photographs and the raging debates on this new commercial practice of photography, in accompanying diaries.Many of these images not to mention Munby s fascinating diaries have never been published before. This book examines this previously un-investigated archive, offering a fresh and arresting perspective on the interrelationships between photographic representations of working-class women, the creation of new identities of class and gender and the evolution of popular conceptions of photography itself."
List of contents
Introduction: The Munby Archive 1 Academically Locating the Archive: History and Theory of Photography - The Nineteenth Century 2 What is a Photograph? 3 Th e City, Photography and Relations of Looking 4 Who was Munby? Useful Readings of the Munby Archive 5 Munby and the Turn to Photography: Hannah, the Private Urban Collection and the Search for Phot, 7 Dressing Above Your Station and Making it Work for Him: Domestic Photographs of the Urban Working-C lass Woman 8 Under the Skin: Munby's Photographs of Facially Disfigured Women - Th e Real and the Symbolic, Appendix: Th e Photographic Archiveographic Truth 6 Starting to Collect: Munby and his Turn to Commercially Produced Photographs of Working-C lass Women
Report
Reading this book, I experienced the same astonishment that I have felt reading previous studies of Munby ... The notes, records, sketches, and photographs brought together in the archive are of the utmost importance to historians of nineteenth-century society and culture and, as we now also appreciate, to historians of photography. - Victorian Studies
