Anglais - La révolution industrielle à travers la photographie

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Hardie, D. W. F., A History of the Chemical Industry in Widnes, Imperial Chemical Industries Limited, 1950.

Third year of License of History

2020-2021

This work is about the industrial revolution mainly in England, cradle of the latter, in a period going from 1750 to 1950 approximately. Having worked on History through photography last semester, I found it relevant to reuse the knowledge I have to pool it in an axis of reflection on the industrial revolution. So I asked myself what the Industrial Revolution was, and then I asked myself about the use of photography in a context such as this one, about what was taken in pictures, what was shown or not. Initially I wanted to focus only on England, with English photographs, but I had difficulty finding English photographs representing the social aspect of the Industrial Revolution. So I decided to use an American photograph to describe my subject, but the system was the same in the big cities of Europe that were living the industrial revolution.

Many upheavals have taken place throughout history, which are more or less striking. Changes during the 18th and 19th century will change the world in areas such as technology and science and that attracting considerable interest. The end of the 19th century was marked by two industrial revolutions which allowed strong economic growth, but what is an industrial revolution? It’s a phase of important transformation of the industry which is caracterized by the use of new techniques, the emergence of new branches of activity and a strong growth of the latter. The term revolution also invites questions about its meaning and the meaning of evolution. Evolution is defined as a natural transformation, a progress, which comes from a natural selection or a learning and which, after several tests, keeps the most adapted method and revolution is defined as a sudden and violent change of an economic, moral, cultural and societal order: the industrial revolution is thus a revolution which contains evolutions. That is to say that the period of industrialization answer to a revolution since the change was fast and radical between a rural and agricultural population and a population which become urban where all industrializes, all automates and all develops. Developments that are themselves evolutions since to get the photography or the many industrial machines it’s necessary to establish plans, prototypes, to test them and to keep the method that works best according to our needs. In the case of the industrial revolution the two are linked, but in other cases an evolution does not necessarily require a revolution, everyday things improve, it’s a progressive system, it’s not for all that we are in constant revolution. As for the term reinvention, it’s difficult in times of revolution to know who really did this or that. Most of the time a patent is registered to certify the authenticity of the invention but it’s possible that an initial project has been improved by someone else, in this case it’s a reinvention but can we say that the object really comes from him? This is a question that can be asked

The effects of the Industrial Revolution touched and changed just about every aspect of our lives, it not only transformed the technology and production of all mankind, but it also ushered in social changes, both in class as well as in demographics and economic advancements^[1]. These transitions will be written in the writings of scholars, in school textbooks but also in a completely different field: photography. It’s indeed a technique for fixing images using light using a material sensitive to light and which was invented by Nicéphore Niépce at the beginning of the 18th century. It was his partner Louis Daguerre who brought the process to its final goal and the discovery of this new system was announced on August 19, 1839 by François Arago before the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts. At the end of the century, photography was part of an astonishing heap of innovations and the process was developing more and more. At the same time, an important historical process is taking place which has shifted a predominantly agrarian and artisanal society towards a commercial and industrial society. These two events in the same period, from the creation of photography and the development of the process and the industrial revolution, invite us to question ourself on the mixture of the two. We know that photography is a way of showing news, so we can wonder how photography reflects the evolutions of English society in the 19th century. Photography is certainly an evolution, but we will see how the industrial revolution is represented in photography, what is to photograph, in what context and what it brings. In a first part we will see the creation ode photography and its evolutions until the time of the industrial revolutions but also we will see how the latter arrived, the upsets caused and the evolutions and in a second part on a mixture of two: documentary photography between science and art with an economic and technological aspect and a social aspect.

 As determined in the introduction, photography is developing and is of real interest; this helps to fix a reality and that sells for high prices. It all starts with the daguerreotype, with a silvery copper plate made sensitive to light by exposure to iodine vapor. The plate makes it possible to fix an image after a pause time which initially ranged from 10 to 20 minutes and which has been reduced with the advancement of technology. This daguerreotype photograph represents Abraham Lincoln in 1846 and reflects the strong attraction of the population to a new tendency: the portrait.[pic 2]

The system then moved on to a process called "negative / positive" which was developed in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot. To obtain a paper negative, it was necessary to coat a sheet of glossy paper with a solution of silver nitrate, then in a mixture of acids and deposited in a dark room. The exposure varied depending on the brightness of the shot. With the evolution, the process has moved from a negative technique on paper to a negative technique on glass, which aims to make the process more aesthetic but also to develop the precision of the shots and their details. It’s also a method that allows to develop the circulation of many photographs, to own several copies and potentially distribute them. [pic 3]

"To write about photography is to write about the world" as Susan Sontag will say in her essay collection On photography^[2] which is considered one of the most important works of thought on the subject. Susan Sontag's argument is that each photograph that is taken tells a story, the life of someone, their activities or passions, and that therefore writing about her photographs, which themselves already convey something, makes it possible to describe a person or a population in a specific time. That's how I also see the photography and the writings on it, they allow us to learn more while sometimes we don't have any indication on the photographs, but thanks to what the photo tells, the clothes of a person, the decor, the attitude or the format of the photograph (the colors of this last one, if it’s damaged or not) it’s possible to guess in which time it was taken and in which context. Photographs have so much to tell us.

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