Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J.W. Newland

The scope of this book is well encapsulated by its title. At one level it traces the career of James William Newland (1810–57), one of the nineteenth century’s many itinerant photographers who was also one of that century’s many small-time showmen. At another, however, it is an impressively detailed history of the daguerreotype and its associated technologies; for Newland was not just a highly skilled studio photographer, he was also a talented and inventive purveyor of ‘dissolving views shows’, the term for the performance-based visual spectacles that derived from panoramas, dioramas and phantasmagorias and that evolved into modern cinema. A third level that is just as powerfully invoked, however, is that of the swiftly burgeoning commercial world of photography that was opening up across the British Empire as this existed from the 1840s to the 1860s in those parts of the Pacific world that Newman passed through on his way from New Orleans in the American South to his final destination of Calcutta in British-occupied India. Indeed, by positioning Newland’s career and his works within the popular cultural networks that were a feature of the nineteenth century, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle demonstrates the powerful role that photography and its associated technologies played in communicating ideas about Empire compared to fine art paintings and even literature. DeCourcy and Jolly have produced what we might call a ‘thick’ history both of the media itself and of the places and times in which Newland worked. This is because the emphasis is on the broad social and cultural contexts and effects as well as the webs of significance that surrounded Newland’s inventory, and not so much on the images’ contents. The authors claim to privilege biography as their methodology. As they write in the introduction, ‘biography is the only methodological framework which encompasses a study of Newland as a multimedia artist and as a traveller, exhibitor, businessman and self promoter’. However, in their case what they call biography is broadly defined, extending as it does to a consideration of the main economic and cultural transnational forces that helped produce the first wave of globalisation that lasted from 1800 to 1914. As the authors themselves explain, focusing on the figure of ‘Newland allows us to stitch the visual economy of daguerreotypes, published prints and dissolving-views exhibitions into larger economies of migration, trade and power’. Geoffrey Batchen describes the authors as developing ‘a new way of understanding the early history of photography’, one that emphasises the global network of spectacle and exchange that was such a dominant feature of the colonial world as it existed around the time when Newland was working. In order to bring this global network of spectacle and exchange into view, Jolly and deCourcy populate their narrative with what they call the ‘the microhistories of biography’, to describe the many figures around Newland, both those he collaborated with and those who influenced or paralleled his daguerreotype practice and showmanship. However, there are many other figures mentioned besides these. The text reads like a veritable