Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past, by Jennifer Green-Lewis (original) (raw)

Jennifer Green-Lewis has written an ambitious book that simultaneously wrestles with how literature responded to photography's emergence and with how acts of cultural remembering are elicited and facilitated by photography. It is with this latter point that she departs from her earlier Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (1996), which not only suggested that photography offers a direct route to understanding the Victorians, but also argued that the Victorians invested in both realism and photography as tools for seeing. 1 In her new book, Green-Lewis again identifies photography as an invaluable tool for the Victorians, but this time for looking at the past: for remembrance. She focuses on how the Victorians were already aware of the way in which the past and the present intersect in the photograph. Despite the heavy echoes of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) throughout this book, Green-Lewis's prefatory chapter attempts to move away from Barthes's fascination with the nostalgic power of photography. Noting that Barthes described the photograph as a gesticulation to 'look', Green-Lewis adds that the photograph also asks the viewer to 'look' and to see time passing. Nonetheless, this book relies heavily on what Barthes would term 'metalanguage', as it comes to rely heavily on the idea that different meanings 'adhere' to the photograph itself. 2 In fact, Green-Lewis proposes that the physical photograph and its meaning can operate independently from one another. The section titled 'Afterlight', which is both a postscript (it was written only when the rest of the book was completed) and a preface, exposes this tension between physical object and metaphorical meaning by exploring how modern