On Disaster: Photography, Media and Visual Culture

The mutual development of modernity with the photographic medium in Britain intersected with the rise of anarchy, natural and industrial disasters, major weather events, urban tragedies, and a global pandemic. The media recorded such events for the public in news articles increasingly accompanied by visual media such as drawings, engravings and later—photographs. This research project considers the ways in which the visual record was used to inform the public of such events, and the changing aesthetics of such images driven by technological advancements, media practice and public desire. Enhancing the sense of spectacle driven by media, political propaganda, and “ghoulish sightseers”, a burgeoning visual culture brought catastrophe and disaster into the homes of millions via the production of stereo views, postcards, and the illustrated news well before the arrival of television.[1]

This book questions in what ways did the photographic medium make disasters? From engravings of daguerreotypes and photographs in the illustrated press, to mass-produced stereo-views, postcards and memorabilia, the disasters that drove public imagination often did so through visual representation. How do such events become seared into collective memory through the photographic image as “great disasters?” And what of those that remained largely unphotographed such as the Spanish Influenza of 1919 in Britain, which was “so quickly forgotten”?[2]

[1] As described in Michael Paris, Silvertown 1917, 28.

[2] Mark Honigsbaum, Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 2009), ix.

Image: Henry Bedford Lemere, Clerkenwell Gaol Explosion, December 13, 1867, V&A Collection.