Eva Ehninger: The Modern Dream of Order. Victoria, Photography, and the Social Imagination

The Modern Dream of Order offers a critical analysis of modernity through the lens of nineteenth-century photography in Britain. The study combines art history and the history of photography, as well as gender, cultural, and media studies, and features a wealth of previously unpublished visual material. It explores how commercial portrait photography – the largest and yet most neglected visual archive of the nineteenth century – shaped social relations and provided visual stability in an era of rapid change. By the 1860s, commercial photographic portraiture had become a common experience. Produced in great numbers, bought singly and in stacks, gifted, collected, collaged, and rearranged, these photographs impinged on daily routines of interaction and representation. The book makes use of Queen Victoria’s ubiquitous photographic presence in private and communal contexts, to demonstrate how new visual media undergirded the power of conventional concepts of social order and stability. Modernity, seen from this perspective, is not determined primarily by new technologies and their distributive power, but rather by the utilization of these technologies for the visual construction of imaginations of the social. Critical reflection on this mechanism is crucial to understanding current media practices as well.