The Association for Art History’s Summer Symposium Photography and Printed Matter is a two-day annual conference that highlights current doctoral and early career research. This year the Summer Symposium celebrates its twentieth anniversary. The event will focus on research on photography and other forms of printed matter.
Newhaven Madonna: Women and Early Photography in Scotland
Hill's Newhaven fishwife...has something that cannot be silenced, something that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there.
Walter Benjamin, 1931
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s 1840s calotype portrait of Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall1 is a foundational work of photography, and one of the first to have been self-consciously presented as art (Stevenson, 1981:23). The history of photography has long been told in such a way that many of the living, breathing participants of its earliest period remain unknown. Principal among them are women. We are only now coming to terms with how the discipline was gendered from its very inception. Photography’s close association with the female body has been accompanied by the historical erasure of the agency of actual women: their hands, their thinking and self-activity that helped shape the medium through its fin de siècle phase.
This paper explores the history of women in early photographic practice Scotland through the subject Elizabeth Johnstone Hall - one of Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven ‘Fishwives’. It takes a forgotten, long-ignored outtake of Johnstone Hall, the Newhaven Beauty / Newhaven Madonna, and explores the ethics of recovering one of photography’s ‘unknown women’. The portrait depicts Johnstone Hall just moments before (or after) the ‘iconic’ shot that caught Benjamin’s attention. In this extraordinary version, she stares back, and in doing so, disrupts a century of analysis of her ‘seductive shame’.
What are the limits and possibilities of getting close to Johnstone Hall? Can her labour, her life, be accessed? How can practice-led research, in particular re-enactment, enhance the afterlife of the calotype? And how might our understanding of early photography be enriched by examining the medium through the lens of this working class, fisherwoman sitter, about whom, we know so very little?
