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Picturing Ecology Photography and The Birth of A New Science Damian Hughes Download PDF Chapter
Picturing Ecology Photography and The Birth of A New Science Damian Hughes Download PDF Chapter
Picturing Ecology
Photography and the birth
of a new science
Damian Hughes
Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC)
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2022
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Acknowledgements
All books feel a long time coming, and all book-work is broadly collab-
orative, dependent upon the contributions, influence and support
of others.
My lifelong partner Teresa is a practical ecological thinker, and she was
there at the birth of the idea that transformed into this book. My under-
standing of ecological ideas and practices has been informed by more
than three decades as a professional ecologist and field naturalist, and the
influence of numerous colleagues along the way, but always in conversa-
tion with Teresa.
As a photohistorian, I have been profoundly shaped by thinking and
talking with my good friend Professor Kelley Wilder––my first and
continuing mentor in photographic history––and by the always original
and influential thinking of Professor Elizabeth Edwards. The Photographic
History Research Centre which they built together at De Montfort
University provided an ideal professional framework against which to
build a project of this kind.
I would also like to acknowledge the all too invisible dedication of staff
at the various museums, libraries, archives and other organisations who
have supported my research with specific resources, or otherwise contrib-
uted to my understanding of the wider contexts of my research.
In particular, I thank Hazel Norman at the British Ecological Society
for unreserved access to the Tansley Photographic Collection, without
v
vi Acknowledgements
which this work would have been fatally impoverished. I would like to
recognize especially the hard-pressed and under-resourced dedication of
staff and volunteers in local museums and libraries everywhere and, in
connection with this work, particularly at Huddersfield’s Tolson Memorial
Museum, and the Huddersfield Local Studies Library.
Image credits: Images reproduced in this book are from digital copies
of originals made by the author, except where otherwise indicated.
Photographs from the Tansley Photographic Collection are reproduced
with the kind permission of the British Ecological Society. For other
images, from published sources, images in the public domain, and images
still subject to copyright, the source of each image and relevant copyright
details are provided in the figure captions.
About This Book
vii
viii About This Book
1 Ecological
History, Visual Science and Photography 1
‘At a Glance’ 1
Visual Science, Visual Ecology 4
Exchange and Flow 11
Visual Methods, Visual Tools 17
Visual Places, Visual Bodies 20
Botany into Ecology 25
Mapping the Book 30
Bibliography 41
2 New
Natural Landscapes: Nature Tracing Its Own Shape 53
Visual and Natural Knowledge in Alexander Humboldt’s
Phytogeography 55
The General Physiognomies of Anton Kerner von Marilaun 61
Ecological Foundations: Eugenius Warming and Andreas
Schimper 67
Mapping the Field: The Beginnings of British Vegetation
Survey 75
Bibliography 92
ix
x Contents
3 Expanding
the Field: Making Associations 97
British Associations: Ecology at the BAAS 99
Collecting Associations 104
Professional Associations 118
Ecological Associations 128
Photographic Associations 135
Outdoor Associations 148
Amateur Associations 158
Bibliography 188
4 Picturing
Vegetation: The Print Cultures of Ecology197
Printing Pictures 199
The New Phytologists 206
A Journal for Ecology 217
Textbook Photography 224
Die Vegetation der Erde 241
Picturing British Vegetation 254
Bibliography 264
5 Hidden
in Plain Sight: Visual Knowledge and Ecological
Method271
Scaling the View: Vegetation Mapping and Visual Ecology 273
Mapping, Rational Inventory and Affective Knowledge 283
Mapping and the Visual Body 288
Sketching Knowledge 296
Walking and Looking: Estimating Abundance and
Characterising Vegetation 304
Looking and Counting: Mathematical Vision 309
Experiments in Ecological Surveying 322
Bibliography 346
Contents xi
6 Taking
to the Field: Exchanging Objects/Exchanging Views357
Exchanging Photographs/Exchanging Objects 359
Natural Cultures of Collecting 364
Talking, Showing, Publishing 370
Rational Pleasures, Affective Objects, Authentic Places 379
Natural Objects of Photography 389
Bibliography 415
7 Conclusion:
Ecology and Photography as Visual Field
Science421
Ecological Vision 423
Material and Social Practice 426
Rhetoric and Representation 428
Visual Tools 429
Ecology in Place 432
Photography, History, Theory 434
Bibliography 439
A
rchival Sources443
B
ibliography445
I ndex485
About the Author
xiii
List of Figures
xxiv
Fig. 1.1
6
Fig. 1.2
12
Fig. 1.3
16
Fig. 1.4
17
Fig. 1.5
20
Fig. 1.6
24
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 5.12 Arthur Tansley’s chart quadrats and photographs from Crockham
Common 1905 and 1907. Photographs (BES Tansley
Photographic Collection. TAN/3/26 & 28) and squared
paper mounted onto card c.4½ inches × 6inches (Tansley
Papers, Cambridge University Library. CUL/TP/B.84) 319
Fig. 5.13 Arthur Tansley, Quadrats photographs Plot A4, Crockham
Common 1905. BES Tansley Photographic Collection.
TAN/3/26320
Fig. 5.14 Part of the Bouche d’Erquy, showing a gridiron survey under
way in 1904. From Oliver and Tansley (1904). (Image:
Biodiversity Heritage Library [Harvard University Botany
Libraries])324
Fig. 5.15 The same mapped ‘gridiron’ from the Bouche d’Erquy in
1904. From Oliver and Tansley (1904). (Image: Biodiversity
Heritage Library [Harvard University Botany Libraries]) 324
Fig. 5.16 Repeat vegetation mapping at the Bouche D’Erquy,
1907–1908. From Hill (1909). (Image: Biodiversity Heritage
Library [Harvard University Botany Libraries]) 330
Fig. 5.17 Francis Oliver. Colonising sand-bank at the Bouche d’Erquy, in
1903 and 1907. From Carey and Oliver (1918): Plate
XIX. (Image: Biodiversity Heritage Library [Cornell
University])331
Fig. 6.1 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Arrangement of Fossils
(Coquillage), 1837–1839 (Daguerrotype). Musée des arts et
métiers. (Image: Musée des arts et métiers, Paris) 361
Fig. 6.2 William Henry Fox Talbot. Wrack, 1839. Metropolitan
Museum of Art. 36.37 (25) (Photogenic drawing). (Image:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 362
Fig. 6.3 ‘Capturing insects’, from Anon (1839) The History of Insects.
The Religious Tract Society 364
Fig. 6.4 Sir Vauncey Harpur-Crewe, Calke Abbey, National Trust.
©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel/John
Hammond366
Fig. 6.5 R.M. Adam, Photographing Shags, 1905. Robert Moyes
Adam Photographic Collection, RMA-S.87A. (Image:
Courtesy of University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums
and D.C. Thomson) 369
List of Figures xxiii
‘At a Glance’
Those who have had the good fortune to accompany him in the field know the
singular and almost instinctive faculty which Professor Flahault has of seizing,
as it were at a glance, such essential features of the vegetation.1
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 1
D. Hughes, Picturing Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2515-3_1
2 D. Hughes
associations of plants. This novel way of seeing was reflected in new pho-
tographic methods for description and in predominantly photographic
methods for presenting their new visual experience to others. This ‘eco-
logical eye’ is just as evident among ecologists today. In exploring visual
practices among early ecologists, therefore, this book equally reveals the
tacit visual basis for understanding and working methods among con-
temporary plant ecologists.
The visual perspective adopted in this book places a strong accent on
the objects of ecology, as well as on the social and technical practices of
ecologists, rather than attempting a genealogy of ecological ideas. The
conceptual content of ecology is inseparable from its objects and prac-
tices and remains embedded in such an approach, but it does not drive
the narrative of ecological development; rather, it is allowed to emerge
1 Ecological History, Visual Science and Photography 7
from discourse and practice. The merit of this approach is that it allows
the historian of ecology to attend to social and material practices that
might otherwise appear incidental or ancillary to the ‘real’ content of
ecological science but which, nevertheless, have real explanatory power
for ecological theory and method. Objects and theoretical constructs
which practitioners treat as self-evident are called into question and spe-
cific practices are revealed as drivers for disciplinary definition and devel-
opment. By taking a visual and photographic perspective, therefore, this
book casts new historical light on the distinctive epistemological content
of early ecology, and on the ways in which the first ecologists separated
their science from established forms of knowledge inherited from nine-
teenth century life sciences.
In particular, ecology instigated a significant break in botanical under-
standing, precipitating a shift from nineteenth century floristic botany–
–which investigated the taxonomic and geographical relationships of
plant species and their relatives––to a new vegetation science which would
examine the environmental and interspecific relationships of plants in
dynamic communities. In these respects, Picturing Ecology borrows some
of its methodological tools from historical epistemology,7 as well as his-
torical ethnography.8 My analysis of the field practices of ecology and
photography especially follows Elizabeth Edwards who enjoined scholars
to “explore specific photographic experiences: how photographs and their
making actually operated in the fluid spaces of ideological and cultural
meaning”.9 Accordingly, this book explores the social and institutional
contexts of early ecology, and its cultures of material exchange and display
in related natural history settings. It also examines the closely related cul-
tures of print publication, which were enthusiastically adopted by early
twentieth century ecologists to promote their new understanding.
Critically, therefore, this is a study from ‘inside ecology’––a phrase con-
sciously adapted from Elizabeth Edwards, whose study of the British pho-
tographic survey movement provides a highly instructive model for any
ethnographically oriented history of practice.10 Picturing Ecology takes a
broadly ethnographic approach, acknowledging the importance of social
factors in the making and circulation of scientific knowledge and of sci-
ence’s contingency upon its own material and cultural contexts. According
to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “if you want to understand what a
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