Stephanie Spencer. Francis Bedford, Landscape Photography and Nineteenth-Century British Culture: The Artist as Entrepreneur. Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2011. ISBN: 978-1409408536. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

Think of British landscape photographs of the mid-to late-nineteenth century, and chances are you’re thinking of something that could have been photographed by Francis Bedford—even if it wasn’t. Much photography of the Victorian period that set out to represent Britain to itself shares a family resemblance, in terms of both content and style, a fact that Stephanie Spencer’s book on Bedford’s work brings into focus, albeit incidentally. Spencer’s claim is for the primacy of Bedford’s photographs—from the outset she identifies this landscape photographer as “the best in a field in which the British were acknowledged to excel” (1)—and she makes little space for other photographers who might lay claim to that title and whose popular appeal certainly matched Bedford’s. This seems like a lost opportunity, because the basic argument of the book defers not to what is idiosyncratic about Bedford’s work but rather what makes it usefully representative of the ways in which a national identity may be forged through its self-representations. That Francis Frith, a prolific landscape photographer and successful middle-class purveyor of foreign and domestic scenes in the form of albums and picture postcards, printed and published some of Bedford’s work, tells us that the establishment approved Bedford’s work. Similarly, Bedford’s fondness for photographing in North Wales might be usefully compared with that of Henry Peach Robinson; Roger Fenton’s architectural images give a broader context for Bedford’s interest in churches; and so on. Obviously, Spencer’s spotlight is on Bedford’s work, but the point of her book is that Bedford’s work provided a way of seeing Britain that was pervasive, persuasive, and authoritative. Spencer is almost certainly right; but for Victorian readers, as indeed for us, Bedford’s photographs reference not only their original landscapes, but also other photographs of similar views. The fact that much of Bedford’s work looks vaguely generic to a modern reader is the result of the successful conveyance of values, values largely shared among those photographers who, like Bedford, were invested in what being British, and more specifically, being English, might mean. If this seems like a lot of weight for landscape photographs to carry, it is. Spencer’s energies are channeled in two rather different directions: first, she contextualizes the photographs chosen for discussion. Second, she offers specific readings of each image. In contextualizing the pictures, she is painstaking and informative, restoring to a modern reader much information that lends, if not light, then perhaps texture, to Bedford’s photographs of bridges, beaches, cottages, churches, and slate quarries. Details about, say, the political history of Wales, or the specifics of wealth enjoyed by the aristocratic, quarry-owning Penrhyn family, or the building of a road in Torquay and its relation to trade and development in the popular tourist region of Devon, are fully absorbing—once the reader stops trying to figure out how such information shapes our reading of the individual photographs. Regarding that particular quandary, and in turning to the photographs themselves, Spencer finds herself in challenging territory. What is the relationship between the contextual stuff of politics and history, and these images that remain to us? To what extent are Bedford’s photographs complicit in a broader effort to convey a Britain that belonged to the Penrhyns rather than to the (invisible) quarry workers who might more truly have been said to shape the landscape? There’s little evidence of real wrestling with such questions here, though it’s likely that they were in fact the genesis of the book. At times the documentary ambivalence of photography itself comes to the fore, as with Spencer’s lengthy discussion of Bedford’s photographs of restorations by G. G. Scott at Exeter …