Dr Diamond's Day Off

• Published in: History of photography Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 3 - 17
• Main Author: Dahlberg, Laurie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.01.2015
• Subjects: amateur photography; art photography; Frederick Scott Archer (1813-57); George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film; Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901); Hugh Welch Diamond (1809-86); photographic albums; physiognomy; Victorian England; wet collodion process
• ISSN: 0308-7298; 2150-7295
• DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2014.1000095

Having pioneered the use of photography as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool in portraits of his female patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s, Hugh Welch Diamond is typically remembered as the 'father of psychiatric photography'. This parochial label and the pathos of these well-known images have occluded our contemporary view of Diamond, who was regarded by his peers as one of the leaders of British photography. A recently identified album in the George Eastman House collection raises questions about our assumptions that Diamond approached photography purely in an instrumental or utilitarian way. In fact, the album suggests that at the same time as Diamond was immersed in the documentation of his patients, he was experimenting with dramatically expressive portraits in ways that forecast the work of pictorialists such as Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron. The album's superabundance of portraits of women makes a compelling case for Diamond's preoccupation with the woman as muse, whether for the purposes of art or science.