Elizabeth Edwards's magnificent The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and the Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 is, in the first instance, about the photographic survey movement in England in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This was a time when amateur photographers were urged and organized to make a pictorial record of a fast-changing England. While they often concentrated on the churches and cottages that signified “Englishness” itself, even as these edifices crumbled away or had their multiple layers of history purged by purist restorers, the photographs also include the chimney stacks, railyards, and warehouses of industrial cities that strongly signaled this change. Some of these images are already familiar, especially through the striking work of Sir Benjamin Stone, the survey movement's best-known advocate and the recorder of folk customs. Yet Edwards shows that Stone was, despite his energetic promotion of the movement and his declarations about the preservationist goals that photography could accomplish, something of an anomaly. Indeed, she notes that “only about 10 to 15 percent of the photographs can be described as relating to folk customs or even everyday practices” (197)—even if these are the ones to which our eyes tend to be drawn today. Far more common were plain records of gateways and carved capitals and half-timbered houses; fonts and barns and village streets—some with the creep of modernity plainly visible in the form of tin placards advertising bicycles or Sunlight soap.

The Camera as Historian offers a corrective to our current knowledge of the survey movement through Edwards's meticulous research, and she gives a vivid sense of how tough some of this research was, given the vagaries of subsequent archival treatment of the materials. Indeed, one of the many things the book does is to demonstrate how the histories of archives themselves offer telling evidence about shifts in values concerning what is, and is not, considered historically important, as well as how the meaning of images alters according to the differently organized collections in which they may be found. Edwards investigated an image data set of around fifty-five thousand prints: many others may have been lost or misrecorded.

But Edwards's study is far more wide reaching than a detailed revisionist history of the survey movement. She uses her grounded knowledge to open up many important issues in photographic history and interpretation. The archival trail revealed about a thousand amateur practitioners making these images, and the study illuminates a crucial period in the history of the amateur photographer. Edwards brings out vividly the challenges to rigid class hierarchies that the democratic practice of photography brought about through local groups and exhibitions, shared enthusiasm, and a desire to disseminate new scientific developments. She demonstrates the role of different specialist publications in this and, as well, in diffusing ideas about how to record local knowledge and local sentiment. She also delineates the relationship of photographic records, not just to other movements for salvage and preservation, but also for enhancing a sense of past-ness, an awareness of historicity and change and national identity. Together with all this, she shows how local, even individual, priorities might be at odds with, or at least in dialogue with, broadly conceived emphases on what constitutes national significance—and yet both form a part of what can be termed the historical imagination.

Throughout, Edwards sets late Victorian and Edwardian debates in a broader context of much more recent photographic theory, especially debates about what it means to memorialize, to be aware of the imminent past-ness of the present, and about how one might use the past and record the soon-to-be past in order to conceive of the future. In other words, considering the survey movement also means thinking about how people used photography to understand themselves as existing within time and space, whether that space was that of the parish church or the empire. She asks how much a sense of national identity is consciously developed and how much it is the product of diffused ideology. Our attention is drawn to the dignity of the ordinary, to the importance of the everyday, to questions about how time—and its passage—may be materialized. Importantly, Edwards calls our attention to how many spokespeople for the survey movement spoke anxiously about a future that was not going to be shaped by an awareness of the past. Their visual inscriptions were pointed toward the uncertain future.

The book is beautifully produced. The images are shown in color, and this means that something of their original tonal quality is preserved in the multiple shades of gray and sepia that allow one to appreciate the printing choices of silver bromide or platinum or the occasional lantern slide. The images accrue something of a patina themselves through the visible stains and fading on both print and mount. Edwards is very alert to the tension that existed in the survey movement between aesthetics and observation, the assumed subjectivity of the former, especially when aligned with the compositional and production values of the pictorialist movement, often clashing with the demand for indexical, factual record—at least in commentators' minds. Contrasting two images of Tredington Church, in Warwickshire, taken a couple of years apart by Bernard Moore, she writes extremely well about the difference between a photograph informed by a personal vision, infused by contemporary aesthetics, and one that serves more scientific, less symbolic, ends. The strength of this analysis has me wishing that she had taken more opportunities to analyze the formal aspects of photographs, rather than usually leaving them to speak for themselves.

But this is a small caveat, compared with the many excellent things that make this book essential and exciting reading for anyone interested in the visual culture of this period. Edwards's achievement is to make the activities of one group—or linked groups—of people speak to the nation's sense of itself and of how its physical character should be preserved and remembered. No less important is the way in which she makes us think about how photography may best be understood as history and what its responsibilities may be. These are not just questions that exercised the survey practioners: they engage all of us who, today, work with images of the past.