Photo Archives VI: The Relational Album: Photographic Networks, Anthropology, and the Learned Society

This paper takes the notion of the ‘relational museum’ – the concept that museum objects to some degree conceal the mass of relations that lie behind them – and applies it to a nineteenth-century album compiled at meetings of the Anthropological Society in London. The album is something of a ‘scrapbook’, as such this album is a particularly important ‘relational’ object, enabling a rich and nuanced insight into the relationships between photography, anthropological knowledge, and scientific networks in nineteenth-century London. The paper gives an overview of the album’s relational networks and suggest ways in which it shifts our understanding of photography and anthropology in a crucial period in the discipline’s early history.