The Postal Service, Circulating Portfolios and the Cultural Production of Modern Networked Identities

The launch of the Royal Mail’s parcel post service in 1883 was concurrent with the increase of amateur photographers in Britain, supporting new ways for this group of practitioners to come together through postal photographic clubs. This article explores the influence that members’ participation, in assembling and distributing the portfolios shared by each club, had on photographers’ understanding of their own role in the production of photographic meanings and values. It does so by discussing the postal service as a technology of communication and transport; the virtual space created through circulating portfolios as a modern network; and the conjoint acts of writing, reading and looking at photographs that constituted each portfolio as reframing photographers’ idea of self. The article covers the period from the early 1880s to the early 1910s, by which time postal photographic clubs had become almost ubiquitous in Britain. The article demonstrates that this process implicitly challenged the institutionalisation of this period’s dominant photographic discourse.

to our understanding of such proliferation of practices by showing how photographic studies can benefit from taking into account the parallel sprouting of media and transport technologies that were affecting people's livesa benefit that extends to other media studies, a case most recently made by Leonardi and Natale. 16 It covers the period that goes from the emergence of postal photographic clubs in the early 1880s to the early 1910s, by which time they had become almost ubiquitous in Britain. Because of their ephemeral nature, postal photographic clubs have left very few archival traces. My investigation relies primarily on a close reading of the contemporary photographic press, which was often used by postal photographic clubs to advertise vacancies or to share examples of good and bad practice. Drawing on the methodology set out by Steve Edwards in his study of the photographic press in the 1860s, I have adopted a '"volumetrics" of reading -a concern with the incessant, everyday speech of photographers' 17 that has thus provided the ethnographic voice for my research. Additionally, I have examined a small set of cover sheets from the 1890s currently held by the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, to my present knowledge the only known material trace of these clubs.
I start by considering the role that the parcel post, a modern technology of both communication and transport, played in the emergence of postal clubs by facilitating the virtual mobility of photographers. I then explore how postal communication took place through distinct spatio-temporal and material experiences that enabled photographers to contribute actively to the form and content of communication, in doing so becoming part of a modern network. Finally, I discuss how this impacted on the social interaction between photographers in a way that transformed the perception of each member's individual role in the production of photographic meanings and values. As this article will hopefully show, postal photographic clubs were the cultural expression of a novel experience that created the conditions for photographers to reconfigure their own sense of self in the world.

The Parcel Post and Photographic Mobility
Until the early 1880s, the parcel trade was controlled by private couriers, particularly railway companies. 18 Their reach, however, was limited. While the railway service was rather cheap and effective for sending local parcels, the existence of many different railway companies, each with its own rate, made this service impracticable when it came to longer distances. 19 A parcel post regulated by the Post Office, which had been flagged as necessary by the postal reformer Rowland Hill as early as 1837, was finally introduced in 1883. 20 Thanks to the new Royal Mail service, it was now possible to mail packages up to 7 lb in weight across the country; in 1886, the limit was increased to 11 lb. 21 Its public appeal was remarkable, so much so that it was run even if at a deficit. 22 As Perry notes, 'partly this stemmed from the difficulty of eliminating a service which The Times ten years after service began termed "an adjunct of daily life"'. 23 Indeed, tens of millions of packages were sent annually. 24 The introduction of this service was concurrent with the increase of amateur photographers in Britain, facilitating their engagement with photography in two main ways. Firstly, the parcel post offered a practical solution to the transportation of a still cumbersome camera apparatus. While the more portable celluloid film had been on the market since the late 1880s, many -self-appointed 'serious' -amateur photographers continued to prefer dry plates into the new century. As the Amateur Photographer advised its readers in 1907: a good many firms -Harrods, Benetfinks, and such like -will now send you plates by post, post free; so when on tour you could arrange to find a box awaiting you at trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, New York: Columbia Press 2013. 'Photography and Networks', a special issue of History of Photography guest edited by Owen Clayton and Jim Cheshire, includes a number of contributions that discuss the application of Latour's work to photographic studies and, more generally, systems of (photographic) knowledge production. See 'Photography and Networks', History of Photography, 41:4 (2017) [55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]Royal Mail,[55][56][57][58]. The international convention on parcel post, signed in 1880 by several Universal Postal Union members, pushed Britain to develop its own national parcel post so that it could join in the possibilities for world commerce that the agreement had made possible. Léonard Laborie, 'Global Commerce in Small Boxes: Parcel Post, 1878-1913', Journal of Global History, 10 (2015 each stopping-place, with no great expense. Your used plates you could post home in the emptied box: the unused ones you would load into your camera or slidesto be emptied only when you reached your next waiting supply. 25 This exemplifies how the service was used to supply a still largely absent degree of independence to one's ability to photograph when travelling; or, to put it differently, how an increasingly mobile society took to the parcel post as a way to overcome one of the perceived limitations of camera technology -its bulkiness. Photographers appreciated the 'great convenience' 26 of travelling unencumbered that the service allowed because they could move more swiftly, which camera manufacturers were mindful not to impair by providing, as in the case of the 'Postal Photographic Company ', a 'prompt dispatch'. 27 Secondly, this new ability to move photographic materials was a key factor in the formation of virtual spaces in which photographers could meet: postal photographic clubs. Soon after the introduction of the parcel post, the number of postal clubs in Britain began to soar. Sources are scant, especially because many of these clubs, considered to be minor, were not listed in the photographic annals. Nonetheless, comments published in the photographic press reveal their growing presence. In 1887, for example, the Amateur Photographer noted that 'considerable interest is now being attached to the establishing of "Album Clubs," "Postal Albums," etc.'. 28 By 1899, Lund could recommend that 'good judgement should be exercised in choosing a name for the association, such vague titles as the "Postal Photographic Club" or "Postal Camera Club" having ceased to be distinctive'. 29 Numbers continued to grow, and by the turn of the century the press reported with frequency on the formation of new ones. 'It may probably be said that about a quarter of the amateur photographers in this country belong to one or more postal photographic clubs', 30 wrote Hawes in 1900. 'The postal photographic clubs have become of late a very important feature of British photographic life', 'Waverley' -a pseudonym -similarly remarked in 1902, adding that 'the number and variety of these small bodies is more remarkable than the casual observer might at first think'. 31 Many ordinary photographic societies also started 'inter-society' circulating portfolios. 32 By 1912, Amateur Photographer and Photographic News could comment that 'There are a great number of these in the country, and many are run as a section of a photographic society'. 33 A key reason for their popularity, J. Eaton Fearn 34 and Reginald A. R. Bennett 35 explained in an article published in 1887 to help 'those who are taking up the working of Postal Photographic Clubs', 36 was that 'man is essentially a social being'. 37 For 'the isolated individual who dwells in the solitude of the country [. . .] separated from his confrères', they argued, the only way is 'to join one of the many Postal Clubs'. 38 There is ample evidence that it was this desire to communicate with others that motivated many to start or join a postal club, particularly in those instances in which geography was a barrier: 'a monthly album', C. Aylmer from Kilcock, Ireland, for example wrote in 1885, 'would especially benefit amateurs in the country'; 39 'for the isolated, out-of-the-way workers who have few means of communicating with the brethren in the craft, who cannot visit the exhibitions, and cannot, perhaps always get the journals', another similarly noted in 1902, 'the postal club is of the greatest value'. 40 Their communication was sometimes supplemented by the sharing of members' portraits. For example, Fearn and Bennet recommended that '[it] is a good idea to ask members to put in their own likenesses, wither taken by themselves (i.e. developed, etc.), or professionals, in the second round, this serves as a kind of general introduction'. 41 'The arrival of the portfolio is looked forward to with great interest by all', concurred the Junior Photographer, which had launched its own postal club, 'and by none more 25 -A. Wheelman, 'Cycle and Camera', Amateur Photographer (13 August 1907) than ourselves. Since many members have contributed their own portrait, we are all getting to know each other very well'. 42 Where the members of each postal club lived is largely unknown -I have not been able to trace any list of members' addresses. It seems clear, however, that the majority would not have shared geographical proximity -the exception being 'inter-society' arrangements. Gathering photographers who lived far apart is something that was also often encouraged. For instance, when Hawes wrote to the Amateur Photographer to advertise vacancies in the Kent Postal Camera Club, he was keen to specify that 'the circulation of the portfolio is not restricted to the county of Kent, as perhaps its name implies'. 43 Similarly, the Anglo-Celtic Postal Photographic Society, launched in 1903, 'aim[ed] at bringing together a proportionate number of workers in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man'. 44 The name itself of these clubs, which infallibly hinted at their mobility -Circulating Album Club, 45 Postal Photographic Club, 46 Negative Exchange Club 47 and so on -indicates that the postal system both defined and made their existence possible in the first place. By contrast, ordinary clubs usually included their own, static, location in their name; for example, Brechin Photographic Association, Sheffield Camera Club, Cardiff Amateur Photographic Society. As postal clubs proliferated, which raised the need to be distinctive, geotagging continued to be avoided while a reference to their mobility to be included: in the 1890s, for example, clubs included the Light and Truth Postal Photograph Club, 48 Hand-Camera Postal Photographic Club, 49 and Sun and Co. Postal Club. 50 It is difficult to assess whether postal clubs provided new ways for coming together for reasons of gender, class and ethnicity, since there is no direct reference to this in the sources that I have consulted, but the dynamics enabled by their infrastructure suggest that this could have been possible. For example, although within some clubs the members shared their own portraits, it would not have been possible to check whether this matched the sender, and the address remained perhaps the only more reliable indication of status. Additionally, as Laura Otis observes in relation to the telegraph, 'communications technologies invite people to try out alternative personae', 51 thus the veil of anonymity provided by the lack of physical interaction could have enabled some to participate in previously inaccessible circles or to be more experimental with their photographic practice. Anonymity was also guaranteed by the fact that admission was usually gained not through invitation or recommendation, but by submitting specimens of one's work to the secretary, for assessment. Similarly, although the press usually referred to the members of these clubs using the generic male gender -'brethren' in the example quoted earlier, but also 'his or her ability' 52 as cited earlier in this article -it is certainly possible that these networks also opened up a new space for women in public life, as an early incarnation of women's emancipation online. 53 Although I have not been able to trace any list of members' names, from the turn of the century many of the secretaries were reported to be women, for example in the Postal Pictorial Club, 54 the Teifi Postal Camera Club, 55 the Amateur Postal Club, 56 the Perseverance Postal Camera Club, 57 the Zodiac Postal Camera Club 58 and the Postal Photographic Society. 59 In none of the materials I have examined was their gender given any notice by the commentators, which suggests this was or had become a common practice.
What this overview shows, then, is that thanks to the parcel post, photographers were able to overcome the stationary condition imposed upon themselves by their locality, potentially social status or, we could imagine, limited or lacking means to travel, through a form of communication that relied on what we could describe as the vicarious transportation of photographers themselves. Lash and Urry have noted that 'modern society is a society on the move', and that 'the modern world is inconceivable without these new forms of long-distance transportation and travel'. 60 In this sense, the postal service did not simply add to the existing communication system but, most importantly, provided a modern infrastructure that expanded people's personal mobility: while tourist photographers were able to enjoy a new experience of physical mobility, members of postal photographic clubs participated in one of virtual mobility. In other words, the parcel post created the conditions for the emergence of new relationships based on modern connections, what Uricchio has described as 'spatial and temporal dimensions that exceed those normally available to human subjects' 61 and Harvey calls 'time-space compression'. 62 As the following section explores, a crucial component of such form of mobility was people's direct participation in the production and circulation of the portfolios, and thus in the form and content of communication itself.

New Spatial, Temporal and Material Experiences of Modernity
Hawes, who we encountered in the introduction, had noted that postal clubs 'differ [. . .] but little one from another; they all have a portfolio circulating so many times'. It is certainly the case that, by the turn of the century, portfolios assembled en route, so to speak, were the predominant system in use. Yet this had not always been the case. Some of the earliest postal clubs had used albums as a support -soon discarded because they were heavier than portfolios and thus more expensive to post -and circulated the material after the album or portfolio had been assembled by the secretary. For example, the Photographic Exchange Club, launched in 1884, required 'each member to send in monthly prints from two negatives [. . .] These would be mounted in an album and send round from member to member in rotation'. 63 The Postal Photographic Society, 64 the Lantern Slide Exchange Club 65 and the Postal Photographic Comparing Club 66 followed similar practices. The members were invited to 'interchange ideas with each other' 67 or add 'criticisms and notes', 68 which was usually done through the notebooks and criticism sheets that accompanied each parcel, but this largely amounted to a response to a predefined product that had been shaped by the secretary's own choices of selection and sequencing, as well as introductory comments. Similar to what would have taken place in the context of an ordinary society, the secretary -who as Lund noted 'is essentially president as well as secretary' 69 -provided clerical support and creative direction, which put them in a position of control over the content and configuration of the postal club's communication.
However, members soon became more actively involved in the production of the portfolio itself, adopting what the secretary of the Photographic Exchange Club described, following the remodelling of his own club, as the 'pass-round-the-hat method'. 70 As Warburg, the secretary of the Postal Camera Club, noted in 1906, 'the method of sending the prints to the Secretary, on whom it lays extra trouble, is not so good as the other, which works regularly and automatically'. 71 Let us consider, for example, the guidelines that Fearn and Bennett put together in 1887 to advise anyone interested in starting a postal club, a passage that is worth quoting at length because it exemplifies the configuration since followed by the great majority of these organisations: The first thing to be considered, in starting an 'Album Club,' is whether it shall take the form of a regular photographic album, or a light case in which the photographs shall travel from member to member [. . .] In either case some means ought to be provided for members to criticise, and give advice on, each other's prints. This, if a case is to be used, is best afforded by a sheet of paper placed round each print by the member inserting it, and numbered to correspond with the print [. . .] When it gets back to the member who inserted it, he takes out both photograph and sheet of paper, and thus has a continual memorandum of the opinions and advice of the other members of that print. He then inserts another photograph and sheet of paper in its place, and so on, ad infinitum. Members should be asked to give full details of the prints they insert, either on labels, with which the originator of the club may supply them, and which may be fastened to the backs of their mounts, or in the pages of a note-book sent round with the photographs [. . .] In the case of an album, the labels may be fastened on the opposite page to that on which the prints are mounted, and facing them. The details asked for should include make of camera, lens, stop used, exposure, light, time of the day, month, plate, developer, toning bath, subject, remarks of any kind. In the note-book, several pages should be devoted to further details of members' prints, for which there is not room on the labels; also space should be left for queries and answers, miscellaneous notes, etc. [. . .] Twelve members is a good number for one club. If each member keeps the case two days, and then forwards it to the next, it ought, theoretically, to go round in one month. Practically the journey from one member to another takes another day in nearly every case, so that more time will elapse before it returns to its starting point. Sundays are best excluded from the two days, as there is no parcel post on that day. Each member should be requested to insert a certain number of prints per month; two ¼ plates or ½ plates is a good allowance in a club of twelve members. Members may be fined threepence each day they detain the case over the allotted time, which leaves a 'balance in hand' for the purchase of a new case when it gets knocked to pieces in the post, which, alas! it speedily does. 72 Although different clubs had different rules for what concerned, for example, the number, size and type of the prints that each member was expected to contribute, the theme of the photographs or the amount of fine to be paid in case of delay, this text introduces a working framework that remained largely unchanged throughout the period considered in this article. An 'album' or portfolio 'case', accompanied by supplies for sharing information and criticism -'sheet[s] of paper', 'labels', or 'notebook' -enabled the communication by 'travel [ling]', thanks to the Royal Mail service, 'from member to member'. Upon receiving the parcel, the member added their own photograph(s), 'giv[ing] full details' for it, inspected and commented upon the work of others and then sent the parcel on. This was a circular process: at the beginning of each new rotation -or 'cycle of revolution', 73 as Lund once described it -the member removed their own work and others' criticism of it, and inserted a new photograph with its own details, a process that Fearn and Bennett described as continuing 'ad infinitum'. In order to keep the momentum of this 'ever-circulating portfolio' 74 or 'evercirculator' 75 'to go round in one month' or a similar predefined period, each member was expected to perform the actions of examining, commenting on and changing prints within a limited and pre-established timeframe, usually from two to four days, and 'fined' if they did not conform with this swift temporality.  fig. 2 and fig. 3 in figure 1). 76 A typical portfolio, Pugh added, also included 'a small envelop pasted inside the portfolio [. . .] to hold a sufficient supply of postcards'; a 'large brown paper envelope [. . .] for the purpose of containing prints which have circulated once [. . .] to remain until it reaches its owner a second time'; and 'a quarto-sized notebook [. . .] intended to enable members to communicate with one another'. 77 In line with standard practice, Pugh recommended 'that the membership be limited to 15 or 20'. 78 As Warburg for example explained, with a membership of thirty 'each album takes four months to circulate once', while 'smaller membership has the advantage for a quick circulation', which was preferred. 79 Because the portfolio and its contents were constantly altered, and the prints that each member removed when the portfolio reached them were often repurposed for exhibitions or competitions, physical traces of their operations have proved elusive. The only known material is a set of thirty-four criticism sheets (what Pugh described as a 'cover sheet') that belonged to photographer Alfred  Figure 2 shows the front page of one such sheet, which he submitted to the Light and Shade society in April 1896. Following the template, Brunwin included information about the taking, developing and printing of two photographs of Spains Hall in Finchingfield, Essex, both glued on the inside, while members commented overleaf (see figures 3 and 4 for an example of this). The criticism sheet used by the Light and Truth club looks similar: the front page includes sections for 'Subject, with any notes of interest' and 'Technical Particulars', while photographs and members' criticisms are overleaf. Each sheet was commented on by between eight and eighteen members in the Light and Shade society, and between five and eleven in the Light and Truth club, fluctuations that probably reflect the changing overall number of members, the fact that not everyone might have criticised each print and members' absence from home due to work or personal commitments -which, as the photographic press indicates, they were expected to communicate to the secretary via postcard. As each portfolio circulated monthly, members would have had an average of two days each to complete their contribution. These examples describe a cultural practice of production and circulation of photography-related content that took place within what would appear to be a tightly regulated space. 'I must impress upon members the necessity of being punctual both in forwarding the prints and despatching the albums', admonished Frederick G. Reader, the secretary of the Photographic Album Club, in 1886, 'otherwise the workings of the club will fail'. 81 The 'successful working' of a circulating portfolio, wrote the Amateur Photographer in 1902, 'is largely dependent on unfailing punctuality, and every member of this must feel that he is a unit on which much depends, so that any neglect on his part may disorganise the whole'. 82 Accordingly, as in Fearn and Bennett's guidelines, secretaries drew up detailed rules of conduct intended to enforce the smooth circulation of the parcel and the dispatch of the postcards, and imposed fines 'for delays in forwarding the portfolio, non-insertion of prints and other sins and omissions' 83 or, as in the case of the 'Mercury Supplement' Postal Photographic Club, 'struck [members] off the list'. 84 This strict regulation of time and behaviour can be understood as part of that broader Victorian concern with rational leisure and respectability that informed cultural practices in the nineteenth century. 85 The use itself of postcards, which enabled secretaries to track, and hence control, the travelling portfolio, sought to discipline photographers. Siegert, for instance, has noted that the postal practice of 'registering the distance between bodies on a post card', which was implemented in order to safeguard letters against loss and theft, 'provided records and surveillance'. 86 Conversely, in abiding by these rules, the members of postal clubs could demonstrate social conformity and participation in the system of modernity; as Gunn writes, 'what served to unify the middle-class, above all, was culture'. 87 Simultaneously, however, those same dynamics that created conformity and standardisation also gave to the clubs' members a degree of control over both the form of the album or portfolio and its circulation. Although Lund claimed that a secretary 'virtually has absolute control of the scheme, and provided he exercises his power in a reasonable manner no one is likely to question his prerogative', 88 they only saw the content of the portfolio the moment it was their turn to receive it. Additionally, trying to monitor the location of this constantly moving object was a cause of anxiety. 'The work is arduous and never-ending', wrote the secretary of one such club in 1902: Every day [the secretary] has to be in touch with the three or four albums constantly circulating [. . .] there is the tiresome man who always forgets to send the album on at the proper time, so that the poor secretary has endless work in writing and urging the defaulter's attention to punctuality. 89 'There is no end of worry attaching to a club of this kind', he continued, adding, in relation to the submission of content considered to be unsuitable, that 'a strong secretary should be on his guard against any such threatening degeneration '. 90 This tension between what we could describe as standardisation of practices versus the unpredictable actions of individual members was embodied in the materiality itself of each parcel. For instance, in the sketch that accompanied Pugh's article (figure 1), the content of the portfolio is represented in an untidy, or perhaps unruly, state. The contemporary press often noted the rather disorderly appearance of those they received for criticism: in 1887, the Amateur Photographer described the Postal Photographic Album as 'not an album, but a box [. . .] The prints are loosely wrapped in a sheet of writing paper'. 91 Similarly, the Practical Photographer noted in 1899 that the portfolio of the Amateur Postal Club was 'fairly overflowing with its multitudinous contents', 92 while the cover sheets of the Talbot Album Club 'appear to us inconveniently small, they ought to be the full size of the portfolio, which would enable the contents to be kept straight and tidy instead of becoming dog's-eared as is the case at present'. 93  a higher degree a precision. These were the objects under the secretary's control -as the originator of a club, the secretary would make the rules and determine the order of circulation -or, as in the case of the postcards, the objects that were meant to exercise control. This indicates, then, that the flip side of the rigorous cooperation that the system demanded was the production of a space that members where actively involved with and, consequently, that allowed them a degree of freedom. As Waverley commented in 1902, 'each member places his prints, mounted according to his own fancy, and got up after his own ideas'. 94 Similarly, a few years later, Warburg observed that 'the contents of the portfolios [. . .] alter from member to member'. 95 Brunwin's criticism sheets offer an intriguing example of this. In the one discussed earlier (figure 2), for instance, he left the 'Other Particulars' section blank but included a handwritten note with an extract about Spains Hall from Bernard Burke's Family Romance (1853), which he secured to the form by threading it from the inside -the white thread, knotted on the outside, is visible on the left-hand side of the document. His personalisation of the forms is also illustrated by the handwritten note, this time taped to the front of the criticism sheets, that accompanied his submissions to the Light and Shade society in October 1897 and February 1898; by his choice to sometimes include more than the required one photograph and to adapt the template in order to include all their details; or by the fact that on twenty-seven of the sheets he meticulously carved out eyelets in order to secure the prints -the others were glued. We can then say that while the photographic press had been instrumental in the development of what Jennifer Tucker has defined as a 'brotherhood' of photographers that emerged from the shared ritual of reading the same papers, 96 constituting an 'imagined community', following Anderson's influential analysis, 97 the postal service fostered the development of a modern network by facilitating a form of collective participation in constructing, sharing and cyclically remixing photography-related material. This can be seen as an early incarnation of the 'network sociality' that, in his analysis of the information age, Wittel contrasts to the idea of community. While the latter 'entails stability, coherence, embeddedness and belonging', network sociality is 'not based on mutual experience or common history but primarily on an exchange of data', a social relation 'constructed on the grounds of communication and transport technology'. 98 Similarly, the network created by the postal service was not rooted in a sense of place nor simply on a more abstract notion of photographic community, but in the cooperative circulation of cultural objects that bore the signs of others' presence. This was an informal bottom-up mode of communication where meaning and value were created within this process of circulation, morphing with each mail delivery, thanks to the members' individual active participation. 99 The preference for portfolios over albums, dominant from the 1890s onwards, only added to the amorphous structure of the material that travelled from member to member. The postal services can thus be understood as one of   , 1870-1886', in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, ed. Elliot West and Paula Petrik, Kansas City: University Press of Kansas 1992and Ellen Gruber Garvey, 'Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, those infrastructures that, Paul Edwards writes, 'simultaneously shape and are shaped by -in other words, co-construct -the condition of modernity [. . .] To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures [. . .] [which] allow us to control time and space'. 100 In other words, this use of the postal service was different from premodern systems in the sense that it 'create[d] both opportunities and limits' 101 or, as Mattern discusses in relation to modern urban infrastructures, meant to create 'active and informed citizens' -"proper" photographers -but produced the equivalent of 'a site for radical meetings and rallies', 102 what Edwards describes as a 'decentralized, distributed, networked forms of power' 103 and Wittel as 'network sociality'. This space, I argue, created the conditions for the emergence of new photographic possibilities. As Edwards continues, 'Building infrastructures has been constitutive of the modern condition [. . .] In redeploying emerging infrastructures to their own ends, users participate in creating versions of modernity', 104 and by extension novel versions of themselves. In this sense, the postal system was both a material and a cultural infrastructure in that it facilitated the emergence of a modern, networked, sense of self that, in turn, implicitly challenged the 'centralised, hierarchical forms of power' represented by the dominant photographic discourse of this period. 105 103 -Edwards, 'Infrastructure and Modernity ', 210. 104 -Ibid., 191 and222. Remaking, andRecirculating', in New Media, 1740-1915, ed

The Networked Photographer
As a result of a new experience of communication, members of postal clubs were placed in a transformed relationship to one another. On the one hand, this was felt to be closer than what other social interactions, for instance those taking place within ordinary societies, could offer. For example, in 1902, following the launch of the Leeds Photographic Society circulating portfolio, the Amateur Photographer commented that such arrangement 'will put the members more in touch with each other, always a difficulty in large societies'. 106 The general assessment was, in fact, that postal clubs were particularly successful in creating a keen sense of unity and participation amongst photographers. 'The photographic enthusiast', Fearn and Bennet wrote in 1887, 'counts the days to the next arrival of the Postal Album, so anxious is he to know the exact date when he will have the pleasure of inspecting its contents'. 107 'No one will deny', Leonard Castle, Secretary of the Quarterly Photographic Portfolio, similarly noted in 1910, 'that many of these circulating portfolios are doing good work in keeping warm the enthusiasm of the members'. 108 Writing about the telegraph's impact on people's sense of self, Otis argues that 'From the 1850s onward, as more and more people began communicating through telegrams, the public [. . .] began to understand themselves as "connected" and to envision themselves as cross-points in a net'. 109 By being part of such network, she continues, one's identity was 'defined through one's connections to others'. 110 It is in this sense, I argue, that the dynamics of postal photographic clubs shaped their members' identity: the particular way in which photographers came together influenced each members' own experience of photography and sense of their own role in this process because this was defined through one's interaction with others. Central to the production of this particular form of sociability -and, by relation, individuality -were the entwined acts of reading and writing as a framework for looking at, and consequently understanding, photography.
As introduced by the previous section, in lieu of oral communication, photographers used criticism sheets and a notebook 'to criticise, and give advice on, each other's prints' and also to share more general 'queries and answers, miscellaneous notes, etc.'. The written text occupied a prominent position in the circulating portfolio, widely considered as important as the images themselves to enhance members' learning. 'The advantages to be derived from membership to clubs of this kind', Hawes, for example, wrote in 1900, 'are two-fold, namely: (1) The value of the criticism written by every member on each print, or rather on the loose sheet of paper attached to each print for the purpose, and (2) the inspection of the prints themselves'. 111 'Development of the Critical Faculty', wrote Photographic News in 1906, 'is one of the advantages of the postal club. Each worker becomes an art critic, and because he will in turn be criticised, more thought and care are bestowed on his criticism than is often the case'. 112 'The benefit to be thus derived by inspecting and criticising the work of others, as well as the opportunity it affords of submitting your own work to the candid opinion of fellow members ', concurred Pugh in 1909, 'is beyond doubt'. 113 An important reason for the need to combine the acts of reading, writing and looking was that what made a print successful, from either a technical or an aesthetic point of view, was not objective or absolute knowledge but something that depended entirely on established practices and values. Learning to take a successful pictorial photograph, for example, meant acquiring the proper cultural capital, which could then be demonstrated by selecting, composing, lighting and subsequently printing one's photographs by following precise conventions. 114 The text was thus key to 'increase the knowledge of practical photography' 115 or to improve 'the study of pictorial photography', 116 because it could transmit a type of information that was not self-evident in the photographs themselves. Or, to put it differently, postal clubs were considered to be particularly effective in forming pictorial photographers because they could teach members how to write, and thus talk and think, about photography as a prerequisite for taking 'proper' photographs -I have not found a single postal club that only shared images.
Members' active participation in the production of the portfolio, however, also meant that they were the authors of photographic discourse: in the absence of 'important gentlemen in the chair', as Lund noted in the quotation with which I started this article, what made a photograph good or bad, or simply how one should talk about photography, had to be negotiated amongst members. In the comments that members of the Light and Shade Postal Photographic Society and Light and Truth Postal Photographic Club wrote on Brunwin's criticism sheets, disagreements on compositional or technical matters are not infrequent. For instance, the view of a crossroad in Shalford Green, two members agreed, 'would be improved by clouds' and 'certainly a few clouds would be an improvement', while a third opined that 'certainly this does not want clouds'; on a photograph of Shalford Church, W. R. B. wrote that 'I should be inclined to cut off a little on the left hand side', to which F. M. replied that 'I should not cut off a little on the left as W.R.B. suggests'; while a photograph of a snow scene was praised by one as a 'success in carbon work', but questioned by another as 'In what respect does this excel as carbon print? Somewhat lazy'. 117 Figure 3, which shows Brunwin's contribution to the Light and Shade society in June 1896 -the 'No.2' on the top left corner of the cover sheet indicates that this was the second portfolio circulated that month -is particularly intriguing because he chose to submit a photograph that he considered to be unusual. As he noted in the 'Other Particulars' section, 'This was done as an experiment. The partridge is sitting on wheat which, as you will observe in the right hand of corner, I had to hold back with my stick and take off the cap with the other hand. Rather an anxious time for the partridge!' The criticisms on the back of the sheet (Figure 4) show a mixture of positive and negative responses, and perhaps the ambiguity in knowing how one should look at or comment the photograph: for example, 'A novelty'; 'Good under the condition'; 'What a pity that after so much care the partridge is still partly hidden'; 'Not at all bad for a first attempt'; 'Very interesting indeed, and, under the circumstances, well done; 'I see nothing interesting in this. Pictorially or as a lesson in natural history its value is nil'; 'This is a photographic puzzle to me'; 'Brave attempt not quite successful; 'Ditto. I should like to see some more picture like this'; and 'A pity, that this is not more successful, but a difficult sort of photograph to get'. To emerge from such exchanges was the realisation that everyone came to photography from different perspectives, and that one's opinion was perhaps as valuable as the next. This is not to say that individual members were not influenced by or sought to conform with the dominant aesthetic discourse of the time -they certainly did, as this allowed them to demonstrate social status and moral worth. Instead, my argument is that being integral participants of postal photographic clubs, rather than simply beneficiaries of the infrastructure, transformed photographers' role in the wider photographic discourse: the production of photographic knowledge, and hence what gave it value, depended entirely on the idiosyncratic and kaleidoscopic experiences of the individual.
Indeed, this was a freedom of expression that alerted some secretaries, who realised that many of the conversations that took place within postal clubs could not have developed within the much more structured space of an ordinary society. 'It is amusing sometimes', 'Waverly' noted in 1902, 'how a member will take up a half-a-dozen or more pages of a club note-book in a drivelling and long-winded discussion on some point that interests him, or virulently attacks some other member or work he doesn't understand or care for '. 118 Or, as 'Old Portfolio' (a pseudonym) wrote in two articles for the Amateur Photographer, to be criticised was often the fact that photographers contributed to the discussion what they were interested in, rather than what the established -and considered respectable -photographic discourse demanded. In the first piece, 'Old Portfolio' disapproved of 'Mr. Champignon', who 'all he seems to live for (if he doesn't live on them) is fungi'; 'Mr Convention', who 'Every round submits the same sort of view, technically perfect in every case'; and 'Fogg', wondering in conclusion 'Why don't they make some radical change in their methods, and widen their scope?' 119 In the second article, which started with the sarcastic remark 'What different ideas seem to exist in the minds of different members, as to the function of criticism!', attention was directed to 'De Wit', who 'will never let slip a single chance of demonstrating his peculiar humour'; 'Mr Ditto' who, 'with his invariable "Agree with the above" is hardly a great accession to the criticism'; 'G. Arrulous, Esq. I've never known that man to write less than four lines of every photo'; and 'Ego. With that fellow, it's a never-ending holding-up of his own work and methods'. 120 What someone like 'Old Portfolio' saw as a cacophony of personal views, however, was in other instances experienced as a fertile terrain for individual photographers to express, and thus realise, their photographic potential. Writing about the Postal Camera Club, Warburg, for instance, described how: Difficult words flitted across the pages of the note-book, words like subjectively and objectively, idiosyncrasy and personal aesthetic expression. Words of which we grasped the meaning for a moment, only to lose it in a labyrinth of conflicting ideas. Of course the discussion led to no decision. Such discussions never do. Nevertheless they are extremely useful. They make one think of problems which one would not otherwise consider. 121 One reason why Warburg considered this plurality of views to be positively generative is most likely because the Postal Camera Club, composed of photographers 'very high in the photographic world', 122 was widely considered to be one of the 'leading pictorial photographic postal clubs in the United Kingdom'. 123 As such, the views expressed by its members aligned with the dominant photographic discourse of this period. However, if Warburg's judgement differed in value from what other secretaries were noting, his assessment of the circulating portfolio was largely the same: it not only increased members' individual contribution to the form and content of communication, but also multiplied its points of origins, making each member feel on a level playing field with others. In other words, the postal service influenced how photographic discourse was produced and circulated and, in the process, reframed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, an important reason why photographers themselves enjoyed being part of a postal club was that this was felt to be more open to individual experiences than ordinary societies. As 'Waverley' wrote in 1902, 'There are many drawbacks to the ordinary photographic society. For my own part, I dislike them so strongly that I never could belong to one'. On the other hand, a postal club, he continued, 'has no particular tendency to mould a worker -to mould its members into a narrow-lined school, as has the ordinary society, so that if a member has original ideas, he has full play, and room to work them out'. 124 Similarly, Photographic News reported in 1906 that the members of the Dundee and East of Scotland Photographic Association 'find the circulating portfolio is more valuable to them than the society itself, with all its meetings' because 'in the circulating club members devote all their attention to the work and the members themselves, whereas in a photographic society their time is mostly given to lectures, demonstrations, and lantern shows which may not touch at all on the question of their own individual experience'. 125 What is particularly interesting in these comments -which, in turn, can help us understand photographers' experience of postal clubs more generally -is the recognition that the circulating portfolio allowed the photographer as an individual to assert themselves. In an ordinary society, the calendar of winter and summer events -broadly 'lectures, demonstrations, and lantern shows' and photographic excursions, respectively -was normally planned by the secretary, president or a committee: the wider membership, especially in larger societies, participated in these events but was not directly involved in their constitution. 126 Additionally, as both these examples indicate, some members felt that they were expected to conform to the dominant view promoted by their society -'mould a worker'or that there was no space to express or explore 'their own individual experience'. Conversely, the space created by a circulating portfolio enabled each member to focus on their own experience -'members devote all their attention to the work and the members themselves'; 'if a member has original ideas, he has full play, and room to work them out'. As Practical Photographer noted in 1899, referring to postal photographic clubs more generally, 'The note book section seems to be more actively supported than is usually the case in these clubs. Each member takes it in turn to start a discussion', covering 'such subjects as "Flash-Light Photography," "The Best All-round Printing Process," "Should Alum be Used in Development?" one or two methods of storing negatives, snap-shots, and a multitude of other matters'. 127 This analysis thus suggests that while an ordinary photographic society was viewed as seeking to merge the individual with the collective by encouraging the former to adopt the values, aesthetics and practices of the latter -and, hence, a particular ideology -the engagement fostered by postal clubs, their empirical experience, displaced the hierarchical relationship between the individual and the dominant discourse embodied by the collective. This, I argue, allowed the former to see themselves as distinct from the latter. Hartmut Rosa posits that 'socialstructural processes of modernization cannot occur without some correspondence in the construction of subjective senses of self [. . .] social-structural transformation through modernization must necessarily go hand in hand with a transformation of identity '. 128 In this sense, the network produced by the infrastructure of the Royal Mail as used by these clubs created the conditions for the modern realisation of an individual identity because the process of co-producing the meaning and value of a circulating portfolio depended on the dialogue between different but equally weighted views, rather than being regulated externally by the secretary or president of a society, or by the editor of a photographic periodical. This was another main difference between their relationship and the imagined community at the centre of Anderson's, and thus Tucker's, analysis: while in the latter each individual 'is wellaware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others [. . .] whose identity he has not the slightest notion', 129 within each postal club the relationship between members was far from imagined. Therefore, by carrying the traces of a plurality of experiences and perspectives, the circulating portfolio allowed photographers to see themselves as part of a modern network of their own making, simultaneously evidencing the fragmented and rhizomatic nature of photographic knowledge itself. This impacted on how photographers could understand their own role within the process of communication, implicitly questioning the production of knowledge about the photographic. We could then think of these photographers as popular modernists because, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to a similarly constitutive photographic practice, 'they broke with previous modes of thinking about photography [. . .] while never really looking beyond the petty matters of everyday life'. 130 Although members of postal photographic clubs did not consciously seek a transformation of their photographic self, their active participation in a modern network meant that their identities became inevitably adaptable and reconfigured. We can then say that the postal network was instrumental in affording to amateur photographers a new form of mobile and networked sociability that created the conditions for the emergence of a novel sense of self, in turn influencing how photographers could conceptualise the production of meaning and what made photography valuable.