Photography And Fish - This Is Not A Fish

R. T. Crawshay, c.1870, Untitled

Photography And Fish - A Slow Market

From Things: A Spectrum of Photography, 1850-2001 (2004) London: Jonathan Cape

R T Crawshay, 1868, A Slow Market, Albumen-silver print from wet collodion negative

'Robert Crawshay was the fourth 'Iron King' of the Cyfarthfa Iron Works, Merthyr Tydfil.  In 1867 he became a member of the (Royal) Photographic Society.  A Slow Market was probably taken during spring 1868. It is beautifully made and carefully observed; the tear in the tablecloth echoes the open mouth of the nearest salmon. The photograph combines the popular genre motif of fisherfolk with a tradition of still life, and a Victorian predilection for dressing up. Beneath the shawls and skirts is Crawshay's daughter, Rose Harriette. She wrote in her diary (23 March 1868): "Papa came in with the ugliest, dirtiest, nastiest old straw bonnet that ever existed and a cap (thank goodness it was clean) for me to be photographed in as a fish woman which lasted till lunch time".'

Jane Fletcher, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television

The Ongoing Moment Revisited - Photography And Fish

R T Crawshay, c.1870, Untitled

In 2005, Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment (London: Little Brown) appeared on book stores' bookshelves in Britain.

The Observer described it as 'odd and illuminating' suggesting that, while it was less than rigorous, it 'may yet [take] its place among the classic works' on photography (16.10.2005).

Geoff Dyer's publisher describes it thus: 'With characteristic perversity . . . Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same things (benches, barber shops, signs, roads)'.

The result is a new, if eccentric and skewed, perspective on the history of the medium.  A history harnessed to the 'form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art'.

Around the same time, a curator of photographs approached me in his role as co-editor for a new series of photography books, interested to know if there were an angle on photography that I would care to write about.

I said, 'yes, photography and fish'.

But my passion for the poisson in the history of photography was received like a damp squib.

My suggestion was rejected.