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Photographic Inengland JAPANJAPANSOCIETY SOCIETY ofImaGEARTSof IMAGE ARTS and SCIENCES 181 Delivering Coal Mines: Advertising Photographic Postcards of the Coal Mining Industry in England INui Ytikiko O. Introduction The function of nineteenth-century photography has been examined and directly compared with a type of currency by Jonathan Crary] and others. The proliferation of the photographic image that leads to the substitution of the copy for the original, and practices in which the images no longer have "real" any reference to the position of an observer in a world, a so-called "simulacrum" "spectacle" in Jean Baudri11ard's term or the prehistory of in Guy Debord's term, were already acknowledged in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. The then newly emerged and empowered middle classes with the dominant culture in society began to produce signs on demand to challenge the aristocratic monopoly of signs and to suppert their social power and control. Walter Benjamin's statement in the mid 1930s on the technique of reproduction in capitalism and the art based not on ritual but on politics "The "detaches support this. technique ef reproduction," he says, the reproduced object from the domain Qf tradition, By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced."! Benjamin "closer" indicated the desire of his contemporary masses to bring things spatially and humanly, and to overcome the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.3 In the nineteenth century, this phenomenon of the proliferation of signs as social power, which promised the irnaginary purchase of places and people in photographs, was most visib]e in popular photographic items. Mass-produced media such as the stereograph, lantern slide, and cartes de visite which covered every imaginable theme were circulated, exchanged and collected like currency mostly among the middle INul Yukiko is a Ph.D candidate at Kyoto University. She has been researching early photographic pestcards and other nineteenth-century photographic media relating to the coal mining indllstry in Britain at Canterbury Christ Church University College and the University of Leeds. ' ICONiCS Volume 7 (2oo4). Published by the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences NII-Electronic Library Service JAPANJAPANSOCIETY SOCIETY ofImaGEARTSof IMAGE ARTS and SCIENCES 182 INmYukiko classes and served to fulfi11 their desires and fantasies. The photographic postcard of the coal mining industry during the Golden Age of Pestcards (c,1902-1918), when over eight million picture postcards were sent in a year in Britain, could partly be understood in these terms: as a tool which helped to extend a capitalist world view and world order, in the theme of physical labor fbr energy resources, the basic part of the capitalist economy. All details of the coal industry in its peak period were photographed and turned into pogtcards..Although prints from artists' drawings of disasters, strikes, and woman coal miners had already been featured in the illustrated magazines circulated among the middle clagses from the mid nineteenth century, they were not fbr the working classes. In the case of the postcard, by contrast, the participation of the working classes before the full-scale of mass reproduction of photography (in newspapers or magazines in the 1920s) should be taken inte account. It could be said that the postcard is the first medium which broadly popularized the visual imagery of the coal industry beyond classes, by means of photography and printing technology. Postcards as such were circulated among members of mining communities and the people concerned. A number of private messages on the reverse side of cards are eloquent testimonies to this. However, certain kinds of mining postcards were particularly aimed outside of mining communities, An example is the photographic mining postcard for advertising. This study examines a series of collectable photographic postcards produced by Derbyshire's coal and iron company, the Clay Cross Company (CXC), to ce]ebrate and adyertise their prize-winning coal in the Franco- British Exhibition in 1908, showing miners at work. The isolation of colliery communities prevented other sections of society from understanding the mines and miners, and kept them out ef everyday sight. Indeed, the middle classes are said to have known so little about the industry that coal mines '`sublirne" became sites of fear, of otherness, and of the in the terms of the eighteenth-century English school of landscape artists, as well as of amusement." It was sometimes feared, and sometimes idealized and enioyed. CXC turned these social (mis)perceptions of coal mining into profit, 77ie Photogrmphic Picture Post-Carzi: For Personal Use and For Prqfit, a guide book fbr making picture postcards, published in l906, right before the climax of the postcard craze, mentions the lucrative potentiality of advertising postcards and the mining industry as one of the conspicuous industries that were already beginning to use the postcard for advertising.5 In advertising between 1880 and the eve of First World War, although the fu11 development of commercial information and advertising as part of the modem distributive system in the developed capitalism was seen in this period, its comparative crudeness in techniques of appeal, design and layout NII-Electronic Library Service JAPANJAPANSOCIETY SOCIETY ofImaGEARTSof IMAGE ARTS and SCIENCES Deliyering Coal Mines/ Advertising Photographic Postcards of the Coal Mining Industry in England183 "psychological" is observed and true advertising is said to be very little.` The CXC cards are no exception to this. The interpretation of these postcards as straightforward expressions of the virtues of the industry, therefore, seems valid, The CXC cards obviously aimed to show the best aspects of the "industrial industry. Their vision is so-called reverie," as clarified in John Taylor's analysis of advertising photography of the late nineteenth-century factories. His study shows that advertisers used images of aesthetically pleasing factories (clean, rational, and reassuring) to demonstrate the excellence of their products.i As AIIan Sekula argued with reference to the industrial photograph in general, advertising photographs are also cornmissioned, executed, displayed, and viewed in a spirit of calculation and rationality, Sueh pictures seem to offer unambiguous truths, and at the same time, unintended effects of power and contrel are revealed by photographs: a positive public facade, merely a respectable, acceptable, ideologically necessary substitute for the latent truth of exploitation.S CIass issues, power relations, and the working "other" classes as the to the middle classes could be read in ephemeral objects like advertising photographic postcards of a coal cQmpany, This article examines the CXC's postcards in two distinct ways. Firstly, it explores the context of production and consumption, the socio-economic background of CXC postcards as an example of a popular photographic medium. Secondly, it analyses the corporate values behind the postcards' production, as they reflect class issues, power relations, and the notion of "otherness." This is achieved through examination of the captions of postcards, through a union worker's interpretations of postcards, other related postcards and photographs, and contemporary data of the coal mining industry. At the same time, the bourgeois tradition of classifying and collecting and the commodification of labor hidden behind the image of workers are also discussed. 1. The Clay Cross Company and Their Postcard Series CXC was one of the largest iron and coal companies in the Midlands, located in north-east Derbyshire. The company was founded by the pioneer of the steam locomotive, George Stephenson, and their centenary book `Ca boasts that it is source of pride and gratification" that the Company first came into existence in the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837,9 In the whole Victorian Era, CXC improved as a vertical integrated company whose activities extended from coal mining to coke ovens, lime works, farming, foundry and furnaces, etc. This attracted a considerable labor force and caused a dramatic population increase to transform the Midland's eastern region frorn a small farming community into a dynamic industrial center.t" CXC was the first mining company to transport coal to NII-Electronic Library Service JAPANJAPANSOCIETY SOCIETY ofImaGEARTSof IMAGE ARTS and SCIENCES 184 TNulYukiko London by rail (via the North Midland Railway Company) in 1844, The integrated coal, iron and limestone works, low cost labor and railway connections offered endless opportunities when the railway system of Britain was being built, and by the 1860s, they had grown into one of the three major coal producers in Derbyshire, Their whole history exemplifies the development of the industry closely connected to the railway age, and "a this is why CXC is called classic product of the Industrial Revolutien." 'i Until 1914, the year of the First World War, their business was still very similar to that founded seventy-six years earlier,'2 though on a 1arger scale. It was in 1908 that the company wen two gold medals for its quality house coal and fue] saving product at the Franco-British Exhibition. To celebrate this and to advertise their prize-winning coal, they started to preduce a set
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