George Bagshaw Taney 1838-1913, Norwich

A commissioned c.2000-word essay (one of two) for an anthology compiled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Photographic Collectors' Club of Great Britain. Entitled Victorian Photographers and their Studios, it features 50 biographical chapters on lesser-known photographers. For my second essay of the commission, I examined the practices of a late-nineteenth-century photographer, based in Norwich, who was prosecuted for trading in obscene photographs in 1881. The essay provides new knowledge about the photographer and his son, especially in relation to their criminal activities, which I contextualise in the proliferation of obscenity prosecutions from the 1870s. The essay considers comparative legal cases and examines the production and consumption of nude, suggestive and explicit photographs across social classes and across the country in the period.