Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), author of the satirical utopia Erewhon (1870) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), but also a major British photographer active 1880-1900. His subjects were street life, ‘portraits’ of characters from literature, continental travels, Italian art, especially of the Sacro Monte pilgrimage sites of the north, and classical sites in Asia Minor, Greece, and especially Sicily. But such descriptions mask the wit, originality, and imaginative reach of his photographic invention.
Photography offered Butler escape from an oppressive family background. His first known picture dates from 1866, but his energies were focused by his travels in connection with the book Alps and Sanctuaries (1881), illustrated with his own drawings and etchings, and the extensive photography carried out for his art-historical work Ex Voto (1889), a pioneering study of the Sacro Monte and the Renaissance artist Gaudenzio Ferrari. His vivid sense of the relationship between the hyperreal life-size New Testament sculptural groups and the local communities which had furnished models for them informs his representations of contemporary Italian life. His photographs of the 1890s relate to books on the theme of The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), challenging the view that the classics were handbooks for young gentlemen destined to rule the Empire. Just as his novel became an important element in the anti-Victorian early modernist movement, so his suggestion that ‘Homer’ was a woman living in Sicily began the ironic deflation that culminated in James Joyce's Ulysses. His Sicilian photographs invoke a heroic legend in a modern down-at-heel setting. The new medium brought freedom through its improvisatory speed (especially with the introduction of the Kodak), natural comedy, democratic levelling; in short, it helped to banish hypocrisy and pretension.
— Elinor Shaffer
Bibliography
- Shaffer, E., Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic (1988)
