1 - Forays into the Wilderness: Conan Doyle as Amateur Photographer

Summary

So I have the pleasant prospect of a roomful of photographers clamouring to see my negatives & my wonderful unipod stand—which has been described so often tho’ mortal eye has never seen it.

Arthur Conan Doyle (ca. 1883) on meeting Henry Greenwood, the editor of Photographic News

Conan Doyle began his literary career as an amateur photographer. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and then in 1882 settled in Southsea, practicing medicine there until 1890. During this time he discovered photography. Conan Doyle's training was in ophthalmology. For some years the lens of the human eye and that of the camera were his passion. Their “writing of light” was then suddenly replaced by a slew of articles written and printed, which never ceased for the rest of his life. Later Conan Doyle produced nearly ten pages a day, all of it leading to hundreds of publications. But at the start of his career the central focus was on photographic images and the description of them. Here images and texts went hand in hand, and would do the same later on in different forms. Photography, which later on he no longer practiced himself, nevertheless was just as meaningfully employed to illustrate his stories and novels. Conan Doyle indeed wrote his first short stories by the end of the 1870s, publishing “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” in Chamber's Edinburgh Journal in 1879, but the first set of related texts was a dozen essays that appeared between 1881 and 1885 in the prestigious British Journal of Photography. In 1880 he began to write a column for this, the most important organ of British photography, under the title “Where to go with the Camera,” which because of its success he continued to write for years. The subject of the columns was possible excursions for amateur photographers, which at this time were an important clientele for photo magazines, along with professional photographers. The magazines published diverse articles with technical content that covered numerous new developments in the world of photography, ranging from camera types to lenses to how to develop negatives and prints, all of it reported in detail, but also essays about aesthetic questions and recommendations in regards to questions about composing images and about possible motifs. Photo magazines established technical and aesthetic norms and pulled together the debates found in the genuinely heterogeneous field of photography.