Description:Image: Ruins of an Ancient Roman Aqueduct Supplying Carthage with Water” (1904)
Working with the Stone archive today is a kaleidoscopic journey through different nineteenth century cultures, customs, times and places. Stone’s lifelong passion for travel connected Birmingham’s industrial settings and the surrounding British landscape with distant lands, international cultures and hidden traditions. Between the 1860’s and early 1900’s Stone journeyed extensively throughout Europe, the Caribbean, South Africa, Mexico, South America, the Middle East and other locations.
For those who had the time and money, the late Victorian British empire offered the prospect of new adventures in distant lands. This period tellingly featured the growth of new ‘tourist’ industries; it also featured the rise of commercial photography, when a network of photographers and agents bought and sold images of distant locations. At the same time, scientific curiosity about different physical appearances and customs gave an underlying rationale for participating in travel and in recording differences in culture.
Stone ceaselessly tried to capture his own experiences and impressions of travel through an ever growing, ever changing collection of photographs and artefacts. The images in his collection constantly shift between different kinds of representation: from the scientific to the commercial, from the personal to the historical and from the local to the national and international.
For example, the photograph above appears to be a conventional ‘holiday’ photograph. Closely observed however, it reveals many layers of meaning. The Tunisian landscape with the ancient remains of a Roman viaduct, gives a melancholy impression. The absence of crowds intensifies the atmosphere of the picture and generates a strong sense of photography's power to record a vanishing past. Of course, Stone would have carefully framed the scene to create this impression, suggesting conflicts between nature and society, and the significance of human institutions.
So although Stone may be seen appearing simply to give a sense of scale to the ruins, other impressions start to emerge from his presence in the picture. While the scene looks dry, dusty and hot, Stone remains wearing the imposing black attire of the English gentleman traveller; and his bowler hat signals his national identity almost as clearly as if he were waving a flag. No matter how ‘authentic’ his photographs appear to be, we have to remember when researching the collection that Stone’s political cultural and religious views continually shape his responses to other cultures, whether or not he is present in the photograph.