Benjamin Stone and Education

Description:Image: Stone Collection of Newspaper Cuttings Vol 1 (1860-82)

Stone was initially a collector of commercial photographic prints, rather than a photographer himself. From around 1860, he started gathering prints into catalogues and albums with titles such as 'Local People of Note' or 'Types of European and American Women' or the 'Types and Races of Mankind'. However, Stone gradually felt that these commercial images did not do enough to capture the endless rich details of people’s customs, beliefs, landscapes, religions and appearances that he saw on his travels:

“After about 20 years of collecting, during which I gathered together interesting pictures from all parts of the world, I found I could not buy exactly what I wanted, so, after making a careful study of photography…I started to make my own pictures”.

Learning the craft of photography, Stone became more personally empowered to document different histories and traditions before they were lost to the rapid developments of the highly industrialised world. Stone now photographed everything from English churches to Japanese fishermen. What may have started for Stone as a Victorian past time, grew into a serious anthropological study of travel, folklore, anthropology, empire, local histories and international landscapes. Whilst on his travels, Stone also became an active collector of cultural objects and artefacts as well as photographs. Many of these artefacts are now housed in national museums and galleries across the country.

During this evolving process Stone would also engage philanthropically and politically with Birmingham. Stone was a M.P for Birmingham East from 1895 to 1910. The image above, however, advertises a lecture entitled “The Pleasures and Advantages of Travel” to be delivered to St. Matthew’s “Mutual Improvement Society”. This piece of evidence helps us to understand the way he (and other Victorians like him) saw the bond between travel and photography: both offered ‘pleasure’, with the added advantage of ‘learning’. Stone’s pursuit of photography as an educational tool allowed him to illustrate lectures that linked Birmingham to the rest of the world. In one sense, Stone was one of Birmingham’s first ‘multicultural’ educators- although we would have great difficulty in accepting some of his ideas about race and culture today.