The Use of Photography in the Cases investigated by Sherlock Holmes

Having suffered a surfeit of the emotional outbursts of too many females recently, I endeavoured to ease myself back into equilibrium by re-reading all that I have concerning the enigmatic yet always fascinating Sherlock Holmes.

 

It has occurred to me, whilst immersing myself in the murky backwaters of Victorian London, that I can find very few references to photography in any on the Canon - in fact, the sole reference I can recall is in The Adventure Of The Lion's Mane, in the Volume 'The Case-Book Of Sherlock Holmes'.

 

Has anyone any further mentions which they can recall, please ?

Having suffered a surfeit of the emotional outbursts of too many females recently

Ahh, yes, the male sufferer. How absolutely awful it must be for you. I imagine immersing yourself in the backwaters of Victorian London will solve all your troubles with the contemporary females in your life.

 

Anyway, as to your Sherlock Holmes / Photography question, THIS might help.

Thank you for the link. Immersing myself in the backwaters of Victorian London may not solve my troubles, but at least it allows me to enjoy situations where logic, not (without criticism or prejudice) 'female intuition', is used to arrive at solutions. BTW, I have not (yet) tried The Seven-percent Solution !!

Tony, I'd like to invite you to join the 21st century and stop talking about women in terms of emotional outbursts and lack of reason (logic). Maybe if you read something, perhaps even by a woman of note, written after the turn of the 20th Century, you'd be better equipped to deal with whatever it is you're hinting at.

Sam, I have read, enjoyed and learned from much written by women, over many years. My references were solely to female friends of mine, and were in no way intended to malign women in general, for whom I have a great respect, despite my personal feelings concerning certain individuals. I am sorry if my comments were construed in any other fashion.

Some Grist for the Holmes mill that I came across recently. Link Real Sherlock Holmes revealed: Victorian investigator Jerome Caminada was master of disguise | Daily Mail Online Edited September 30, 2021 by Sandy Vongries

Some Grist for the Holmes mill that I came across recently. Link Real Sherlock Holmes revealed: Victorian investigator Jerome Caminada was master of disguise | Daily Mail Online

 

Thank you, Sandy. I understand also that some feel he was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell, whom Conan-Doyle knew.

Thank you, Sandy. I understand also that some feel he was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell, whom Conan-Doyle knew.

As a matter of fact, I believe ACD made that reference in his lifetime.

My references were solely to female friends of mine, and were in no way intended to malign women in general

Intended or not, they do malign women when presented in the abstract in a public forum as you did. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Roads elsewhere are paved by one's actions. How one talks is often a reflection of how one thinks and using such clichés in a public setting to describe even specific women you know is a malignancy, intended or not.

In The Second Stain, Holmes shows a photograph of Lady Hilda Trelawny Hope to a police officer. I think also he had a photograph of Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia. I can remember a photograph being referred to as "a cabinet" in one of the other stories. I can't recall any other references.

 

I read in a biography of Conan Doyle that he was a keen amateur photographer, although I've never seen any of his pictures. It seems strange that photography never really featured in the stories.

Edited September 30, 2021 by John Seaman

In The Second Stain, Holmes shows a photograph of Lady Hilda Trelawny Hope to a police officer. I think also he had a photograph of Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia. I can remember a photograph being referred to as "a cabinet" in one of the other stories. I can't recall any other references.

 

I read in a biography of Conan Doyle that he was a keen amateur photographer, although I've never seen any of his pictures. It seems strange that photography never really featured in the stories.

 

Thank you for those reminders, John. From what I recall, he was also involved in establishing the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairies photographs.

From what I recall, he was also involved in establishing the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairies photographs.

Yes, a strange aberration for an apparently intelligent and logical person. (FWIW, one of the surviving sisters later admitted that it was all a hoax. In fact it's surprising that anyone was taken in by a few obvious drawings on tissue paper, given that illustrating greetings cards was the occupation of one of the Cottingley Con Artists.)

 

Anyhow. Having read Sir Arthur's collected Sherlock Holmes stories years ago, the mention of photographs or photography doesn't come to the fore of my memory of those stories. Nor in those of his non-Sherlock collected short stories that I've recently been working my way through.

 

My, entirely personal, view is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wished his stories to be as timeless as possible, and set in a time before his own - he died in 1930. A lot of his short stories have a military flavour and refer to Boar war veterans, the Indian Mutiny and the like. Besides, the mid-to-late Victorian era was redolent of macabre events, and a time of great change - simply begging for a character like Sherlock Holmes.

 

WRT the mention of photographs. Photography in 1887 (the first publication of Sherlock Holmes) had been around for nearly 50 years, and so wasn't remarkable enough to get any special mention. However, it would still have been the preserve of professionals, and well off gentlemen and lady enthusiasts - viz one of Alec Guinness's hapless characters in 'Kind Hearts and Coronets'. And newspapers were still commonly illustrated with engravings at that time. So the world wouldn't have been littered with photographs.

 

Maybe Conan Doyle considered photographs too much of a rarity to his impoverished readers to give them much prominence. Or too commonplace. Who knows?

 

Does the mention of photographs or photography still feature heavily in fictional literature? I have no idea what the statistics are, nor little interest in knowing to be honest.

Holmes seems oddly ambivalent in his attitude to forensic science. He was very much into chemical analysis, but not (for example) into fingerprints. If I recall correctly, only one of the stories, The Norwood Builder, features fingerprints (actually a thumbprint). Lestrade points it out to Holmes, telling him how they are unique, but Holmes replies in a rather dismissive fashion.

 

The stories do seem rooted in late 1800's technology, with transport via horse drawn cabs and communication by notes and personal columns. In some later and weaker stories he does use motor cars and the telephone.

 

One detective story in which photography has an important role is the Inspector Morse book The Way Through the Woods where a photograph of a curved building is first thought to have been caused by distortion in the camera. There was also a Columbo episode.

It says here that he wrote for the BJP thirteen times. The site wants you to allow all kinds of script to run before it displays the text, mind:

 

Arthur Conan Doyle, the Photographer. - 1854 Photography

 

People who like his style might like to read his account of photographing cormorants on the Isle of May. I find it a bit long-winded and jolly-good-chaps.

Thanks, all, for your responses. I must admit my view is similar to that of @John Seaman regarding the forensic application of photography, but then again, Holmes' forte was in using his skills to formulate and test his hypotheses and theories. I have no knowledge of when any GB police force began to use photography to record evidence, or even to circulate images of 'felons' they wished to trace, but on several occasions Holmes was very scathing of the fact that potential evidence had been obliterated by the trampling of the local constabulary, which might have been recorded and preserved photographically.

"Ahh, yes, the male sufferer. How absolutely awful it must be for you. I imagine immersing yourself in the backwaters of Victorian London will solve all your troubles with the contemporary females in your life"

 

Not that Sam. aka Freda G would understand relationships between a man and a woman. His proudly Gay, nothing wrong with that, it is a good thing to be proud of.

 

I just have to to ask what the monkeys, when did he become an expert on non gay relationships:

 

It is a mystery.

Edited October 2, 2021 by Allen Herbert

 

Insight. The man himself.

I am sorry if my comments were construed in any other fashion.

You owe nobody an apology.

 

Does the mention of photographs or photography still feature heavily in fictional literature? I have no idea what the statistics are, nor little interest in knowing to be honest.

A damned good question. I recall a novel by Dick Francis in which the protagonist was a press photographer, and the clues were all photography related. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo had a major plot point centred around a photograph. One of the Poirot stories also featured photography as a minor plot point. Hastings got himself a Leica. That was the screen adaptation, and I'm not sure if the details are shared in the novel.

 

Of course there is the short story, Blow-Up, which I highly recommend. You can find a PDF online. It is more interesting to me than any of the few Holmes stories I have read. Recall that the Ripper murders happened while Doyle was writing Holmes stories - some of the victims were photographed. But, newspapers did not yet have the ability to reproduce them, I don't think.

 

Holmes seems oddly ambivalent in his attitude to forensic science.

Odd. Because, IIRC, over in France, they pioneered it, or at least some of it. Maybe my timeline is off though.

over in France, they pioneered it

 

The Paris police official Bertillon pioneered the taking of various bodily measurements to enable the identification of persons (Bertillonage). Before photography and fingerprinting (and eventually DNA profiling), establishing the identity of persons of concern was very difficult. From the very early days photographs were taken for identification purposes, however Bertillon was credited with standardising the familiar "mugshot" so familiar today. According to Wikipedia, "Bertillon is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which one of Holmes' clients refers to Holmes as the "second highest expert in Europe" after Bertillon. Also, in The Naval Treaty, speaking of the Bertillon system of measurements, "[Holmes] ... expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant".

 

This discussion is about the role of photography in the Sherlock Holmes stories, however it's important to remember that he had many other strings to his bow. As well as being a photographer, Conan Doyle was primarily a practising medical doctor. He was also an all round sportsman, having played in goal for Portsmouth and having bowled out the formidable cricketer Dr. W. G. Grace. He was also an amateur boxer and wrote boxing stories. All of Conan Doyle's facets appear in different degrees in the stories Of course he preferred his historical novels to the Holmes stories and tried to kill the character off, only to bring him back by popular demand.

... I have no knowledge of when any GB police force began to use photography to record evidence, or even to circulate images of 'felons' they wished to trace, ...

 

An answer to not quite the same question. I found this when googling after I bought an Ensign Reflex which came with an eleven-inch Ross Telecentric. The main story is that Scotland Yard bought the same lens in 1913, for photographing women's suffrage activists (apparently while they were in prison yards, not on the street or in the commission of crimes); but it also says that prisons (I imagine it means British ones) were told to photograph inmates routinely in 1871.

 

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Spy pictures of suffragettes revealed

You owe nobody an apology.

 

 

A damned good question. I recall a novel by Dick Francis in which the protagonist was a press photographer, and the clues were all photography related. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo had a major plot point centred around a photograph. One of the Poirot stories also featured photography as a minor plot point. Hastings got himself a Leica. That was the screen adaptation, and I'm not sure if the details are shared in the novel.

 

Of course there is the short story, Blow-Up, which I highly recommend. You can find a PDF online. It is more interesting to me than any of the few Holmes stories I have read. Recall that the Ripper murders happened while Doyle was writing Holmes stories - some of the victims were photographed. But, newspapers did not yet have the ability to reproduce them, I don't think.

 

 

Odd. Because, IIRC, over in France, they pioneered it, or at least some of it. Maybe my timeline is off though.

While not literature but rather a TV series, Kolchak's The Night Stalker, a science fiction anthology about people getting killed by strange creatures and supernatural circumstances. The protagonist is an oddball and funny reporter/detective who's always trying to shoot pictures of the "killer" to publish it in the newspaper he works for and get a scoop. Of course, the policeman, a Lestrad equivalent, is always forcing him to pull the film out of his camera to expose it making it useless.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071003/

I am sorry I didn't get into this earlier, but I am a great Sherlock fan.

 

Lots of movie mysteries involve cameras and lenses -- for example, the Exakta in Hitchcock's Rear Window:

 

also see Cameras in Movies part n+3: Rear Window

 

Thelma Ritter, the nurse, tells Stewart

The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house...They got no windows in the work house.

Edited October 4, 2021 by JDMvW

You owe nobody an apology.

 

 

A damned good question. I recall a novel by Dick Francis in which the protagonist was a press photographer, and the clues were all photography related. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo had a major plot point centred around a photograph. One of the Poirot stories also featured photography as a minor plot point. Hastings got himself a Leica. That was the screen adaptation, and I'm not sure if the details are shared in the novel.

 

Of course there is the short story, Blow-Up, which I highly recommend. You can find a PDF online. It is more interesting to me than any of the few Holmes stories I have read. Recall that the Ripper murders happened while Doyle was writing Holmes stories - some of the victims were photographed. But, newspapers did not yet have the ability to reproduce them, I don't think.

 

 

Odd. Because, IIRC, over in France, they pioneered it, or at least some of it. Maybe my timeline is off though.

The only fictional book I've ever read that was entirely photo-centric is a comedy fictional autobiography called "The Shy Photographer". As I recall it abounded with schoolboy humour, but I was only just out of school myself when I read it.

 

I doubt if the author invented the joke, but it was quoted in the book: Friend to Photographer - 'What did you give that poor old beggar back there?' Photographer - 'One hundred and twenty-fifth at F-8'.

 

Oh how I laughed.

Besides mentions of photographs (as in A Scandal in Bohemia), I recall one reference to photography:

 

"Oh, he has his faults, too," said Mr. Wilson. "Never was such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit into its hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault, but on the whole he's a good worker. There's no vice in him."

 

The Red-Headed League

 

Published in 1891, about 10 years after roll film was invented.

Lord Peter Wimsey's gentleman's-gentleman Bunter is said to be a skilled photographer. He photographs footprints, fingerprints, etc. at crime scenes, and does his own developing. Those stories were written much later, between 1923 and 1939, and are set about the same time (Bunter was Wimsey's batman during the first War, and Wimsey suffers from traumatic flashbacks in at least one of the stories).