Beyond the View: Reframing the Early Seaside Photographer

This chapter concentrates on a contemporaneous form of mid nineteenth-century photography, that of the (often) itinerant beach photographer. A worker held in such disregard to be referred to as a 'smudger' or 'bodger'. This chapter reviews the democratisation of the photographic medium and the photographers role and craft, finding synergy between formal innovation and the particular spatial dynamic of the shoreline.