Pictures of professionalism and pride: Portraits of ship crews,circa 1870–1910

Abstract

Photographic portraits of merchant ship crews became a popular phenomenon in western coastal communities in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This article examines how the working collectives on ships in the northern European merchant fleet expressed their professional identities and maritime culture in photographs produced by commercial harbour photographers circa 1870–1910. It explores recurrent visual conventions and themes, as well as the original contexts of use and later circulation of the portraits. The study argues that the reason for their popularity was that ordinary crew members could, for the first time, articulate their professional status in new projections of seamanship, which also resonated with a long-established European maritime image world.