Byline pictures might not figure large in the lives of Irish Times readers. Readers might not be even sure what the term means - they're those postage-stamp likenesses of journalists beside their reports. But believe me, byline pics mean a lot to the people they represent. Badly cropped, for example, and the world gets to know you as a woman without a forehead. Smiling cheerily atop a tragic report, and some sub-editor is in trouble.
These pictures are so important to newspaper correspondents because they give a reality to their written identity, a visual fix. It is partly an ego thing, of course, but it is also to do with the question of recording yourself in your community, leaving an imprint.
The desire to leave a visual record, however brilliant one's creations, is ancient, dating back to the work of the first-known illustrative biographer, Marcus Terrentius Varro. Working around 80 BC, he "compiled a compendium of 700 painted portraits of celebrated Romans", as Roger Hargreaves writes in this most unusual coffee-table book. Hargreaves is education officer at the National Portrait Gallery, a place to which I return as if on the end of a bungee every time I visit London. With sociologist Peter Hamilton, he has written an analysis of the uses to which portrait photography was put in the first 60 years it was available after photography was officially "announced" in 1839. One of their main points is summed up in the title of the book: it was the beautiful and the damned who were the favourite subjects of the early lenses, on the one hand because of the cost and status of having a photographic portrait, on the other because of scientific efforts to prove that certain facial and bodily characteristics indicated a propensity to criminal activity.
This led eerily to bolster early proponents of eugenics, such as Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who was also "fascinated by questions of heredity and the human type". In one of the lighter moments in the serious and sober prose, an account is given of Galton's notorious obsession with a lady known as the "Hottentot Venus", whom he spotted while on scientific expedition in Africa. Galton was most impressed with the lady's dimensions, but as it was the 1850s felt the only way he could decently ascertain her vital statistics was by recording them with his sextant while she stood at some distance under a tree.
It is this vein of lunacy running through the earnest efforts to harness photography, along with other scientific developments of the Victorian era, which make the story so intriguing. One of the most fetching illustrations is a print of the family of Lytton Strachey, the author of Eminent Victorians, lined up kneeling in profile for a family photograph. They look very silly. Quaint but spine-chilling were the uses to which the Parisian police enthusiastically put the new techno-science in its infancy. Another series of pictures in the book (all black and white, naturally) is of pairs of victim and perpetrator. The fact that the victims were dead did little to dissuade the bold gendarmes of the desirability of pairing their likenesses with their murderers. One unfortunate jeweller, apparently decapitated by a rogue policeman, looks no more troubled than if someone had just asked him the quickest way to Montparnasse.
The authors make the point that European royalty such as Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert realised early the value of photographs of themselves as good honest burghers, rather than resplendent in fur and jewels. They thus showed themselves to be truly of the people - although in reality the people could get nowhere near them. In this can be detected the beginning of the trend which perhaps reached its nadir with the notorious royal It's a Knockout television programme, and the hammy attempts to get on side with one's subjects which only really rolled back with the death of Princess Diana.
Ordinary people were not excluded from photography, particularly as the more malleable collodion process, which lent itself to reproduction better than the delicate daguerreotype (the method proclaimed by the French government in 1839), became more widespread. In the 1860s the craze for miniature photographic portraits known as cartes de visite swept Britain, Europe and the US. Thus it was that when an obscure performer named John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln dead in 1865, the local photographic studio found Booth's likeness in its drawer marked "Actors".
In such a singular and well-presented book, it is a pity that more care was not taken with editing - "dignitries", "supremicist", and of course the missing comma after a subsidiary phrase all standing out. Also, in a book so dependent on visual references, photographs could have been better matched to appear with the relevant text. However, the concept is original - and leading off with the LA police mugshots of Hugh Grant and Divine Brown was inspired.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist
An exhibition based on The Beautiful and the Damned is running at the National Portrait Gallery in London until October 7th