The Forth Bridge’s Human Cantilever: Engineering, Photography and Representation

During the Victorian Age, when the results of ambitious engineering radically transformed the principles of construction, photography proved to be a faithful and indispensable witness. This is plainly seen in the magnificent enterprise to build the railway bridge over the Forth River, accurately captured by the lens of the photographer and engineer Evelyn George Carey, whose excellent work to record those events is without equal. His almost daily annotations were free from symbolic meaning and monumental tendencies: it was the bridge itself that held the most important role. In the form of an experiment it was decided to illustrate the principle of the cantilever at the Royal Institution in 1887. It was during that particular circumstance that Carey produced the famous photographic image of the Human Cantilever. Carey presents to the observer an encyclopaedic array of representations and helps to truly visualise engineering.