Clover Adams's Dark Room: Photography and Writing, Exposure and Erasure

Abstract

Marian Hooper Adams, called Clover, was one of the few American women who were serious amateur photographers before the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889. Clover first learned her craft in 1872–73 while on her honeymoon with her husband, historian Henry Adams. Henry brought along a camera to document their journey up the Nile, and Clover took up his hobby. Henry, in the tradition of expeditionary photographers, took pictures of Egyptian monuments and landscapes, whereas Clover's only extant photograph from the honeymoon portrays interior realms: it shows Henry in the stateroom of theIsis, thedahabiehthat carried the couple up the Nile (Figure 1). In the image, Henry sits within a displaced parlor, casting his gaze down and directing us inward to some subjective space. But though Henry appears before the camera, he is not the subject of the image. Clover's own interior terrain, made invisible and inaccessible, is pictured here.