Posing for Posterity: Photographic Portraiture and the Invention of the Time Capsule, 1876–89

Abstract

In response to scholars’ recent preoccupation with the circulation of photographs, this article advocates greater attention to instances in which they have been withdrawn from circulation or reserved for future use. The focus here is on the most extreme of these closed collections, namely the time capsule, which was conceived in Philadelphia in 1876. The article shows how photography played a crucial role in the earliest time capsules – not just as their principal content, but also as a medium associated with fantasies of time travel, conceptions of posterity, and practices of storage. It then recovers the complex and contradictory political meanings of these photographic collections, thereby challenging the rhetoric of altruism and neutrality that has accompanied so many efforts to preserve photographs for future viewers and historians.