Yes. still. movement.

Abstract

Abstract How does one attempt to look at a photograph that is not attached to an institutional archive and for which there is no known historical data? How does one attempt to look when all you have is the photographic object? Focusing on a circa 1893 tintype of a couple of bicyclists taken at an indoor photography studio, this essay offers a set of reading practices that position photographic subjects as coproducers with the photographer and argues for stillness as a form of movement, rather than the suspension of movement. Conceived this way, this stillness illuminates the connections between movement indoors and outdoors and imagines nineteenth century US-based photographic subjects as diasporic cultural producers. The tintype is part of a larger set of what this essay calls bicycling photographs that were popular in the late nineteenth century, through which individuals and groups remixed two of the most popular technologies — bicycles and photography — to create new material objects that they could frame and keep in a dwelling place and move within and between dwelling places. Moreover, through the coproduction of new material objects, the duo, and many others, gave themselves other mobile lives.