Nineteenth-century Photography Research Articles

Disappearance of the face: From early photography to facial recognition systems

In this article I analyse the hidden genealogical link between portrait photography, used for criminological and psychiatric purposes, and contemporary systems of biometric identification of the human face. The aim is to highlight the shift between the emphasis on the importance of the human ‘expert eye’ in recognizing the face when talking about nineteenth-century photography and the use of computer technology that produces and reads digital facial images. In both cases, however, these are modes and variants of reducing and flattening the human face; the face itself disappears under the onslaught of technologies of vision and mediation, becoming a mere data set. Special attention is devoted to the pose, the frontal view, which is the technological a priori of the empirical possibility of recognition, articulated through the history of visualization of the face from early portrait photography to facial recognition systems. Consequently, what we call the ‘face’ is a simulacra of individual the face presented to the apparatus: the ‘real’ face is transposed upon multiple technological layers (camera – plates – photographic surface), losing its characteristic features to be re-written according to specific techniques of measurement.

The Black Woman in Caribbean Photography: Intersectional Narratives between Race and Gender

This article examines the evolution of the representation of Black women in the Caribbean photographic universe, establishing two significant moments: the foundation of the figure of the “Black woman” as a sign in nineteenth-century photography and the shift in paradigm in the work of contemporary Caribbean artists, with an emphasis on the photographic works of Renée Cox, from Jamaica, and María Magdalena Campos and Susana Pilar Delahante, both from Cuba. Some arguments from decolonial feminism, in the voice of María Lugones, are taken as theoretical sources, with an emphasis on the intersectionality between race and gender as an interpretative key to assess the evolution of the sign “Black woman” in Caribbean photography.

Visualizing Freedom

This essay is the first study of the formerly enslaved woman Ellen Craft’s nineteenth-century photograph album and its contents, and the first study linking Craft’s album to one owned by another nineteenth-century African American woman, Arabella Chapman. Examining Craft’s album and its connections offers an opportunity to consider how African American women employed domestic photograph albums to record their experience of freedom. Past scholarship on photographs of famous formerly enslaved men and women has emphasized how these “self-made” individuals used photography to assert their autonomy in freedom. And, Craft herself participated in this convention when posing for her famous portrait disguised as the White man “William Johnson,” whose identity she passed through in order to obtain her freedom. Yet, this scholarship has not yet engaged the issue of family in photographs of the famous formerly enslaved. My study introduces Craft’s album as visualizing freedom differently through the linkage of photographs of family and friends across pages and under an album’s tight bindings. The book joins photographs together as material representations of Black familial and community bonds that had faced ever-present threats of violation and rupture under slavery. It visualizes freedom not so much in autonomous identity, but via cultivated connections between family and friends in respectable domestic space. Today, the mnemonic notations, fingerprints and smudges on its pages from the hands of four generations of female descendants after Craft reveal the album’s long legacy of preserving affirmative, embodied memories of attachment amongst African American women.

FEELING POST-MORTEM PHOTOGRAPHY: ETSY SELLERS’ MOURNING LISTINGS

Etsy sellers employ such terms as ‘touching’ to describe vintage post-mortem and mourning photographs. In this article, I provide an analysis of the ways sellers produce feelings and encourage buyers to connect with earlier sentiments around mourning. Sellers digitally reproduce antiquarian photographs and contemporary props, incorporate framing information, and suggest how items physically and emotionally feel. I argue that sellers use these practices to provide viewers with emotional experiences of mourning and what has been described as ‘feeling photography.’ As Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu note in their feminist and queer anthology on the subject, feeling photography stimulates dismay and sympathy when seeing violent images and mourning when viewing portraits of deceased intimates. As part of these processes, Etsy sellers reference textured objects to connect buyers to items and feelings. I thus cite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s and other scholars’ considerations of textures and feelings, Roland Barthes’s proposal for how death and mourning are experienced through photography, and analyses of nineteenth-century photographs. My feminist and queer reading demonstrates how sellers support normative expectations about the heightened mourning of children, displace contemporary inequities by focusing on earlier losses, and (often unintentionally) render such less traditional identities as the queer child.

Mimicry and Misrecognition: Re-dressing the Colonial Relation in Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Photographic Transformations

Abstract Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s work “re-dresses” the legacies of nineteenth-century modes of imaging “Indians,” that is, both Native Americans and South Asian Americans. She honours the self-fashioning buried in nineteenth-century photographs of “native types” by restaging photographs with her own body, re-dressed in a construction of what an “Indian from India” is expected to be, all the while subtly pushing back at those expectations. For Matthew, photographs emerge as active participants in re-dressing and redressing the colonial and diasporic relation by demonstrating the ways in which Brown bodies continue to be forced into particular kinds of self-presentation; enacting the exhausting demand to assert oneself as Indian, American, human, legitimate, and belonging, and presenting these struggles as intimately linked to nineteenth-century legacies of representations of colonized, Brown bodies.

Chemical affinities: photography, extraction, and industrial heritage in nineteenth-century northern England

ABSTRACT “Chemical Affinities” explores how chemistry and visual culture were entwined in the long nineteenth century, focusing here on the role of photography as both a material cause of pollution and the aesthetic means to visualize the pollution that it caused. Chemical layering was a common dimension of all nineteenth-century photography and photographic printing, making photography a by-product of the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, no less than fertilizer and paper. Drawing on hundreds of visual representations (drawings, engravings, photographs, and graphs), most of them located in local, scientific, and business archives in northern England, my research approaches photography as a material, economic, and social process: an extractive resource that raises questions about the global future alongside recording the tangible present and arrested moments of the past. Here, I examine the nineteenth-century industry in Widnes, Cheshire, as a particularly representative and vexed site of photography’s chemical effects on land and people, as well as its instrumentation in documenting and recording – and in so doing promising to expose and moderate – those effects. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of photographic archives and critical industrial heritage studies for historical understanding of nineteenth-century chemical industry and its legacies.

“Radical Empathy” in City of Incurable Women: A Conversation with Laura Larson

“Radical Empathy” in City of Incurable WomenA Conversation with Laura Larson Renee H. Shea (bio) In City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022), Laura Larson continues her study of nineteenth-century photography, this time through responses to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, founded in 1656. She focuses on the late 1800s when Jean-Martin Charcot, then director of the hospital, photographed women diagnosed with hysteria. In her book of visual and written texts, Larson explores the depiction of four patients in the hospital (Blanche, Genevieve, Augustine, and Jane) as she reimagines them through the perspective of a contemporary political climate that seeks to control women’s bodies—and resistance to that climate. “I want a liquid chronicle of La Salpêtrière,” she writes, “a volatile flow of chemistry detonating then and now.” Her reflections interrogate the limitations and possibilities of photography as objective documentation, memory, and witness. Click for larger view View full resolution LAURA LARSON, AUGUSTINE’S ESCAPE, DIGITAL COLOR PHOTOGRAPH, 2019 Larson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including in the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Her first book, Hidden Mother (2017), was shortlisted by Aperture/Paris Photo for the Best First Photobook Award. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Rutgers University. Professor emerita at Ohio University, Larson is currently visiting faculty with the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in visual arts. Renee Shea: City of Incurable Women includes archival photographs from the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, published between 1876 and 1880 as a medical reference book, interwoven with writings from Charcot, other historical texts, your own photographs, and your lyrical written responses. How did this project begin and evolve? Laura Larson: The book started at a very basic level for me of looking at the photographs produced at Salpêtrière under the directorship of Charcot. The arc of my work for almost twenty years has been an engagement with nineteenth-century vernacular photographic forms. I was thinking about how I can look back at these different histories and make work in dialogue with it, not in a fetishistic or nostalgic way, but an investigation inspired by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida of the essential character of the medium, specifically from a feminist perspective. There’s incredible scholarship [End Page 45] and creative work on these photographs, but I was interested in how to respond to them in the present. I was making my photographs during the Trump administration, when language about women being out of control or in need of control was commonplace. I was trying to think through this notion of hysteria and hysterical women in relationship to this history. I wasn’t able to do archival research at Salpêtrière, but I went to Paris twice: to spend time on the grounds of the hospital, to think of how these women were moving in those spaces, and to visit other psychiatric institutions. The photographs I made in Paris are a way to bring these histories into the present. The production of my own work began in earnest in 2017. With the pandemic, things changed—I couldn’t work with groups of people in the studio, so there was an artificially imposed stopping point when I had to evaluate where I was and see if I had the material I needed to put the book together. This was when I started writing. I wrote almost all of those texts within two months, which is unusual for me since I’m a very slow writer! Initially, the project began as a collaboration with writer Maud Casey, responding to the photographs and case histories and exchanging our work for further response. Our concerns took us in different directions. Maud published her stories with Bellevue Press this year. I wanted to build a different context—a hybrid work—that looped the archival, the contemporary, and my presence as an interlocutor of this history. Shea: I’m fascinated by what seems to be your initial entry into this project: that the photography of the era...

Hudgins, Nicole. The Gender of Photography: How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography

Hudgins, Nicole. The Gender of Photography: How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

The photographic representation of disability in the territory of Latvia in the second half of the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT This article focuses on approaches to the representation of disability in nineteenth-century photography and the institutionalized construction of the understanding of disability in the photograph album titled Idioten-Anstalt von Fr. Platz: Riga d. 9. Juli 1862 published in 1862 in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). The aim of this article is to analyze to what extent the album was an instrument of authority, reflected a certain understanding of power, and became a tool for helping to construct an understanding of disability. The representation reveals the categorization and concepts of disability of the period and presents the results and consequences of institutional actions and the importance of the provision of special education and social care, as well as the formation of an inclusive society.

At the Cutting Edge of Halftone Printing: William Augustus Leggo and George Edward Desbarats

In Canada, halftone photographic images began to feature regularly in the visual landscape of the news in late 1869, almost three decades earlier than anywhere else. In the technologically obsessed world of nineteenth-century photography, that is a huge amount of time by which to lead on a meaningful techno-cultural advance. Behind this early development were William Augustus Leggo (1830–1915) and George Edward Desbarats (1838–1893) and their initial media ventures: the Canadian Illustrated News and its French-language counterpart, L’Opinion publique. Their ground-breaking work to incorporate photographs into the news, and the scant acknowledgment it has received, is the focus of the present article.

Hudging, Nicole [2020]. The Gender of Photography: How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography

Recensión del libro:
 Hudgins, Nicole [2020]. The Gender of Photography: How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Londres: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Fragments and fragmentary vision in nineteenth-century architectural photographs

The frequent absence of views of buildings as unified, whole objects in nineteenth-century French architectural photography is striking, especially in publications for a professional audience. Instead, photographic views of contemporary architecture often focused upon two fragmentary forms: the ornamental detail (commonly represented through the intermediary of a plaster cast) and the spatial view, depicting an isolated “crop” extracted from a building. The former continues an archaeological tradition, linking historic restoration and historicist production through an indexical chain from cast to photograph. Images such as those in Édouard Baldus’s Palais du Louvre (1869–75), Charles Garnier’s Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris (1875–81), and Anatole de Baudot’s Sculpture française (1884) freeze the subjective labor involved in ornamental design, disseminating it alternately for commercial reproduction or as motifs to inspire a living decorative tradition. Around 1870 another form of photographic fragmentation took hold, this time willfully dissolving the unity of the architectural object to focus upon moments of heightened visual interest. Motivated by a rising interest in spatiality, these “photo-scopic” images in the Gazette des architectes, Revue générale, Félix Narjoux’s Monuments élevés (1880–83), and other publications instantiate a dynamic conception of architecture, one now open to subjective and atmospheric perception. While the ornamental fragment was often intended for recombination in future eclectic tableaux, the later morceaux demonstrate a new, modern form of vision, one that would greatly influence architecture in the twentieth century.

As múltiplas faces de Valério Vieira

RESUMO Este artigo propõe uma análise da obra de Valério Vieira (1862-1941) dividida em cinco partes. Na primeira parte, resgata os processos criativos envolvidos na concepção de Os trinta Valérios (c. 1900) e do Segundo panorama de São Paulo (1922), enquadrando as duas obras em seus contextos históricos. A análise permite delinear o perfil de um autor mais vinculado a práticas da fotografia oitocentista do que alinhadas a propostas do modernismo, sem deixar de sublinhar sua originalidade. Nas quatro partes seguintes, aborda as relações estabelecidas entre a obra de Valério Vieira e outros campos da arte: cinema, teatro e música, em diálogos reais ou imaginários travados com artistas como Georges Meliès, Leopoldo Fregoli, Almirante e Pixinguinha.

White Shoals, White Shrouds: Reflections on the Ethics of Looking at Captive Bodies

In the winter of 2018, I presented a conference paper on a set of nineteenth-century photographs from the national archive of the French colonies. The series, titled “Types Comoriens” (Comorian types), comprises seven photographs commissioned by the French École Coloniale between 1890 and 1896. The École Coloniale was a French colonial school created in 1889, and dedicated to the recruitment and training of French colonial administrators. The school was instrumental to both the institutionalization of colonial knowledge and the development of French higher education. The images are full-length portraits of seven young Comorian natives, naked, standing in front of a white background. My paper looked at the beaded strings that the indigenous islanders wore around their waists, which I traced back to an East African puberty ritual called unyago. Subsumed in the minutiae of my anthropological analysis, I did not register the violence that had been folded into the photographic frame. Nor did I realize that I, myself, was reenacting the voyeuristic gaze of the colonial photographer by re-producing these images in my conference presentation. For the purposes of my presentation, I cropped the subjects’ naked bodies but decided to show their faces. Even then, this timid gesture seemed insufficient, uncomfortably incomplete.

Carlos Relvas’s Stereoscopic Photography: The Digital Reunion of Negatives and Prints

European stereoscopic photography owes a significant part of its cultural specificity to amateur photographers who resorted to the wet collodion process to document nature with reduced exposure times and to perfect their photographic art with crisper and more detailed images. The Portuguese Carlos Relvas (1838–94) was one of these renowned collodion practitioners. Until recently, most of his stereoscopic collections remained undigitised and unstudied, and the contribution of stereoscopy to the launch of his international career was little known. The building of an online catalogue raisonné dedicated to Relvas’s stereoscopic photography has been an opportunity to undertake a combined study of his stereoscopic negatives and prints, making it possible to retrieve new information about the extent, importance and evolution of his stereoscopic work. While designed to make these collections digitally available, the catalogue offers a new perspective on the specific value of stereoscopic negatives and cross-referenced ‘image families’ for a new understanding of photographic practice. By re-examining the opportunities offered by digital collections, this article sheds light on their potential to remodel the memory and historic value of a nineteenth-century photographer and, in particular, to properly showcase stereoscopic photography.

Gathering ideas for an Irish garden: Lord and Lady Berehaven’s Italian tour of 1842–1843

A nineteenth-century photograph of the south front of Bantry House in County Cork, Ireland, evocatively captures the adjacent garden (Figure 1). It features a fishpond, an iron circle, a labyrinthi...

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Nineteenth century glass manufacture and its effect on photographic glass stability

The Industrial Revolution led to mass production of many materials that naturally found their way into nineteenth century cultural heritage. One such material is flat glass, the manufacture of which underwent a succession of innovations that influenced the burgeoning field of photography. Results of historical research illustrate how changes in the glass industry contributed to the diversity of glass available to nineteenth century photographers either as cover glass in enclosures or as substrates. This information provides important context for limited surveys of nineteenth century photographic glass in two historical society collections using only microscopy and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Survey results, plus microscopy, XRF, and OCT and analysis of historical and artificially aged model glass, provide new evidence about instability in glass in historical collections of photography, and underscore the potential for any type of nineteenth century glass to undergo progressive deterioration involving attack on the silicate network in adverse microclimates. Results have implications for both prioritisation of collection needs and conservation practices.

Fugitive stones: the temple of Athena Nike, Athens in nineteenth-century photographs

What happens when early cameras are turned to 5th century BCE monuments and sculptures on the Acropolis of Athens? In what ways might the fragile surface of a daguerreotype, a salted paper print or an albumen print be said to have ‘captured’ a pentelic marble fragment? These questions were thrown into bold relief following the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839 when travellers to Greece in search of sites of archaeological interest began to take cameras with them. With rapid developments in photographic technology, photographs joined landmark texts and a body of drawings, paintings, engravings, plaster casts to alter established relationships with antiquities. Highly emotive material objects, photographs spoke a new language of loss and fragmentation; through the relative ease of their reproducibility photographs newly facilitated memory and forms of aesthetic resurrection. My essay charts nineteenth-century photographs of fragments of relief sculptures of Nikai from the exterior face of the parapet of the Ionic Temple of Athena Nike. Excavation and rebuilding of the Temple during 1835 and 1836 drew the eye of many travellers to the Acropolis. Resurrection of the classical temple shortly preceded the new technology of photography and, in representing a monument described by Wheler and Spon among others, photographs rehabilitated ‘lost’ stones. Exploring, alongside travel narratives, newly fugitive representations of winged and apterous Nikai, I consider what Walter Benjamin termed the collector’s relationship to ‘the scene, the stage’ of the ‘fate’ of a material object.