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PHOTOGRAPHY

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Photography was the most popular cultural phenomenon in nineteenth-century America. Americans had an exuberant love affair with the photograph, and its popularity surpassed that of all print media by the Civil War. The advertiser Frederick R. Barnard is famous for saying that "One picture is worth ten thousand words" (Printers' Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114). But he was only giving authorship to a quip that many Americans were already repeating in 1839, when photography was invented.

While the Frenchman Louis Daguerre (1789–1851) is credited with inventing photography, it was in America that the medium gained its greatest popularity (followed by France, the two countries with the largest middle-class populations and democratic ideologies). By 1850 a photographer was available for hire in every county in every state and territory to satisfy the insatiable demand. In Manhattan there was a daguerreian studio on every street corner, where customers could go to have their portraits taken. The desire for photographs penetrated all regions of the country. And it was a profession that was easy to enter. Much like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Holgrave, the fictional daguerreotypist from The House of the Seven Gables (1851), early photographers came to their trade from other professions and typically abandoned it after a few years. Daguerreotypists needed no background in art, and they could learn the procedure by reading "howto" pamphlets such as Francois Fauvel-Gouraud's Description of the Daguerrotype Process (1840), the first published instructions on the daguerreotype written in the United States. With comparatively modest investment, an enterprising man or woman could buy a camera and supplies, rent a room with a skylight or travel in a covered wagon, and open for business. A successful daguerreotypist made as much money as highly skilled artisans, and given the extremely short apprenticeship period of a few weeks, one could painlessly leave the profession for the next new thing.

The demand for photographs stemmed from a number of factors. It corresponded with the rise of the middle classes (especially in America and France), who wanted portraits of themselves but could not afford expensive paintings. By 1850, after improvements in lenses and reduction of exposure times, every American in possession of pocket change could have his or her portrait taken—and over 90 percent of all photographs were portraits. Portraits tapped into the desire for self-transformation among the emerging middle classes. As Americans rose and fell in social status, they wanted visible and tangible records of themselves at fixed intervals: markers for remembering the past and foretelling the future. In an important sense, Americans created pictures of themselves and then sought to become those pictures.

Photography also offered a way to replace an obsolete way of life with an alternate vision of America. The emergence and popularity of photography coincided with chronic social change and a radical transformation of the cultural landscape. Railroads and steamboats had transplanted enormous numbers of people to distant places and had irrevocably changed the faces of cities and towns. A widespread depression began with the panic of 1837, continued almost unheeded into the mid-1840s, and was followed by another "hidden" depression. The result was a further erosion of old communities and ways of life. In the face of such dis-integration, photography, much like print culture, offered a way to recapture lost, "real" communities by imagining new ones. It helped people answer the question "Who am I?" on a national scale.

The daguerreotype was like print culture in another way as well: it "read" like a book. The daguerreotype image was contained inside a leather case with a velvet backing; one opened the case like a book and therein discovered a new world and another reality. It was thus no coincidence that books were the most common prop in daguerreotype portraiture, and many portraits feature the sitters reading, as though drawn into another world. Like the many histories of the new nation—whether in the form of fiction or nonfiction—daguerreotypes provided Americans with new visions of themselves and of their country.

By the end of the 1850s, cartes de visite, or visiting cards, had replaced daguerreotypes in popularity and represented the precursor to the modern walletsize snapshot. Unlike daguerreotypes, which were oneof-a-kind, "precious" metal objects, cartes de visite were infinitely reproducible prints on paper. They were distributed as calling cards, purchased as souvenirs, and could be produced en masse quite cheaply. Hundreds of thousands of copies of portraits of famous men and women could be made in short order. The night before Abraham Lincoln's famous Cooper Union address of 27 February 1860, which helped put him in the White House, Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896) photographed him and sold over one hundred thousand carte de visite copies. Following the attack on Fort Sumter, a thousand carte de visite copies were sold each day of the Union commander Major Robert Anderson. Through this wet-plate collodion process, Americans collected portraits of themselves and their families and friends as well as of the rich and famous and housed them in photo albums in their parlors. It was a way to identify themselves with famous people they had never met and to become a visible part of a larger collective identity created by portraits.

It was not until George Eastman's (1854–1932) Kodak camera, which allowed Americans to take their own snapshots, that the snapshot finally replaced cartes de visite in popularity. First introduced in 1888, the camera sold for $25 and came with a roll of paper negative film that allowed one hundred exposures. Kodak's slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest," famously summed up a system of creating portraits that remains for the most part the practice today.

WRITERS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Like photographers, writers sought to represent reality and help create what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities" (p. 1), defined around beliefs in the new nation. Reformers in particular were especially influenced by photographs. In fact, based on the abundance of extant imagery, abolitionists probably had their pictures taken with greater frequency, and distributed them more effectively, than other groups (Stauffer, Black Hearts, p. 50). Their desire to transform themselves and their world fueled their interest in images, which helped to make visible the contrast between their dreams of reform and the sinful present. They believed that remaking themselves through pictures was a step toward achieving their new world. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) in particular wrote more eloquently on the photograph than virtually any other American before the Civil War. He sat for his "likeness" whenever he could and had his portrait taken at least as many times as Walt Whitman, the poetic reformer who is legendary for visually creating and re-creating himself.

Douglass believed that "true" art could transcend racial barriers. A good part of his fame rested on his public-speaking and writing talents. But he also relied heavily on portrait photography and the picture-making process in general to create an authentic and intelligent black persona. He knew that his fame and influence could spread more quickly through his portraits than through his voice, and he continually sought to control how he appeared in his portraits.

For Douglass, the truthfulness of the daguerreo-type prevented the distortions and exaggerations that came from the hands of whites. He wrote two separate speeches on "pictures" in which he celebrated photography and praised Daguerre as "the great discoverer of modern times, to whom coming generations will award special homage" ("Pictures"). Because of Daguerre's invention, he said, "we have pictures, true pictures, of every object which can interest us":

Men of all conditions and classes can now see themselves as others see them and as they will be seen by those [who] shall come after them. What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great—is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago. ("Pictures")

The photograph—and accurate renditions or sympathetic engravings of it—became his medium of choice for representing himself visually. For Douglass, Daguerre had turned the world into a gallery of "true pictures," elevating ex-slaves and servants to the level of kings.

Yet the democratizing aspect of photography was only one reason why he thought photographs contributed to the cause of abolition and equal rights. He well knew that most Americans, including slaveholders and proslavery sympathizers, were in love with the photograph. The other reason was that photography inspired the picture-making process in general, and in his mind all humans sought accurate representations of both material reality and of an unseen spiritual world. This affinity for pictures was what distinguished humans from animals: "Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of earth has the capacity and passion for pictures" ("Pictures"). Emphasizing the humanity of all humans was central to Douglass's reform vision, as all but the most radical of Americans defended inequality and racial hierarchies on the grounds that black slaves and their descendants were fundamentally different from other humans.

Douglass attacked these racist arguments by championing the "truthfulness" of the photograph and stressing the picture-making proclivity of all humans. By doing so he emphasized humanity's common origins and the faculty of imagination over reason. The "full identity of man with nature," he said, "is our chief distinction from all other beings on earth and the source of our greatest achievements." While "dogs and elephants are said to possess" the capacity for reason, only humans seek to re-create nature and portray both the "inside soul" and the "outside world" through such "artificial means" as the photograph. Making pictures requires imagination, and Douglass quoted the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue that the realm of the "imagination" is the "peculiar possession and glory of man." The power of the imagination is "a sublime, prophetic, and all-creative power." Imagination could be used to create a public persona in the form of a photograph or engraving. It could also be used to usher in a new world of equality, without slavery and racism. The power of the imagination links humans to "the Eternal sources of life and creation." It allows them to appreciate pictures as accurate representations of some greater reality, and it helps them to realize their sublime ideals in an imperfect world. As Douglass aptly put it: "Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction" ("Pictures"). In the speech "Pictures and Progress," he even went so far as to suggest that "the moral and social influence of pictures" is more important in shaping national culture than "the making of its laws" (p. 456).

In their fiction, Douglass and other abolitionist writers tapped into Americans' love affair with daguerreotypes in order to inspire empathic awareness between readers and African Americans. In The Heroic Slave (1853), Douglass's only work of fiction and the first published African American novella, the black hero, Madison Washington, is "daguerreotyped on" the "memory" of his friend and white protagonist, Mr. Listwell (p. 45). Similarly Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) "daguerreotype[s]" her hero Uncle Tom "for our readers" in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; p. 68). Daguerreotyping a black character was a common trope in abolitionist narration. It conveyed more than physical description or even photographic memory, for a daguerreotype was thought to penetrate the perceiver's soul as well as his mind. Americans saw God's work in the daguerreotype. It was more than a mere picture; rather, it contained part of the body and soul of the subject. Daguerreotyping a black character for white viewers (or readers) was a way for authors to break down racial barriers and achieve spiritual connectedness, and equality, between blacks and whites.

Like Douglass, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was enormously influenced by photography. In fact one might say that his lifelong project, Leaves of Grass, which he revised and expanded twelve times over during his career, depended upon the daguerreotype for its conception. In one of Whitman's self-reviews of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass he describes the purpose of having his half-length portrait on the frontispiece rather than his name: "Its author," he notes, "is Walt Whitman and his book is a reproduction of the author":

His name is not on the frontispiece, but his portrait, half-length, is. The contents of the book form a daguerreotype of his inner being, and the title page bears a representation of its physical tabernacle. (Brooklyn Eagle)

The poetry itself, in other words, is Whitman's effort to daguerreotype his soul and render the frontispiece engraving a daguerreotype that displays both body and soul.

In two poems, "My Picture-Gallery" (1880) and "Pictures," which was not published during his life, Whitman characterizes the very dwelling of his mind as a "picture-gallery," a camera obscura by which consciousness is made possible (pp. 401, 642). Whitman's faith in the democracy of photographs resembles his democratic poetic vision: there is enough room in his little house for all states, countries, and peoples. There is evidence as well that photography influenced particular poems in Leaves of Grass and especially the Civil War poems first collected in Drum-Taps (1865). Like most Americans, Whitman "saw" the Civil War chiefly through photographic reproductions, and poems like "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" probably derived from a photographic image rather than from an event Whitman actually witnessed.

Holgrave, the daguerreotypist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The House of the Seven Gables, is a radical social leveler who embraces self-sovereignty and equality for everyone. He associates with the "strangest companions imaginable": reformers, temperance lecturers, "cross-looking philanthropists," and outright abolitionists, some of whom "acknowledged no law" (p. 79). Holgrave has a "law of his own" (p. 80); he relies on the sacred sovereignty of the self and uses his daguerreotype art to "bring out the secret character" of his subjects "with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it" (p. 85). He lacks "reverence for what [is] fixed"(p. 157) and displays an "effervescence of youth and passion" (p. 161): "The true vale of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a change of garments" (p. 160).

But Hawthorne, unlike his protagonist, was not a democratic reformer and embraced neither progress nor the perfectionist vision of Whitman, Douglass, and Stowe. The "truth" of the inner, secret self that the daguerreotype illuminates was, for Hawthorne, dark-souled, drenched in sin, and thus could not be relied on. By the end of the novel Holgrave "progresses" by abandoning daguerreotypy, conforming to tradition and the authority of law and social superiors: "The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits," the narrator concludes (p. 267). He marries Phoebe and lives respectably and conservatively.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was another "dark romantic" who had little faith in progress, whether of a technology like photography or of a world without sin or slavery. Predictably, he loathed the new medium of photography. He rarely had his photograph taken, and in his novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), the narrator laments the democratization of portraits that comes from the proliferation of daguerreotypists: "instead of, as in old times, immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce" (p. 254). Almost without exception, those writers who embraced the social virtues of photography also believed in progress and the possibility of perfection, and those writers who condemned the photograph were skeptical of such visions.

Ironically, however, the photograph helped to destroy such faith in progress. While the Crimean War was the first war to be photographed, the American Civil War was the first to depict images of dead soldiers. Such truthfulness exposed the costs of romantic visions and proved too realistic for Americans. In this sense Hawthorne was prophetic when he said in The House of the Seven Gables that photography brings "out the secret character" of its subjects "with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it" (p. 85). Americans were not ready for the "truth" and reality of civil war. Alexander Gardner and George Barnard published beautiful "art books" of the Civil War in 1866. But few people purchased them. And Mathew Brady, the most successful photographer before the war, who became rich and famous from his art, went bankrupt after the war, largely because of the lack of demand for war photographs, on which he had staked everything. Photography was too real for romantic and sentimental sensibilities; it shattered the illusions of a world without sin and contributed to the rise of literary realism.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Art; Civil War; The House of the Seven Gables; Leaves of Grass; Technology

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Brooklyn Eagle, 15 September 1855.

Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave. 1853. In Ronald T. Takaki, Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Douglass, Frederick. "Pictures." Holograph. n.d. [c. late 1864]. Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, and on microfilm.

Douglass, Frederick. "Pictures and Progress." 3 December 1861. In The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 3, edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Fauvel-Gouraud, Francois. Description of the Daguerreotype Process. . . . 1840. In The Daguerreotype Process: Three Treatises, 1840–1849, edited by Robert A. Sobieszek. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

Goldberg, Vicki, ed. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851. New York: Signet Classic, 1961.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. 1852. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Raab, Jane M., ed. Literature & Photography: Interactions, 1840–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Island, 1980.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973.

Secondary Works

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 1991.

Banta, Melissa. A Curious & Ingenious Art: Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Sandweiss, Martha A., ed. Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1991.

Sobieszek, Robert A., and Odette M. Appel. The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes. New York: Dover, 1976.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Stauffer, John. "Daguerreotyping the National Soul: The Portraits of Southworth and Hawes, 1843–1860." Prospects 22 (1997): 69–107.

Taft, Robert. Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.

John Stauffer