Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism 9781501736728

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Framing the Victorians

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Framing the Victorians Photography and the Culture of Realism

Jennifer Green-Lewis

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1996 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America ©The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 739.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Framing the Victorians : photography and the culture of realism / Jennifer Green-Lewis, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-3276-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Photography—History—19th century. 2. Photography in historiography. TR15.G69 1996 77o’.9’o34—dc20

I. Title. 96-20784

To my father, P. H. M. Green, whose office at Boundary Farm was full of old photographs And to my mother, R D. Green, who remembers the names of the people in them

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction PART ONE

i SIGNS

i Coming to Terms: Realism, Romance, Photography 2 Pencil of Fire: The Photographer Speaks

13

37

3 Fiction’s Photographers and Their Works: Villains outside the Frame

PART TWO

65

THINGS TAKEN

4 Framing the Crimea: The Narrative of Photographs in Exhibition 5 The Mind Unveil’d: Photographing the Interior

145

6 Signs of the Things Taken: Testimony, Subjectivity, and the NineteentlvCentury Mug Shot Coda: Other Pictures, Other Worlds

Works Cited Index

•

Vll

235

247

•

187 227

97

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. i. Grand Prix of the Automobile Club of France, Course at Dieppe, JacqueS'Henri Lartigue, 1911

14

Fig. 2. Alice Liddell as a beggar maid, Lewis Carroll, c. 1859

15

Fig. 3. The Horse-Car Terminal, Alfred Stieglitz, 1893

16

Fig. 4. The Open Door, W. FI. Fox Talbot, 1843

17

Fig. 5. Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude, Lady Clementina Hawarden, c. 1862

18

Fig. 6. Fading Away, Henry Peach Robinson, 1858

55

Fig. 7. Lace, W. H. Fox Talbot, 1844

56

Fig. 8. A Scene in a Library, W. H. Fox Talbot, 1844

57

Fig. 9. Lacock Abbey, W. H. Fox Talbot, 1839

63

Part Two frontis. Soiree of Photographers, in the Great Room of the

Society of Arts, London, December 23, 1852 96 Fig. 10. No. 68, The 68th Regiment, Winter Dress, Roger Fenton, 1855 108 Figs. 11-21. Nos. 152-62, Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts, Roger Fenton, 1855 114-17 Fig. 22. No. 218, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Roger Fenton, 1855

125

Fig. 23. No. 263, Cooking House of the 8th Hussars, Roger Fenton, 1855

128

Fig. 24. No. 50, Camp of the 4th Dragoon Guards near Karyni, Roger Fenton,1855

130

Fig. 25. No. 216, Hardships in the Crimea: Portraits of Captain George,

Colonel Lowe, and Captain Brown, 4th Light Dragoons, Roger Fenton, 1855

132

Fig. 26. Major Hallewell, Day’s Work Over, Roger Fenton, 1855

•

ix

•

133

•

X

Illustrations

Fig. 27. A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863, negative by T. H. O’Sullivan; positive by Alexander Gardner

134

Fig. 28. On the Antietam Battlefield, possibly by Alexander Gardner. 1862 Fig. 29. Ruins in Charleston, S.C., 1865 Fig. 30. Residence, Quartermaster Third Army Corps, Brandy Station,

135

December, 1863 Fig. 31. What do I want, John Henry? Warrenton, Va., November,

137

l862 Fig. 32. A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Vu., April, 1865 Fig. 33. Self-Portrait ofG.B. Duchenne Using His Electrical

138

Stimulator, 1862 Fig. 34. Christophe S.: Melancholia Religiosa Moria, Dr. Schnauss,

150

136

139

157 1855 Fig. 35. Eva H.: Melancholia Attonita, Dr. Schnauss, 1855

158

Fig. 36. The Four Stages of Puerperal Mania, Hugh Diamond, 1856

172

Fig. 37. Patient, Surrey County Asylum, Hugh Diamond, 1856

174

Fig. 38. Patient, Surrey County Asylum, Hugh Diamond, 1856

175

Fig. 39. The Bashful Model, 1873

202

Fig. 40. The Inspector’s Model, Jacob Riis, 1886

209

Fig. 41. Edward McCarthy, identification card

212

Fig. 42. Edward McCarthy

213

Fig. 43. Isma Martin

214

Fig. 44. J. B. Black Fig. 45. Measuring features as part of the Bertillon system

215

Fig. 46. Bertillon system Fig. 47. Roger Fenton in a borrowed Zouave uniform, taken by his

220

assistant, Marcus Sparling, 1855 Fig. 48. Cottingley fairy photograph, Elsie Wright, 1917

219

225 232

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M

any people have assisted me in the making of this book and I am glad to thank them here. My first debt, however, is to those whom I have never met but from whose own work I have profit' ed, whose writings and collections intially sparked my interest

and sustained it throughout long and (otherwise) solitary hours of thinking about photography. Useful guides to different places were Beaumont Newhall, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, and Roland Barthes, each of whom made it possible to start thinking about photography in the first place. Physical prints also improved the manuscript at various stages. David DeLaura was a patient and wise respondent to its earliest drafts; Elaine Scarry was, and remains, an inspiration as teacher, reader, and friend. I thank both of them for their consistently generous interest. The book began with a re¬ search fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and was completed at the George Washington University thanks to two summer research grants and a very necessary leave. I am grateful to teachers, friends, and colleagues from both institutions, especially to Rebecca W. Bushnell at Penn, and to Tara Ghoshal Wallace at GW, for their long friendship, support, and solid advice. Christopher Sten as GW’s English department chair has demonstrated a com¬ mitment to scholarship that effectively enabled the completion of this pro¬ ject, and I thank him for that. I also thank James Krasner and Ronald Thomas for the scrupulousness with which both read (and reread) the entire manu¬ script. Portions of it also benefited at different times and in various ways from the observations of Allyson Booth, Juliet Fleming, Susan Greenfield, Jules Law, Laura Tanner, and Wendy Wall. It is hardly possible to thank all the librarians, curators, and occasional by¬ standers whom I’ve enlisted in the search for photographs; I can acknowledge •

xi

•

'

Xll

Acknowledgments

only those I bothered most frequently: the staff of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress; Jacklyn Byrns at the J. Paul Getty Muse' um; and Ann Paterra at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks also to Debbie Ireland at the Royal Photographic Society, Bath; Linda Griffiths at the Royal Society of MedL cine, London; Thomas Grischkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Marguerite Lavin at the Museum of the City of New York; William Joyce of Princeton University Libraries; Janice Madhu at George Eastman House, and Christopher Sheppard at Leeds University Library. I am especially grate' ful to Caroline Eisner, who labored so patiently at the end checking refer' ences, bibliographies, and other irritants; to Judith Bailey for her painstaking editing; to Carol Betsch; and to Bernhard Kendler at Cornell for his almost unnerving patience and calm. Earlier versions of certain chapters first appeared in the following publica' tions: “Signs of the Things Taken: Testimony, Subjectivity, and the Nine' teenth'Century Mug Shot,” in Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993)** j^—50; “Outside the Frame: The Photographer in Victorian Fiction,

in Vic-

torians Institute Journal 19 (1991): 111—40; Stories at an Exhibition. Narra' tive and Nineteenth'Century Photographic Documentary,” Journal of Narra¬ tive Technique 20:2 (1990): i47—166. Thanks to the publishers for permission to reprint. This book has been almost ten years in the making, and with few interrup' tions (for most of which he was in any case responsible), Craig Lewis has had to live with its progress. My love and thanks for his apparently inexhaustible interest, enthusiasm, and faith. J. G. L.

Framing the Victorians

Introduction Never since the beginning of Time was there ... so intensely selfconscious a society. —Carlyle

Q

ueen Victoria’s enthusiasm for photography was famous. “It is quite a weakness of hers,” wrote a member of her household, “to be photographed in every possible condition of her daily life. Sit' ting in her donkey chair, dangling [sic] the latest new baby, chat' ting in her private sitting'room among her daughters, working

at her writing'table, or breakfasting in the open air . . . the Queen’s photog' rapher is always to be sent for and ordered to ‘fix the picture.’”1 The picture of the Battenburgs at home, fixed in words for us by our secret informant, is charmingly domestic in its settings, unambiguously middle class in its pretensions, and significantly perceived by its royal subject (who requires

her subject to document it) as worthy of record. Even without a glimpse of the photographs themselves, the invitation to view Victoria’s life through mo' ments deemed sufficiently pictureworthy to serve as emblems of the whole has been hard to resist. Is it, in this case, the sound of the donkey chair (unglanv orous, vaguely comic, solid), the Kingsleyesque sprawl of babies (suggested by the “dangling” of the “latest”), the bracing prospect of outdoor breakfasts? The words as images fuel and feed a desire to see this family as Victoria presumably wished it to be seen: symbol of a national fantasy, large, healthy, robust. The hundreds of images of the queen which she had made with such fre' quency do not define the extremes of her interest, which additionally demanded the translation of the objects around her into photographic form. If 1 The Private Life of the Queen by a Member of the Royal Household (New York, 1898), 119.

Framing the Victorians

we are to believe our source, Victoria ordered the photographing of “every an tide in her possession. . . . Every piece of plate and china, every picture, chair, table, ornament, and articles of even the most trivial description, all pass through the photographer’s hands, and are ‘taken’ from every point of view.” The pictures were then bound into “extraordinary” catalogs, forming “a most remarkable library. Every photo, when affixed to the page, is surrounded by various data, which include the number and name of the room in which the article is kept, the number of the article itself, its size, any marks or signs that may be on it, and a full description of it from every point of view” (120). The taking of the pictures themselves was evidently only part of the fascination with photography, for the queen was also an avid reader of these images of her wealth. “Few days pass,” the narrative confides, “without her sending for one volume or another” (120). The appetite for gathering, collecting, taking, and reading cultural signs has no purer expression in the nineteenth century than photography. Not only in the palace but in the police station and the court, in the hospital ward and at the site of war, images of those things taken—the domestic, the criminal, the insane, the heroic—were made to be exhibited later in the promotion of different realisms and in the service of different narratives. This book examines how certain kinds of photographs were engaged, mediated, and ultimately coopted by the contemporary but self-consciously opposed Victorian schools of positivist realism and metaphysical romance, and it explores some of the ways in which photography, from its very earliest beginnings, has both figured and been a figure of the debate between them. Perhaps the best evidence of the pervasiveness of photography in the nineteenth century remains its appropri¬ ation by both philosophies; photography’s power lay in its potential to be iden¬ tified either as validation of empiricism in its surface documentation of the world or, conversely, as proof that any visual account inevitably represents the world inadequately. Realism’s triumph over the meaning of photography in general was ironic in that science deemed reliably truthful a process of repre¬ sentation that had achieved notoriety and popularity through its potential to lie.2 The problem of veracity has in fact never been so apposite or so frequently invoked in aesthetics as when photography first came under evaluation. Sci¬ entists affirmed its utility through its truthfulness, Pre-Raphaelites were re¬ pelled and attracted by its ability to present detail, and many writers of fic¬ tion, such as Hardy, and of art history, such as Ruskin, ultimately decided that photography lacked intrinsic merit because of its inability to be wholly truth2 See Susan Sontag’s comments on the centrality of lying in photography, in her On Pho¬ tography (New York: Dell, 1977), 86.

3 * Introduction

ful. Doubts concerning its limitations, however, were largely outweighed by enthusiasm for its possibilities, and the camera was far more widely regarded as an instrument of revelation than of deceit. James F. Ryder personified his camera and, in so doing, ascribed moral as well as artistic purpose to his pho¬ tographic work in 1850s America: “What he told me was as gospel. No mis¬ representations, no deceits, no equivocations. He saw the world without prej¬ udices; he looked upon humanity with an eye single to justice. What he saw was faithfully reported, exact, and without blemish. He could read and prove character in a man’s face at sight. To his eye a rogue was a rogue; the honest man, when found, was recognized and properly estimated.”3 Curiously, the ju¬ dicial properties of Ryder’s companion, identified as “truth itself,” were thus suggested to extend beneath the skin of “his” subjects; Ryder’s camera had, he implied, a supernatural ability to perform character analysis in its representa¬ tion of facial features. A similar though no less fanciful estimation of the camera’s perceptual skills soon appeared as the basis for work produced in the pseudosciences of phrenol¬ ogy and physiognomy, as well as in surveillance and detective work in which the potential of photography to prove seemed limitless. “Her business,” wrote Lady Elizabeth Eastlake in 1857, “is to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give.”4 Like Ryder’s, Eastlake’s rhetoric is more suggestive than her argument, her language here at once feminizing photography and concomitantly implying its inferi¬ ority to other arts. Although she herself was a photographer (and her husband an amateur photographer and the first president of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, founded in 1853), Eastlake’s well-known essay on photogra¬ phy, discussed in Chapter 2, reveals in its metaphors of class and gender an ambivalence on the part of its writer toward the artistic standing of photog¬ raphy. Of its factual accountability, however, Eastlake had little doubt, and with reason; by the time she wrote, photographs had already been used as tes¬ timony in court. Within less than two decades the Photographic Times would note that “as a witness in the courts of justice, photography is constantly em¬ ployed in detecting forgery, revealing perjury, and in telling the truth.”5 Writ¬ ing in a similarly figurative but less celebratory vein, Ruskin observed: “Their legal evidence is of great use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed to be ‘true’, and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most impor3 Ryder quoted in Richard Rudisill, “Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society,” Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 76. 4 Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” Quarterly Review (London) (April 1857): 466. 5 “Some of the Modern Appliances of Photography,” Photographic Times 1.3 (1871): 34.

Framing the Victorians

tant syllables and reduplicates the rest.”6 What evidence the photograph pro¬ vided might be undesirable, of course. When Queen Victoria promoted her servant Haviz Abdul Karim from a server to her “Munshi,” or teacher, “the photographs showing him holding dishes were destroyed.”7 “Photography is making stupendous advances,” wrote the Austrian empiricist Ernst Mach at the end of the century, “and there is great danger that in time some malicious artist will photograph his innocent patrons with solid views of their most se¬ cret thoughts and emotions. How tranquil politics will then be! What rich harvest our detective force will reap!”8 Descriptions of photography as an in¬ dependent, personified, superior intelligence, equipped with a moral sense, a subjectivity, even a sex, and most significant, capable of telling something are typical of the metaphors that fed nineteenth-century photographic discourse and shaped popular conceptions of what photographs were supposed and able to do. Photographs, according to the developing mythology, had a mission, a moral purpose, which was to relate the truth. The relay of truthful information, however insignificant, was central to the larger cultural importance of photography. Beyond the widespread accompa¬ niment of photographs with explanatory oral narratives, nineteenth-century pictorial photography reworked Pre-Raphaelite models of storytelling.9 Pic¬ torial photographers, as Henry Peach Robinson wrote, demanded for their im¬ ages “poetry, sentiment, story, the literary part of a picture, which painters without imagination have attempted to banish.”10 More important than sto¬ ry to photograph, however, was photography to storytelling itself. A photo¬ graph could change the narrative status of its subject from fiction to fact. A photograph of one truth—a teacher—could replace, and efface, another truth—a servant. Beyond positivism’s metaphorical construction of them as reliable and hon¬ est guides through the dangerously unfixed world of representation, pho¬ tographs were originally regarded as factual in part because they were fre¬ quently presented as apparently authorless texts, independently capable of describing and classifying human beings and human behavior. Language per6 John Ruskin, The Cestus of Aglaia, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and

Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903—12), 19:150. 7 Helmut Gernsheim, Victoria R. (New York: Putnam’s, 1959), 213.

Ernst Mach, “Why Has Man Two Eyes?” Popular Scientific Lectures, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (1894; La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 74. 9 F°r discussion of the influence of photography on Pre-Raphaelitism, see Michael Bar-

tram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985); and Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (New York: Harrison House, 1978). 10 Henry Peach Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (Bradford, 1896; New

York: Arno, 1973), 13-14.

5 • Introduction

mitted Victorian readers (as it still permits us) to overlook the fact that photographs are not taken but made, that their collective semantic is prone to the same influences and power struggles that shape other forms of representation. “When we press the button of a camera,” as Walter Benn Michaels has put it, “we are writing.”11 And while storytelling (or story writing) remained an im¬ portant part of a photograph, photography itself became part of a larger telling of stories in the building of institutions such as the monarchy, the medical pro¬ fession, and the police force and in the building of nations, for example, through the representation of their wars. In the apparent absence of a human author-narrator, the act of photography became part of a process of significa¬ tion which functioned on occasion not merely to record but to control. Clearly, it is possible to overstate the case. Not all photographs should be regarded as deliberate propaganda, any more than the frequently observed po¬ tential for their use in surveillance inevitably and always signifies an outreach of the Benthamite and now Foucauldian panopticon. Nevertheless, in certain specific sites the prescriptive power of photography was powerful not only be¬ cause its narrative apparently lacked a discreditable narrator but also because it had an unusually intimate visual relationship with the objects it represent¬ ed. Photographs, after all, have sometimes been perceived not as simply telling the truth so much as being a part of it, physical traces of passing moments. “Photographs make a special claim upon our attention,” Joel Snyder observes, “because they are supposed not only to look realistic . . . but also to derive from or be caused by the objects they represent. This ‘natural connection’ has been taken as a reinforcement and even as a guarantee of realistic depiction.”12 Inevitably enough, self-consciously literary writers, particularly those with a previously established interest in the visual arts, found in photography’s metaphors and associations a rich source for invoking and exploring the sub¬ ject of realism. Photographic realism itself—the style of writing held, in its emphasis on objective reportage, to be functionally cameralike—is most fre¬ quently associated with American documentary realism of the 1930s rather than with late nineteenth-century fiction; but the camera’s influence on nar¬ rative form has also been observed in work that seems to have little in com¬ mon with the realist enterprises of the Depression era. Alan Spiegel, for ex¬ ample, identifies in Henry James’s writing “the effort to attempt a balanced distribution of emphasis in the rendering of what is looked at, who is looking, and what the looker makes of what she sees,” and he relates this effort to filmic 11 Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 222. 12 Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 224.

•

6

Framing the Victorians

technique.13 Both David Lodge and Arlene Jackson have written more specif¬ ically about the influence of photography on Hardy’s style.14 The existence of a relationship between literary and photographic realism was in fact frequently observed throughout the nineteenth century and fostered by writers on both sides of the Atlantic who recognized in photography’s ontology a means of discoursing on literary form. “We know few instances more marked,” wrote one British critic in an essay later reprinted by an American journal, “than the resemblance between our latest developed art and our greatest liv¬ ing novelist; between the mirrorlike narrations of the one, and the permanent mirrors presented by the other; between what we shall venture to call the pho¬ tography of Mr. Thackeray and the photography of Mr. Talbot.”15 According to such theories of resemblance, the “mirrorlike narrations” of Thackeray were no less—and no more—realistic than the “permanent mirrors” of Fox Talbot; the equation simultaneously elevated photography to art as it celebrated the value of literary realism. Despite the widespread use and obvious appeal of such comparisons, I have chosen in this book not to add to the discussion about stylistic influences. I have, moreover, made no attempt to describe the history of photography in terms of technological innovation. There are many such histories, the best of them informed by attention to a wider art history that this book does not at¬ tempt to engage. My interest lies, in fact, not in the history of photography at all (at least as it is popularly understood) but rather in reading particular pho¬ tographs in history, studying the development of the idea of photography through history, and considering the shaping influence of photography in his¬ torical debate between differing accounts of the experiential world. Those ac¬ counts are divisively articulated in late nineteenth-century literature, as in other disciplines, through the formal but increasingly unstable distinctions be¬ tween romance and realism, and part of my effort in this book is to explore photography’s peculiar ambivalence in the evolution of those distinctions. In Chapter i I aim to clarify my use of those troubled terms romance and realism and also to suggest how an examination of photography’s presence in Victo¬ rian writings may shed new light on an old debate. One version of that debate may be partially reconstructed from the ways in which people wrote and talked about photography in novels and short stories, Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modem Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 55. 14 Arlene Jackson, “Photography as Style and Metaphor in the Art of Thomas Hardy,”

Thomas Hardy Annual 2, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1984), 91-109; David Lodge, “Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form,” Novel 7 (Spring 1974): 246-54. Thackery [sic] as Novelist and Photographer,” American Journal of Photography, ns 3 (1860-61): 183. 15

7

*

Introduction

in journals and review articles, in the public space of exhibition, and in the private space of darkrooms.16 I begin here with the artists, or the agents, and their imaginative conception of photography. Chapter 2 traces language forms in some of the many photographic journals of the period to consider how, in their choices of topics, as well as of metaphors, similes, and analogies, photographers themselves both perceived and shaped their hobby or profession. In Chapter 3 I investigate the representation of photographers and their works as it surfaced in fictional writing, in which photography’s iconoclastic potential appears to have necessitated the figuration of the photographer as arbiter and agent of social change. In the service of literary and popular fiction, photographers, though usually evil, are invested with genius, and their power is both affirmed and controlled by their relegation to the fringes of novelistic ac¬ tion. Paradoxically, however, the romantic depiction of photography as the product of unruly natural magic serves to distance agents from their own pro¬ ductions, for in attributing their works to a divine or sinister but invariably su¬ pernatural intelligence, such writing separates the photographer from the photograph and empowers the photograph as an independent print of the world. The first section of this book thus deals with the idea, rather than the fact, of photography: its imaginative, rather than its actual, material use; its significance to the debate about art and representation in terms of its aes¬ thetic possibilities, rather than as an object in the material world. Although the first three chapters essentially affirm Snyder’s statement that “photographs do not owe their significance to the possibility of using them to establish facts about the world,” it is that possibility or, more precisely, the de¬ sire to use photographs in that way which provides the focus for the second part of the book.17 In Chapter 4 I consider photography’s related roles in the service of colonialism and documentary, and I use Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War to historicize the implications of making photographs in¬ tended for public exhibition. In Chapter 5 I consider a more unorthodox form of exhibition, taking up the work of physicians who made and displayed photographs of their psychiatric patients. Then, pursuing the notion of the photograph as testimonial one step farther, and one step closer to the end of the century, in Chapter 6 I examine the use of the photograph as a means of

16 I say “partially reconstructed” because as many voices have declared, the notion of his¬ torical reconstruction is premised on a belief about the past which has necessarily been formed by the present that survives it. The prospects of an impersonal retrieval—a rebuilding with clean hands—seem as dim as do those of an agentless photograph. The impossibility of verifi¬ cation does not render the historical object useless, however; rather, it calls for analysis of the centrality of the subject. Speculation has a part in archaeology, and so does projection. I have tried to be conscious of their presence, and of my own. 17 Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” 230.

•

8

Framing the Victorians

establishing and defining criminal identity in the public spaces of the court, police station, and detective manual. Photography’s persuasiveness is the consequence as much as the cause of its imaginative life in the minds of its readers, and the sources of that life, as this book contends, owe as much to romance as they do to realism. Photography is both product and process of a Bakhtinian polyglossia, a site and system of production, a generator of stories whose testimonial potential is great because of and despite their very fictionality. In Chapter 6, therefore, as part of my an¬ swer to the question of how the authority of photography was enhanced through its association with the law, I also consider more elaborate versions of its policing function, which surfaced in melodrama and mystery stories. The unambiguously antirealist representations of photography presented in these stories ironically helped shaped its realist status as the ultimate in proof. I end the book, thus, by returning to the significance of the imagination and the centrality of romance in “realist” applications of photography, finally under¬ mining the bipartite structure of the book by suggesting, indeed, that its halves, like photography’s two lives—in the minds of its readers and in the space of public display—cannot be read independently of each other. Introductions to academic books usually carry disclaimers of various kinds in an effort to ward off the inevitable criticism of readers whose interests have been overlooked or slighted, and this one is no exception. But my excuses here are thin, for I can give no good reason why this book does not contain, for ex¬ ample, a chapter on tourism and photography, or one on the construction of the Other in photographic anthropological study, and so on—and on. The chapters that do appear in the second part, on war, psychiatry, and police, are particularly concerned with exhibition and self-creation, and their immedi¬ ate subjects of the nation, the mind, and the fugitive body provide imagina¬ tive sites of shrinking and expanding sizes. They suggested themselves to me as particularly rich for a consideration of visual authority in an age in which relations among the three were being redefined in the name of privacy. Oth¬ er areas would have served just as well; additional chapters might have been added. The wealth of photography’s history invites the reader to continue reading that history in other places, and the subjects I raise here are intended to suggest other sites as representative of their own. There is one further disclaimer: the focus of the last chapter is primarily on the American use of criminal photography, whereas other chapters draw more heavily on British records. The use of both sources for photography as well as literature needs, in my opinion, no justification, but neither should it imply a lack of difference between nineteenth-century American and British readers. Cultural concerns inevitably shaped particular emphases in photography, and these concerns have in recent years received some critical attention. William

9

*

Introduction

Sharpe has identified political and social interests as paramount to the con¬ cerns of British photographers; Kathryn Humphreys has found the American response to photography, by contrast, far more celebratory of the perceived de¬ mocratizing effect of photographs.18 Where national identity or localized is¬ sues seem to have had particularly urgent bearing on the making or interpre¬ tation of the photographs under consideration, I have made those issues central to my study. The chapter on the Crimean War coverage, for example, while it addresses the related topics of exhibition and documentary, also historicizes its theory in its speculations regarding the significance of the pho¬ tographs for readers operating within the immediate context of a British war and the larger one of the British Empire. The chapters on medical and police photographs raise philosophical questions about privacy and subjectivity which, Foucauldian attention to eighteenth-century France notwithstanding, were central to American culture of the late nineteenth century; American as well as British texts were consulted for both chapters, in which I consider photography as marker both of difference and of appropriation—sign, as one court opinion had it, of “things taken.”19 Providing the occasion for precise¬ ly this focus on the issue of cultural determinacy, the chapter on photography in the literary imagination draws on three authors: an American, an Ameri¬ can expatriate, and an Englishman. The kinds of attention each gave to the subject of photography are, I believe, suggestive with regard to national dif¬ ference. But their fascination with photography also united these authors, and this unity was strengthened by continual photographic exchange throughout the nineteenth century between the two nations. American journals frequently reviewed exhibitions in Fondon; books on photography from the United States were reviewed in the English presses; and the same essays often ap¬ peared in publications of both countries. The first edition of the Liverpool Pho¬ tographic Journal noted that “the Glasgow Photographers obtain their infor¬ mation of our [photographic society’s] Proceedings through the medium of American newspapers!”20 The lively exchange of work and ideas between photographic journals both American and English from midcentury suggests that, despite culturally differentiated interests and anxieties, American and British photographs may be discussed together. Realism’s romance with pho18 William Sharpe, “Ariel or Caliban? Photography as Unruly Servant in NineteenthCentury England”; Kathryn Humphreys, “Blank Checks and Sentimental Greenbacks: Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Photographic Utopia.” Both papers presented at the Modern Language As¬ sociation Conference, Chicago, 1990. 19 Cowley v. People 83 N.Y. 464 (1881), quoted in George Chernoff and Hershel Sarbin, Photography and the Law, 4th ed. (New York: Chilton Books, 1971), 123. 20 “Address,” Liverpool Photographic Journal, January 14, 1854, 1.

Framing the Victorians

tography—and its obsession with “things taken”—spanned continents and years, outlasting the century. 1 hardly need add that the romance with photography is also our own. Our popular cultural memories of Victorian England are still hostage to those fa* miliar images of a dumpy queen and her favorite horse, still captivated by the staged theatricals of the loyal widow. My own mental images of Victoria, at least, invariably reflect that version of her life which the royal subject declared camera worthy. In this book I am more overtly preoccupied with the com' plexities of reading photographs than with our initial attraction to the images, and thus I do not explicitly chart the nature of our compulsion toward pho' tography, in the way Barthes, for example, explores his personal obsession with photographs. But it is the very undeniable appeal of Victorian photographs which makes them so problematic to read, which, in fact, causes the problems in the first place. Despite their different goals, the chapters that follow com stitute in many ways a vote for Barthes’s way of reading, a way that never oven looks but rather embraces the paradoxes generated by the experience of read' ing texts so immutably present, so irrefutably past.21 21 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). See also Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).

PART

ONE

SIGNS

the

PRACTICAL

PHOTQCRAPHER Devotedlot^ Art - Science * Applications

Photoorapby

Vol.8

No. 90 June

G

LONDON • • PERCY

LUND • HUMPHRIES •

C° • L™

CHAPTER

I

Coming to Terms Realism, Romance, Photography

T

he year 1989 marked the 150th anniversary of the officially am nounced invention of photography, and predictably enough, publications that retell the history of our long fascination with camera images proliferated. For the most part oversized and expensive coffee-table books, these works chart the rise in popularity of a form of mass entertainment and reproduce with varying degrees of quality excerpts from the photographic canon: the blurred speed of Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s gocarts and automobiles; sultry Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar; Alfred Stieglitz’s horses steaming in the frozen air of snowbound New York City (figs. 1-3). The accompanying gloss generally invites the reader to view them as windows on the nineteenth-century world. That these photographs refer in many cases to other works, that photographers recognize their “belatedness” in a tradition of visual culture and express self-conscious, even ironic relations to that culture, is generally overlooked. Such books imply not only that the photographs they reproduce are images of what was but also that their onto¬ logical status as images is beyond question. Like literature, historical pho¬ tographs are often subject to use as archaeological aids and yet rarely (at least in those glossy tomes) are they considered prone to the same kinds of prob¬ lems as literary texts when used in the service of documentary. When it is taken out of its original context, a photograph cannot serve as evidence of history, however, or in fact as evidence of anything at all beyond itself. To this extent photographs are like words, the significance of which de¬ pends on their surroundings and their readers; and surroundings are easier to reconstruct, of course, than the privately held views of their inhabitants. Con-

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14

Framing the Victorians

Grand Prix of the Automobile Club of France, Course at Dieppe. Jacques-Flenri Lartigue. 1911. Gelatin-silver print, 10 X 13V2" (25.4 X 34.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer. Copy Print © 1996 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo Researchers, Inc. Fig. i.

sequently, no matter how carefully context may be considered, it is really im¬ possible to talk sensibly, let alone confidently about “the Victorian reader” of “the Victorian photograph.” Beyond a mere dismissal of those phantoms and an acknowledgment of the plurality of readers, the diversity of readings, and the power of moment and circumstance, perhaps most crucial to any reading of nineteenth-century pho¬ tographs is an awareness at the outset of the late twentieth-century fondness for particular visions of the Victorian world. That fondness is bolstered by the reissue of the familiar images on anniversary dates or the marking off of peri¬ ods of image making. What these images are able to tell us about the age that produced them is unclear; indeed, the titles of recent exhibitions suggest in¬ stead a desire to free photography from history, in order to celebrate photography-as-painting. The Waking Dream (in which we finally come to con¬ sciousness courtesy of the camera?) displayed moments from the first one hundred years of photographs; On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, staged to mark

Fig. 2. Alice Liddell as a beggar maid. Lewis Carroll, c. 1859. Morris L. Parrish Col¬

lection of Victorian Novelists, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries.

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16

Framing the Victorians

Fig. 3. The Horse-Car Terminal. Alfred Stieglitz. 1893. Library of Congress.

the sesquicentennial, offered a similar invitation to forget history in the com templation of surface lights and shades.1 Enjoyable as it undeniably is to consider yet again the clean slant of the broom in Fox Talbot’s Open Door or the gauzy light filtering through windows framing Lady Clementina Hawarden’s daughters (figs. 4 and 5), their reappearance on a date that collides with the advent of the technology that brought them into being can tell us nothing about original context, or about how they were read and what made them meaningful. It seems certain, however, that the Victorians did read these photographs rather differently from the way we do. For one thing, the canon we affirm, as we review its best-known images on anniversary dates, is our creation, shaped by the desire to preserve images that correspond to our own versions of what we think we have lost. That canon of images to which we are so attached reveals as much and pen haps more about the intervening century and a half of readers as it does about the original seconds photographed. 1

The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century: Selections from the Gilman Paper Compa¬

ny Collection, exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art; On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography, exhibition organized by the Na¬ tional Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I?

•

Coming to Terms

Fig. 4. The Open Door. W. H. Fox Talbot. 1843. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ran-

som Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Loss and its marker, the will to preserve, are of course central to any com sideration of photographs; indeed, they are so intimately bound up in a read' er’s relationship with a photograph that their importance is often overlooked. Yet every question about why a photograph is made, like every additional speculation about why it is displayed (or hidden away), concerns loss in its implh cation that a photograph has to do with some impending change in the sta' tus quo. A photograph is concerned with the way things are but will not remain, or perhaps the way we wish they were, or the way we wish they might have been. The perceived threat that this state will be lost is inherent to the act of photographing. A photograph from an age we describe as past inevitably means something different to us from one defined as contemporary, both because of the years that separate us from it and because we have determined that its era has ended. The absence of original readers and contexts does not call, however, for an imagined conversation with the dead, though it does demand the restoration of language to photography. If we are to read photographs in, rather than “as,” history, which is my intention here, we must do more than revisit the famib iar images. If we are to talk about how photographs have acquired meaning, we must treat them as more than windows, more than charming pseudopaint'

Fig. 5. Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude. Lady Clementina Hawarden. c. 1862.

Lithograph by Day & Son Lithographers, Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Calif.

19

•

Coming to Terms

ings. To read photographs in history is to recognize, as Alan Trachtenberg expresses so well, that “the history they show is inseparable from the history they enact.”2 Instead of focusing on disparate images, “interrogating” old photographs for the information we suspect they harbor or treating them as urn mediating windows on a nineteenth-century world, instead of revisiting only those versions of it which are regularly displayed, we must explore photogra¬ phy as a cultural practice, trace its significance in social as much as aesthetic terms. To answer the large question, How did these photographs mean7, we can most usefully begin with questions that are potentially easier to answer. What roles, for example, were photographs permitted to play in different arenas, such as scientific research, or in literary publications? How were they figured in other kinds of writing, such as trade or professional journals? For what pur¬ poses were they used in sites of display and self-representation? How were par¬ ticular pictures reviewed? In what kinds of argument does photography fea¬ ture? What debates does it appear to have sparked or resolved? These kinds of questions resist treating any photograph as either window or icon and, instead, attend to the historically contingent creation of the meanings of photography in the larger workings of culture. They restore language to photography, in fact, by reinstating its images in a complex network of discourses within which those images began, and continued, to acquire meaning. In shifting attention away from the value or merit of particular photographs and focusing instead on the meaning of photography through a study of its use, we soon notice that it is impossible to talk about photography without talk¬ ing about other things. Roland Barthes has observed that when we look at a photograph “it is not it that we see” but rather its subject.3 When the topic of discussion is photographs we tend to talk, in fact, not about photographs at all so much as what they make present to us. Photography itself slides precipi¬ tously in writing and conversation from noun to verb—a photograph, to pho¬ tograph—from image to praxis, from viewer to viewed and back again to the eye of the lens. This tendency dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when photography became useful as a site for the discussion of topics beyond itself and then served for years as the self-effacing frame of debate on any number of issues in varying disciplines. Within these disciplines, photography most frequently provided a locus of debate for issues having to do with realism, especially literary realism. There are two probable reasons why it did. First, a photograph may be perceived as having to do with literature because it has narrative potential, in the sense

2 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), xvi. 3 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.

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20

Framing the Victorians

that it often inspires or accompanies or invites the telling of stories. Second, a photograph has an unusual relationship with the idea of truthfulness, in part because of its manner of production, which diminishes the significance of human agency, in part because of its surface verisimilitude. Because realism’s own relation to truth (or lying) is so well illustrated by the workings of photography, photography became useful as the metaphorical substance in which wider representational topics with both ethical and practical imperatives could be argued. What realism ought to do and what it was actually capable of were topics for which photography was able to provide confirmation. The most urgent philosophical and literary debates of the nineteenth cen¬ tury have traditionally been polarized by the dichotomies of logical positivism and metaphysical idealism, realism and antirealism (or romance). Despite their differences, proponents on either side were drawn to photography as symbol of the insufficiency of empiricism’s account of reality or, conversely, as proof of the totality of its vision. Photography’s continued shared usefulness in the expression of this conflict, indeed, suggests that it may be possible to view these philosophies not as separate and distinct but as competing versions of a narrative addressing the larger culture of realism. Why such a view should be either useful or desirable or merely preferable to a position that finds them to be radically opposed is something I hope this book will make clear. In lat¬ er chapters I examine photography’s varied contributions to different cultur¬ al narratives, but my purpose here is to give some background by considering the relationship among photography, romance, and realism which made such a contribution possible.

Photography and/as Language: Ways of Saying Since (metaphysical) romance and (positivistic) realism, in literature at least, are both made of words, they can be considered part of, or belonging to, language. They say things, in a literal sense; we can quote the words in which they tell their stories. Whether or not photography may also be considered language depends on our viewpoint. Whether a photograph can tell a story depends similarly on the relation between photography and language. Of course, even if we don’t really believe it, the statement “Photographs tell sto¬ ries” is relatively uncontroversial, at least as far as metaphor goes. Its implica¬ tions don’t seem so very far-reaching. But the statement really makes two quite significant claims, one about photographs and the other about stories. It claims, first, that there is a language of representation to which photography belongs and, second, that that language tells stories, says something to some¬ body. The second point is less controversial than the first, its somewhat min-

Coming to Terms

imalist definition of story notwithstanding. The crucial element in story is agency, which, in the case of the photograph, may be located in the viewer. The viewer of any found photograph, for example, makes of its subject what he or she will, and the likelihood is that he or she will make it mean some¬ thing by endowing it with narrative capabilities. The photograph will in this sense be made to “tell” about its subject. But the telling is no more than a metaphor. Photographs do not really tell stories any more than paintings can speak; yet the metaphor sticks, in part, perhaps, because of the testimonial use to which photographs are frequently put. Is this, then, what it means to say that photography “belongs” to a language of representation? That because a photograph may be understood to “tell sto¬ ries,” may even be used to “bear witness” in other storytelling, it fulfils some criteria that allow it to participate in language? On the contrary. By claiming that photography belongs to language, I don’t mean to suggest that photogra¬ phy is itself a language (though that viewpoint, as I will show in a moment, certainly has its proponents). Nor am I simply extending the metaphor of pho¬ tograph as speech. I am suggesting instead that photography acquires mean¬ ing through its relationship with language and that considering how photog¬ raphy works requires considering the workings and effects of language, restoring language to photography. Most essentially, of course, to claim that a photograph “belongs” to a language of representation is to assert a relation¬ ship between photography and language. The existence and nature of that re¬ lationship has been for years the subject of critical discussion, and like pho¬ tography itself, its various incarnations have provided the basis for very different theories. The most recent and, arguably, most helpful contributor to this discussion is W. J. T. Mitchell, who charts the shape of the debate by identifying “two basic descriptions” of the relationship between photography and language which are “fundamentally antithetical,” owing to their proponents’ differing ideas concerning the nature of photography itself.4 One description is that of Ernst Gombrich, who has described photography as at least partly natural or nonconventional. “As far as I can make out,” wrote Gombrich in 1961, “prim¬ itive tribes that have never seen such images [as line drawings or photographs] are not necessarily able to read them. But it would be wrong to conclude from this fact that the symbolism of photography is merely conventional. It appears to be learned with surprising speed once the nature of the required adjustment is understood.”5 So quickly and irreversibly is this learned adjustment made

4 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Uni¬ versity of Chicago Press, 1994), 281. 5 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 53.

Framing the Victorians

that it ceases to be conventional; it is, in other words, naturalized. Gombrich suggests that the decoding of photography is limited to the first act of reading a photograph and therefore is the product not of the individual photograph itself but of the medium, which, once learned, becomes second nature. Photography, he thus implies, is able to function outside or beyond coded systems such as language, operating at a higher, purer, more immediate level. From Gombrich’s viewpoint it is in fact the very absence of code in the reader s ex¬ perience of photography that renders it so intimate with the world of things it represents. Photography survives not in but as language; it bypasses other systems and thereby speaks with greater directness. The other description of the relationship of photography to language—the “dominant view” of “sophisticated commentators” such as Victor Burgin, as Mitchell puts it—emphasizes instead the conventional nature of photographs, by insisting on the primacy of the reading process Gombrich denies as part of the way a photograph is made to mean.6 It is not merely that a photograph, like language, must be decoded but that the omnipresence of language itself additionally complicates its decoding. For Burgin, “seeing is not an activity di¬ vorced from the rest of consciousness.” Thus the act of looking at a photo¬ graph brings “subjective consciousness” to bear on the object of study. Pho¬ tography, like any other art form, cannot be considered a “‘purely visual’ medium,” nor can it be separated from the invasive textuality of the world in which it is read: “we rarely see a photograph in use which is not accompanied by writing. . . . even the uncaptioned ‘art’ photograph, framed and isolated on the gallery wall, is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermin¬ gle and exchange one for the other.”7 Burgin insists on the intimacy of any photograph with language, from which it cannot be extracted, and his refusal to accede to a theory of photography as pure vision uninvaded by language stresses photography’s conventional relationship with the objects it repre¬ sents. In place of a naturalized relationship of the kind Gombrich suggests, Burgin conceives of photography as no closer than painting to words and no closer than words to things. In his own examination of the relationship between language and photog¬ raphy, Mitchell’s concern isn’t to disprove one or the other of these views but to examine what might be at stake for both parties. While he acknowledges the popularity of Burgin’s position, he also questions the reasons for that pop¬ ularity. What, after all, he asks, is especially “true or desirable” about the fluid

6 Mitchell, Picture, 282. 1 Victor Burgin, “Seeing Sense,” The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Posumodemity (Lon¬ don: Macmillan Education, 1986), 53, 51.

23

•

Coming to Terms

model of exchange between photography and language posited by such crit¬ ics?8 Conversely, why do other people (unfashionable but persistent nonetheless) still hang on to the opposing idea, traditionally associated with positivism and now with “naive” realism, that photographs are somehow privileged visual information free of the muddying cultural convention that is language? In answer to the latter question, Mitchell suggests that perhaps Gombrich’s defense of the nonlinguistic character of photography is not open to “ordinary” forms of persuasion and debate because it is ideological at base; believing in a language of photography provides a way of looking. The ideology that informs the nonconventional status of the photograph is nonnegotiable. For Burgin too, the obviousness of the photograph’s conventionality cannot be denied or even disputed. The ideologically bound position that informs the view of the photograph as conventional cannot admit of any degree of immediacy. For Mitchell, the absolutism of both camps on the question of photography’s relationship with language is most satisfactorily restated, though not re¬ solved, by Barthes’s classic discussion of denotation and connotation in the photographic text.9 Barthes subsumes and defies the ostensive exclusivity of both positions, identifying the paradoxical coexistence in any photograph “of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the photograph).”10 According to Barthes, all photographs participate in both analogical and rhetorical relations, forming a complicated “network,” as Mitchell puts it, “of denotation and connotation.” In fact photography’s “prim cipal connotation or ‘coded’ implication is that it is pure denotation, without a code.”11 Whether from certain standpoints photographs work through or above (or below) words, however, the constant remains the message, the subject, the thing that is narrated. A photograph for Barthes is thus both lam guage—a message in need of decoding—and nonlanguage—a “message with¬ out a code.”12 To say that photography “belongs” to a language of representation, as I did earlier, is thus (if we follow Barthes) to suggest its participation in each of these relationships, literal, metaphorical, denotative, connotative. It is to say that photographs at some point and in different ways always have to do with lan¬ guage, with a speaking subject, and therefore, by extension, with narrative. It 8 Mitchell, Picture, 283. 9 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image^Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 15-31. 10 Ibid., 19, quoted in Mitchell, Picture, 284. 11 Mitchell, Picture, 284, 285. 12 Barthes, Image, 17.

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24

Framing the Victorians

is also to admit photography into a connoted relationship with the world it represents. It is to say that, notwithstanding and also because of its apparently “natural” relationship with the world it represents, photography, like lam guage, has a code that must be decoded if it is to be read. This sense of the necessity of decoding defers to a language-based context (we use words to de¬ code pictures, not just other pictures), which causes us to perceive photogra¬ phy as having to do with language, as being always embedded in words, “in¬ vaded” as Burgin says, “by language.”13 But it is the concomitant sense of immediacy, of bypassing the process, which draws us as powerfully to meta¬ phor, in which we say that the photograph speaks without words, and is there¬ fore unsullied by language.14 This popularly perceived superiority to words appealed to a wide array of at least superficially antagonistic Victorian philosophies. In the arts, photogra¬ phy served as convenient metaphor and analogy for romance as well as real¬ ism, in large part because, as I suggest in later chapters of this book, romance and realism are not schools of thought so much as ways of seeing; to discuss them it is not just useful but in fact necessary to posit models of visuality. Pho¬ tography was the most exciting representational innovation of midcentury and its power in the public imagination was profound; so it is hardly surpris¬ ing to see it emerge onto the pages of both commercial sensationalism and self-consciously literary fiction. The strength with which the idea of photography took hold, the burgeon¬ ing popularity of its practice, and its gradually increased accessibility to all classes have a lot to do with the centrality of photographs in nineteenth-cen¬ tury discussions of visual realism. But ultimately the major reason for photog¬ raphy’s rapid aesthetic and testimonial ascent had to do with the cultural de¬ bates that shaped its reception and that it in turn helped to shape. The majority of these debates concerned realism: how to achieve it, how its ends were best served, what it was, and whether, indeed, human experience could be satisfactorily expressed through its paradigms. Although at this point it might seem useful to give a compact clarification of terms (what is realism? what is romance?), there are several reasons to avoid this exercise. To give a preliminary definition of each in isolation implies a simple opposition that can be grasped by the handy reduction of several prin13 Burgin, “Seeing Sense,” 51. 14 The tradition within which the metaphor proves so useful privileges the image over the word and heralds a richer language of things graspable without the muddying distortion of lan¬ guage. This tradition, of course, predates photography by two thousand years or so and is traced by Gombrich to Plato’s Phaedo, passed down to the Christian tradition via the Neoplatonists to shape our vision (and metaphors) still. For Burgin, “such relics” obstruct “our view of pho¬ tography” (“Seeing Sense,” 70; see also Mitchell, Picture, 281-85).

25

•

Coming to Terms

ciples to one word. It is true that a desire for the simplicity of opposition is especially strong where realism is concerned,15 but one of my aims in this book is to suggest reasons for resisting such oppositions and for discussing realism and romance not as polarized or even distinct entities but as variants of each other in a wider culture of realism. Perhaps most important, any choice of de¬ finition without specific regard for history and geography pulls the term out of the context within which it acquires meaning. The words have significance only through their use in the world that is both their site of contest and their most urgent object of desire. My definitions of the two terms are, therefore, as ambivalent as they are cautious. Realism represents the world in a way that seems realistic to its readers, but romance does something very similar and should, therefore, like photography itself, be considered expressive of a larger culture of realism which fostered and encouraged certain viewpoints or ways of seeing.

Realism and Photography: Ways of Seeing As much as photography suggested ways of seeing in a literal sense—how to look at particular objects—so it also implied metaphorical ways of seeing— how to regard those objects. Photography’s prescriptive powers were greater than those of painting in part because a photograph looked more like the thing it was supposed to represent but also because people wanted it to be true. I have said that photography has an unusual relationship with the idea of truthfulness. Rudolph Arnheim talks about the “authenticity” of a photo¬ graph, “from which painting is barred by birth.”16 Barthes speaks of the “spe¬ cial credibility of the photograph,” of how the connotation of photography is able to assume completely “the ‘objective’ mask of denotation.”17 Built into the idea of photography is the fantasy of perfect re-presentation, a mirroring of the object which surpasses mimesis. A photograph, in theory, can more than replicate appearance. It can duplicate it. Further, being a physical trace of the world, a photograph participates in its subject matter through an indexical as well as iconic relation. The apparently limited interpretive space that exists between chemically produced image and material object is considerably less15 Hillis Miller notes the tendency of criticism of realism to “express itself in either/or di¬ chotomies.” J. Hillis Miller, “Is Literary Theory a Science?” Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Rehtion to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine (Madi¬ son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 155. 16 Rudolf Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of Califor¬ nia Press, 1986), 107. 17 Barthes, Image, 21.

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26

Framing the Victorians

ened, and thus its truthfulness is less open to (if not altogether removed from) debate. In fact, the ideal photograph, would, theoretically, eradicate dissent. The only possible response to the ideal photograph would be recognition and accord: recognition of the subject depicted and accord with one’s fellow human beings that this is, indeed, the way it looks. Ideal, or absolute, photogra¬ phy would affirm a bond not only between a photograph and its subject but between viewers who could not help but perceive its images in the same way. Clearly, there is no such thing as absolute photography, nor is there any such monolith as absolute realism. Like photography, however, most versions of re¬ alism seem in any case to depend on a faith in the possibility of shared vision. As I show in my later discussion of documentary photography, the faith pho¬ tography inspires in shared vision fires both its narrative and its prescriptive power. It is through its implicit affirmation of a community of viewers who see in similar ways that photography enters the domain of realism. Realism is an ostensibly consensual mode of representation, since to objec¬ tify a world, which is the project of realism, requires a shared agreement, a complicity, in what the object status of the world might be. Such an agree¬ ment is crucial to the implied unity of realistic narration, writes Elizabeth Ermarth, since unity “assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone.”18 As a consequence there is in re¬ alism a homogenization of represented experience which prescribes a way of being, a “normality,” as John Tagg puts it, “which allows a strictly delimited range of variations.” Realism thus offers a representational model that, while it appears capable of representing all human experience—everything real—at the same time limits what can be defined as real. Tagg describes such limita¬ tion as a process of “cross-echoing,” whereby the realist text continually draws upon a “reservoir of similar ‘texts’” at the same time as it differentiates itself from other texts.19 Reality is thus defined by intertextual relations that them¬ selves have no referent. Nevertheless, some belief in (or perhaps shared desire for) the existence of a referent is necessary for the formal continuance of re¬ alism. As George Levine notes, “Whatever else” literary realism may mean, “it always implies an attempt to use language to get beyond language, to dis¬ cover some non-verbal truth out there. The history of English realism obvi¬ ously depended in large measure on changing notions of what is ‘out there.’”20 Indeed, so changeable is that history that for contemporary critics, such as John Tagg, there is no “out there” out there: “What lies ‘behind’ the paper or ‘behind’ the image is not reality . . . but reference: a subtle web of discourse 18 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Prince¬ ton University Press, 1983), 65. 19 John Tagg, “Power and Photography, Part 1: A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,” Screen Education 36 (1980): 53. 20 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6.

2?

•

Coming to Terms

through which realism is enmeshed in a complex fabric of notions, represen¬ tations, images, attitudes, gestures and modes of action which function as everyday know-how, ‘practical ideology’, norms within and through which people live their relation to the world.”21 For Tagg, as for Levine, realism is wholly conventional, an ideological structure that provides, as Ermarth sug¬ gests, a sense of “uniformity at the base of human experience” which confirms the “solidarity of human nature.”22 In contrast, Roman Jakobson’s work on realism undermines its assertion of hegemony not only by emphasizing its historical and cultural partisanship but by insisting on the centrality of subjectivity: “We call realistic those works which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verismilitude,” he writes. But we also frequently take into account authorial intention: “A work is under¬ stood to be realistic if it is conceived by its author as a display of versimilitude, as true to life. ... A work may be called realistic if I, the person judging it, per¬ ceive it as true to life.”23 The determination of realism thus becomes a mat¬ ter of subjective response. Since readership is historically contingent, what best represents the real, according to this view, will be largely a matter of time and place. As Gillian Beer has observed, “The realistic novels of one age or audience have an uncanny way of becoming ‘romances’ in another setting.”24 Realism, according to Beer, is historically contingent, and its potency depends upon the reality—the historical, sociological, and cultural moment—within which its readers read. Jakobson goes a step further by claiming that realism may be recognized years later by critics whose judgment of what constitutes realism departs from the judgment of the work’s own historical moment. “A contemporary critic might detect realism in Delacroix,” he writes, “but not in Delaroche; in El Greco and Andrej Rublev, but not in Guido Reni; in a Scythian idol, but not in the Laocoon. A directly opposite judgment, howev¬ er, would have been characteristic of a pupil of the Academy in the previous century.”25 W. J. T. Mitchell argues strenuously against this catchall definition of real¬ ism in his critique of Nelson Goodman’s work. Like Jakobson, Goodman treats realism as relative and habitual instead of defining it in terms of illusion or resemblance.26 Goodman, complains Mitchell, produces a “bifurcated ac¬ count of realism” in his desire to “have it both ways”—‘“most of the time’ fa-

21 Tagg, “Power,” 53. 22 Ermarth, Realism and Consensus, 65. 23 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 20. 24 Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), 5. 25 Jakobson, Language, 23. 26 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

•

28

Framing the Victorians

miliar and traditional, but ‘sometimes’ novel and revelatory. Realism for Goodman, writes Mitchell, “is the familiar at time Ti; it is the unfamiliar at time T2.”27 In place of such overly “capacious” accounts, Mitchell calls for a more specifically conventional description, a recognition that realism cannot simply be equated with the familiar standard of depiction but must be urn derstood as a special project within a tradition of representation, a project that has ideological ties with certain modes of literary, historical, and scientific representation. No amount of familiarity will make Cubism or Surrealism ‘look’ (or, more importantly) count as realistic, because the values that underwrite these movements work at cross purposes with those of realism.28

Habituation, in other words, does not in itself render something realistic, even if it is no longer strange: “It is entirely possible for some style of depiction to become familiar, standard, and normal without its ever laying claim to ‘reab •

m?9

ism. Realism’s reputation has fallen on bad times. Victorian realism especially has suffered through its post-Foucauldian association with panopticism and restraint, its supposed patriarchal oppressiveness and lack of self-doubt, its emptiness, in other words, of those very attributes Jakobson and Goodman find to be its defining features. George Levine has come to the rescue by mak¬ ing the case for realism as a sophisticated exploration and expression of the very skepticism it appears to defy. Nineteenth-century realism, he says, “was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality. Its massive self-confidence implied a radical doubt, its strategies of truth telling, a profound self-consciousness.” Levine contends that realism dis¬ plays the self-consciousness we have come to associate with the romance, and points out that the act of writing is itself antithetical to realism, since “lan¬ guage, in representing reality, most forcefully demonstrates reality’s absence. At best, language creates the illusion of reality so that our current definitions of realism swerve from implying the possibility of direct representation to fo¬ cus on the difference between the medium and the reality whose absence it registers. Language, finally, can ‘represent’ only other language.” Writing by its very nature thus creates a tension between the experience of a thing and its representation, with the result that the reader of realism in particular must 27 Mitchell, Picture, 353. 28 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1987). 7329 Ibid., 72.

29

*

Coming to Terms

negotiate some path of belief between the understanding that it “tries to rep¬ resent reality and our sophisticated awareness that it cannot.”30 Victorian authors were particularly sensitive to the ironies of writing real¬ ism. That sensitivity is displayed in the most aggressively “realistic” works, which, as they assert the truthfulness and totality of their novelistic vision, are nevertheless preoccupied with the inherent and literal limitations of hu¬ man vision, and the concomitant difficulties of recording satisfactorily em¬ pirical data. Both British and American novels of the mid to late period show a fascination with ocular technologies which hints at their professional con¬ cern with the acts of seeing and recording: Hardy, Eliot, James, Hawthorne, and Dickens all feature the innovations of camera, stereoscope, and micro¬ scope and consider implicitly, if not explicitly, contemporary developments in theories of vision, classification, and organization, as well as new guidelines for the determination of significant information. As much as they represent scientific developments of the period, the many scientists, doctors, and stargazers in nineteenth-century novels also figure, of course, the dilemmas of their creators. The objectives of science and realistic fiction are, after all, close; like science, realism, as Edwin Eigner notes, “is interested in the effects of experience on individuals.”31 Miles Orvell finds in late nineteenth-centu¬ ry fiction a “deliberate analogy being proposed . . . between the scientific act of description and the literary one.” For Orvell, this analogy inevitably raises questions within the text concerning the nature of realism itself: “Is an accu¬ rate description the same as an artistically ‘true’ one? And how is such a true description best achieved? Through the use of established models and con¬ ventions or through direct observation? In pursuit of the real, should the writer-cum-scientist avoid the ‘commonplace’? Should he avoid the ‘photo¬ graphic’? Or should he emulate the objectivity of the camera? In short, how close to ‘the real thing’ should ‘realism’ come?”32 Post-Darwinian narrative in particular displays an awareness of the limitations and conflicts within the supposed camera objectivity of literary realism, just as it feels most crucially bound to address and produce it. James Krasner notes the paradox that “postDarwinian nature writers, while profoundly attentive to landscape and biolo¬ gy, choose a mode of representing nature based on visual perception that leads them inevitably toward a more abstract and psychological portrayal of natur¬ al landscape.” In order to “emphasize the profound spatial and temporal lim30 Levine, Realistic Imagination, 19-20, 7-8, 8. 31 Edwin M. Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel in England and America: Dickens, Bulwer, Melville, and Hawthorne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2.

32

Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 120.

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30

Framing the Victorians

itations besetting the human observer without diminishing the grand scheme of evolutionary nature in all its dynamism and multiplicity, Krasner claims, Darwin himself abandoned “the omniscient narrative eye common to nineteenth-century scientific and literary discourse and adopt[ed] one characterized by misprision, illusion, and limitation.”^ Krasner and Levine thus show nineteenth-century realism to be engaged with precisely those issues their cre¬ ators are most often charged with ignoring. Beyond this engagement, however, according to Levine, as a literary con¬ vention realism depends on certain expectations it fosters, primarily the “commonsense expectation that there are direct connections between word and thing.”34 From this viewpoint, realism has most to lose in modernism’s sup¬ posed divorce of word from thing, since to sever relations between them is es¬ sentially to doubt the communality of human experience which depends on an expression of their intimacy. In the realism of the middle to late nineteenth century, even as the fragility of human bonds is examined, those bonds are fre¬ quently affirmed and even strengthened through the distinctive relationship that exists between Victorian author and reader. Conventionally at least, re¬ alism suggests a shared vocabulary in which (at a given time) one word means one thing understood by all; it creates a world in which all who speak its lan¬ guage belong. That shared language is the substance of realism, which binds reader and author together in their illusion of containment and unity, their mutual but tacit desire for communality. The subjects and media of realism are primarily suggestive of the great faiths of the age, and in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and America what best represented the real for many people was photography. Photography, indeed, promised a superior grasp of reality, a realism more real than the thing itself. “You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it,” wrote Zola in 1901.3 5 Of course, Zola did not mean literally that you cannot claim to have seen something without first pho¬ tographing it; the exaggeration of his statement suggests instead his perception that photography offers a different way of looking at its subjects, a way that permits and perhaps forces a closer study of them. In place of the fleeting im¬ pressions of human vision photography substitutes the stasis of the slide under the microscope; the photograph itself slows down the act of looking to such an extreme that the observer sees what was never observed by the human eye. But neither was Zola suggesting (and nor am I) that the act of looking itself had been changed by photography. As Jonathan Crary notes, “Whether per-

33 James Krasner, The Entangled Eye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4, 5. 34 Levine, Realistic Imagination, 9. 35 Emile Zola, quoted in Sontag, On Photography, 87.

3i

'

Coming to Terms

ception or vision actually change [sic] is irrelevant, for they have no autonomous history.” As Crary’s own work shows, the determination of vision is not the product of “some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface.” That surface is formed by “the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs.”36 The field of perception is created from and made possible by the technologies of the day, and those who exist within it, who must perceive as that field dictates, are subject to the possibib ities and limitations within which it exists. Zola’s comment thus historicizes vision by suggesting that to see contemporarily—“really” to see—is to see through the medium of photography. Moreover, not only does nineteenthcentury visual culture demand familiarity with the photographic image, but additionally photography serves to reinforce the centrality of the act of look¬ ing to the culture of realism. Audrey Jaffe maintains that nineteenth-century spectatorship itself offers “a means of access to cultural life.”37 Indeed, one could argue more forcefully that to be denied the role of spectator in the sec¬ ond half of the nineteenth century is not so much to be exiled from its cul¬ ture of realism as to be identified instead as a subject for its speculations. Just as the technology of photography contributed to conventions of the perceptual field, so photography’s potential for detail, for verisimilitude, and for stasis became a standard in other forms of realism. Photography was en¬ dowed with the narrative burden of realism, which is to say that it had the as¬ sertive function of carrying what Mitchell calls a “belief system.”38 More than just a pointing finger, the photograph in use became a statement that this is the way things really are. As I have suggested, the ease with which photogra¬ phy was assimilated has to do in part with the receptive environment provid¬ ed by the larger culture of realism. It is more than a little ironic, however, that this ease testifies not only to the confidence photography inspired in Victori¬ an theories of presence and subjectivity but also to that culture’s doubts about the very same issues.

The Romance of Photography As hard as it is to find consensus concerning realism, definitions of romance are trickier still. Most critics use realism as a sort of standard from which ro36 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 6.

37

Audrey Jaffe, “Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol,” PMLA 109 (1994): 255. 38 Mitchell, Picture, 356.

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32

Framing the Victorians

mance may be identified as deviating, and thus, whatever their definition of realism, they define romance by negation: what realism is romance is not. They follow, that is, in a tradition established by nineteenth-century realism, which, according to Levine, “defined itself against romance because that form implied wish fulfillment rather than reality.”39 Contemporary accounts of romance thus generally present it as an alternative or in opposition to realism. Romance is said to focus on dreams rather than reality, its authors to be interested in the internal rather than external lives of their subjects. Eigner claims that mimetic (realist) writers describe the effect of experience on in¬ dividuals, and the metaphysical (romance) writers instead chart the na¬ ture of experience itself. For Eigner it is their goals that distinguish them. Metaphysical romance is preoccupied, he claims, “with explaining the why rather than the how of reality.” But even Eigner, who seems so committed to opposition, notes that “half the world of the metaphysical novel appears le¬ gitimately to warrant the designation of novel as opposed to romance. This half is firmly based in what the nineteenth century commonly regarded as re¬ ality. Its philosophy is positivist and/or utilitarian, its psychology and aesthet¬ ics are associational, its materialistic world view derives from John Locke and his empirical followers.” The “metaphysical novel”—as examples, Eigner cites works by Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, and others—may thus defy its own pre¬ sumed obsession with “the why ... of reality” and shift its attention to the con¬ sideration of a “materialistic world view,” because of the necessity of exposing the consequences of that world view, “so that metaphysics, which the posi¬ tivists had banned from philosophy, might be restored as a legitimate province for human inquiry.”40 In other words, the metaphysical novel, to use Eigner’s term, or romance, to use mine, for the sake of disproving realism is as likely to engage with its issues as it is to eschew them. This propensity raises a question that may appear to bring romance closer to the province of realism, for can we really say that a work “about” realism is distinctively different from a work “of” realism? Both kinds of works address the same questions, thereby verifying the centrality and significance of the questions. If the realist novel usually asserts the omnipotence of the creative subject, its very presence as writing, as Levine suggests, simultaneously works to undermine its own scientific absolutism. The romance merely posits with greater explicitness than realism the limitations of textual knowledge. But a work’s subject or its preoccupations hardly define its genre or catego¬ ry. Cubism, for example, may address itself to the limitations of realism or be a commentary on them and, as Mitchell writes, “is now a familiar, standard 39 Levine, Realistic Imagination, 9. 40 Eigner, Metaphysical Novel, 3, 5, 7.

33

*

Coming to Terms

style of Western painting”; nevertheless, “no one calls it ‘realistic.’” No one claims, in other words, that “‘this is how things are’ or ‘this is how a man really looks.’”41 Surely, to admit no difference at all between realism and n> mance is to open the bag of realism too wide. Realism, though, is not a bag capable of holding only a limited number of definitions. It is an ideology, a way of seeing, a system of historically contingent connotations. Produced within a culture of realism, nineteenth-century works of romance can never be wholly innocent of its shaping force; although they may seek sites of resistance to that culture, they nevertheless enforce its mores through the very patterns on which they depend to make meaning. Es¬ sentially, what I am proposing here, then, is not a simple restatement or new definition of the opposition between romance and realism, with illustrations from the field of photography, but rather a consideration of how that opposi¬ tion operated during a period in history when it most mattered. The differ¬ ences I note between the two are not essential; that is to say, they do not alone constitute the markings of genre. They do, nevertheless, indicate the places at which representational theories diverge. Whether one reads romance and realism as promoting inherently opposing philosophies or as merely seeking to define themselves against each other, the various debates on realism which played out in fiction from the 1850s to the 1880s were, as Beer states, “central to theories of fiction.” Superficially at least, romance offended realism in two ways, according to Beer, “at first, because it was not concerned with the actual: social conditions, ordinary peo¬ ple, the common chances of life. Then, when emphasis upon the conditionof-Eng land gave way in the late eighteen-fifties to a preoccupation with psy¬ chological realism, it offended because of its tendency to simplify and allegorize character, to offer tableaux instead of the processes of choosing.”42 The tendency of romance “to offer tableaux” has its descendants in the epiphany of modernism, with its flash of illumination and adjustment and its frequent urge, despite its own freneticism, toward pictorial stasis and silence. For this reason alone, photography proved useful to the plot mechanics of nineteenth-century romance by providing a means of image making whose in¬ stantaneous and even dramatic process draws attention to the act of translat¬ ing life into image. Picture making is, of course, one of the ways in which ro¬ mance historically defines itself. Wendy Steiner argues that romance is the “genre of literature most consciously obsessed with its relation to the visual arts,” in part because of the usefulness of dreams to romance’s positioning of anti- or (to use Mitchell’s term) ir-reality. In romance internal or sublime

41

Mitchell,

42

Beer,

Picture,

Romance,

352, 356.

68, 69.

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34

Framing the Victorians

truths frequently bypass language and are revealed to the chosen few through the dream or vision that must then be deciphered. But romance is also preoccupied with images because, as Steiner claims, “paintings remind the reader that the romance is not merely the story of love but the story of love pen ceived.”43 Central to the romance are subjectivity, how one sees, how one in turn is seen. Like realism, then, romance has human vision as its primary obsession. Romance has at its center a person or persons viewing and viewed, an observer or spectator whose abilities to see fully, partially, or not at all indicate his or her moral as well as physical acuities. Whereas in realism the insufficiencies of vision are frequently expressed beyond the margins of story in the inadequacies of prose or, as Levine writes, in the very presence of language itself, in romance the problematic limitation or fragmentariness of scopic knowledge is overt, a result of sharpened narrative focus upon its subject’s status as an observer. The two narrators of Bleak House, for example, make inescapable the complexities of narrative truth and perception through a kind of telescopic re¬ versal, an interchange of perspective from subject to object and back which ultimately undermines the privilege of either position. Esther’s first-person ac¬ count of events points up the limitations of a lone consciousness; determined as she is by her history and her literary tastes, Esther is doomed to become the figure of melodrama her journal promises. The mobile voice of present histo¬ ry, on the other hand, promises omniscience through virtue of its unconfined vision but can ultimately offer neither understanding nor closure in its depic¬ tion of human suffering. While the status of the observer is continually rede¬ fined in such works, human presence in the form of the gaze itself remains a constant. “The fact that art never goes on in a vacuum between work and artist,” writes Steiner, “but always includes an observer is what makes it a moral fact and an essential part of the ongoing narrative of history.”44 That narrative, whether romance or realism, cannot proceed without an observer whose significance to both ways of viewing the world unites them in their mu¬ tual preoccupation with subjectivity. Despite the obvious and central importance of the observer to photography, as well as to romance and to realism, I will not attempt here to define his or her status or to describe the vast social mechanism of eighteenth- and nineteeth-century Europe within which that status took shape. Foucault has reconstructed that mechanism in his works, and Crary has explained how the observer was transformed in the early decades of the 1800s into “an

43 Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 120, 48. 44 Ibid., 120.

35

*

Coming to Terms

object of investigation and a locus of knowledge.”45 According to Crary, that transformation—the shift, as I described it earlier, from spectatorship to cub tural appropriation and enforced subjectivity—was not launched by the invention of photography. In fact, Crary says, “a reorganization” of the observer occurred before the invention of photography, and it constituted a far more important transformation in the history of vision.46 If Crary is right, photography should be considered not the herald of modernity but a symptom of an earlier shift in the modernization of vision. In either case, photography’s most noticeable effect on the culture that produced it was to reinscribe the cerrtrality of spectatorship and visual theory to philosophical debates within that culture. For perceptual questions—how to see—it substituted an emphatic command: “Look!”4/ Victorian literature echoes photography’s call to look and its promise of new vision in questioning perception, self-knowledge, and realism itself. In ro¬ mance and melodrama of the middle to late century such questions are often confronted through the magical extremism of the camera, whose products are frequently capable of extraordinary feats. Photographers in such works are not sober agents of realism but artists of the fantastic, figures of wild and ques¬ tionable science. Realism, on the other hand, tends not to figure the camera or photographers much at all but rather to use the idea of photography as a structuring principle or standard of truth to which the language itself aspires. For this reason in Chapter 3 I compare works by three authors who are drawn to photography as a way of stating what is essentially the same problem. The

45 Crary, Techniques, 16. 46 Crary rejects the model of vision that posits the invention of photography as a water¬ shed in modernity and, instead, identifies a conflict implicit in what he calls the “core narra¬ tive” of “most theories of modern visual culture,” which attempt to explain how with “Manet, impressionism, and/or postimpressionism, a new model of visual representation and percep¬ tion emerges that constitutes a break with several centuries of another model of vision, loose¬ ly definable as Renaissance, perspectival, or normative” (Techniques, 3-4). The problem with such theories, he claims, is that their “narrative of the end of perspectival space, of mimetic codes, and of the referential” is at odds with another periodization of the history of European visual culture—namely, the invention of photography and other forms of realism, which have historically been presented as “part of the continuous unfolding of a Renaissance-based mode of vision in which photography, and eventually cinema, are simply later instances of an on¬ going deployment of perspectival space and perception” (4). Thus, as Crary demonstrates, the received model of vision in the nineteenth century tends to be oddly “bifurcated,” with a sup¬ posedly new way of seeing emerging on one level while, on another, vision remains “embed¬ ded within the same general ‘realist’ strictures that had organized it since the fifteenth centu¬ ry” U)47 As Barthes notes, “The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; it points a finger at certain vis-a-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language” (Camera, 5).

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36

Framing the Victorians

work of the first is uncontroversially identified as romance; that of the second may be controversially so identified; and that of the third is sometimes described as “psychological realism.” To begin, however, I consider some of the early observers. If nineteenth-century culture was as preoccupied as I have been suggesting with the limits and possibilities of human observation, those preoccupations have their expression in writing, particularly by persons selfconscious about their own roles as observers. In the second half of this book I examine some photographic images that were the consequence as well as the cause of certain ways of looking; in the first half, I am interested in some men¬ tal images of photography. How was photography imagined? What kind of a life did it have in the minds of those most fascinated by it? Perhaps most im¬ portant, what kind of powers did it appear to bestow on those who engaged in it? Since the most obsessed are likely to have been its practitioners, it would seem helpful at this point to turn to their own reflections on photography.

CHAPTER

2

Pencil of Fire The Photographer Speaks

Before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who —never but in uncreated light Dwelt from eternity— took a pencil of fire from the hand of the “angel standing in the sun,” and placed it in the hands of a mortal. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859 The photographer is the essence of photography. —Alphonse de Lamartine, 1858

A

t the first meeting of the Photographic Society of London in 1853, its honorary secretary, Roger Fenton, addressed his fellow members “upon the mode in which it is advisable the Society should conduct its Labours.” Its aims, said Fenton, were clear enough: “The principal objects of the Society [are] the collection and the diffusion of information, the verification and explanation of new discoveries, the com¬ parison of processes and of their results, and the improvement of the me¬ chanical and optical machinery of the Art.” The methodology was to be sci¬ entific, Linnaean, organized around principles of gathering and sorting. The work was to begin with “the collection of information,” followed by classifi¬ cation and a hierarchization of knowledge. “One of [the society’s] simplest, but not least important offices,” continued Fenton, “will be to define what is al1 Roger Fenton, “Upon the Mode in Which It Is Advisable the Society Should Conduct Its Labours,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London, March 3, 1853, 9, 8.

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37

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38

Framing the Victorians

ready known. . . . Next, it will be a register of all new facts, and herein will consist much of its value.”1 That the journal should devote itself to the accu¬ mulation and registration of facts was unsurprising, given its self-conscious al¬ legiance to positivism; given the subject matter, indeed, the preoccupation with documentation of the empirical world was in many ways apt. In 1709 George Berkeley maintained that perceptions are acquired “in the same manner” as are the meanings of spoken or written words.2 The speed of recognizing a signifier for a signified in perception as well as language is such, he theorized, that the signifier becomes invisible: through a syntactic confla¬ tion the word/perception becomes, in a sense, its referent. Had Berkeley lived to see it, photography might have provided him with a more striking instance of such conflation. At least ten years before Fenton addressed the first meet¬ ing of the Photographic Society, photographs had begun to stand for, and as, those persons and objects they were intended to represent; they were both things in themselves (to be accumulated) and records of them (to be regis¬ tered). Moreover, apprehended as representing facts about the world, pho¬ tographs were widely understood to need little more interpretation than a fact, perhaps less, for they showed what they were. Photography’s embrace by an overtly positivist mainstream culture had a profound effect not only on its own history but on the culture’s representational theories. “As people became ha¬ bituated to absorbing their visual information from photographic pictures printed in printers’ ink,” writes William Ivins, “it was not long before this kind of impersonal visual record had a most marked effect on what the communi¬ ty thought it saw with its own eyes. It began to see photographically, it stopped talking about photographic distortion, and finally it adopted the photograph¬ ic image as the norm of truthfulness in representation.”3 Although Ivins per¬ haps overstates the case somewhat with his description of an absolute and wholly uncritical hegemonic shift, its representational authority did allow photography to serve in certain contexts as a yardstick of reality, a fertile stereotype that not only reflected but created standards. Moreover, as Chap¬ ters 4 and 5 make clear, since aberrancy is a priori dependent on normativity, photography in the service of realism was used to identify as well as reaffirm boundaries between different human groups. The photograph’s potential to standardize, part of the basis for its authori¬ ty as a way of seeing, was due in part to its physical contiguity with those ob¬ jects it represented. The consequence of the play of sunlight on chemically treated surfaces, a photograph—like a shadow’s undeniable sign of presence—

2 George Berkeley, “An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” secs. 143-45, Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings, ed. David M. Armstrong (1709; New York: CollienMacmillan, 1965), 274 353 3 William Mills Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (London: Routledge, 1953), 94. -

-

39

'

Pencil of Fire

belonged to nature. By its very processes, a photograph affirmed a natural relation to the world and facilitated an analogical reading—assertively nonconventional, nonrhetorical, nonwritten. Logically enough, therefore, the assertion of the natural over the conventional relationship of the photograph with the world had the result of marginalizing the intermediary presence of the photographer as a creative artistic force. This marginalization was assist' ed by various kinds of writing which ultimately worked in different ways and for different reasons toward the same ends. Curiously, despite the personal interest of photographers in the promotion of photography as an art, their own words as reported by the proceedings of their clubs and societies occasionally served the same purpose of distancing them from their works by empowering the photographs as self-evident facts and disempowering photographers as mere servants of the camera. Widespread dissent about what photography could or should do and who its practitioners were or ought to be revealed the centrality of class issues to a debate only su¬ perficially concerned with aesthetics and ultimately determined the language choices made by photographers in their discussions of photography. In turn, these language forms contributed to a new discourse in which the figure of photography itself was shaped.

Classifications, Metaphors, and Hierarchies From the beginning, photographers fell between two schools as they began to practice the “art-science.” The Victorian inability to locate photography precisely within either aesthetics or testimony was reflected not only in the popular term used to describe photography but also in the titles of contempo¬ rary journals. The full title of London’s first (and noncommercial) photo¬ graphic journal, established in 1853, was carefully inclusive: Journal of the Pho¬ tographic Society of London Containing the Transactions of the Society and a General Record of Photographic Art and Science. H. FL Snelling’s New York monthly emerged in 1851 under the title Photographic Art-Journal, but was two years later renamed Photographic and Fine Art Journal. The two-word insert speaks an anxiety of classification, the “and” signifying the differentiation of photography from art about which photographers were to disagree so vehe¬ mently. Fears that their artistic status was being called into question were well founded. The preparations for the second Great International Exhibition of 1862 saw heated public debate concerning the commissioners’ classification of photography as machinery and, by extension, its identification of photog¬ raphers as mechanics. H. P. Robinson remembered that “photography was not well treated, but was stuck up in a damp tower, that called for much enthusi-

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4

°

Framing the Victorians

asm to visit.”4 Photographers across Britain were infuriated. One member of the Birmingham Photographic Society sent notice to the Photographic Journal that “this meeting is of opinion that the classification of Photography by the Commissioners in their programme of regulations for the proposed Intemational Exhibition of 1862, is both unfair, discourteous, and unjust.”5 Editors of the British Journal of Photography urged their readers against accepting an invitation to what they perceived as supper “in the kitchen.” Photographers, they declared, “require that their productions shall be recognised as ‘works of art,’ and as such reasonably demand a rectification of the mis-classification adopted. If this be not so, why do artists interfere in photography at all? Why not let those artisans, photographers, follow out their own mechanical devices?”6 The metaphors—and the treatment—were in fact nothing new. Language generated by the earliest acts of photography betrayed and created a vision of photography as mechanical, its agents as mechanics, workers who must eat “in the kitchen.” The photographer ranked no higher than “a butterman or a butcher. . . . Local lawyers and doctors exclude him from the professional class, while society generally turns up its aesthetic nose and regards him simply as a shopkeeper.”7 The London journal Photography habitually referred to the photographer as “the operator”; the American Journal of Photography termed photography “the craft.” Such words did not pass without complaint, despite their long history of usage; as late as 1892 one photographer mused: I have often wondered why such an intelligent set of men as my brethren of the camera have not invented a more appropriate name than “operator” for the man who well lights and poses the human figure. Surely, a first-class man who, if he has not exactly had an art training, has enough innate artistic feeling or in¬ stinct—whichever you like to call it—to compose a pleasing photographic pic¬ ture, is worthy of a better title than the prosaic and mechanical-sounding “oper¬ ator”; a word which is apt to set one thinking of telegraphists and typewriters.8

4 H. P. Robinson, “Autobiographical Sketches,” Practical Photographer 9.98 (1898): 29. 5 Thomas Brown, Letter, Photographic Journal, August 15, 1861, 240.

6 British Journal of Photography, July 15, 1861, 247. 7 J. Macer Wright, “On the Present Position of Photography in England,” British Journal of Photography Annual (1882): 147, quoted in John Taylor, “Landscape and Leisure,” Life and Landscape: P. H. Emerson, Art and Photography in East Anglia, 1885-1900, ed. Neil McWilliam and Veronica Sekules (Norwich, England: University of East Anglia, Sainsbury Centre for Vi¬ sual Arts, 1986), 75. 8 F.J .A., “What’s in a Name?” Yearbook of Photography and Photographic News Almanac (Lon¬ don, 1892), 73.

41 • Pencil of Fire

That the “brethren of the camera” might not have “exactly had an art training” and thus could not aspire beyond being mere operators of their machines was a troubling issue for those photographers who actively promoted photog¬ raphy as an art and themselves as artists for largely social reasons. At a meet¬ ing of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1855, one member observed that by connecting art with photography, photographers would be able to “increase [their] own splendour of appearance, and so cut a better figure.”9 Cutting a better figure would be more problematic if photography were classed as an in¬ dustrial technique, its agents as mere workers in the factories of pictorial re¬ production. Critics of photography’s claim to higher status relentlessly employed metaphors of machinery and assembly-line work, but photographers them¬ selves used these metaphors to differentiate the work of the operator from that of the artist. Thus they provided a means to distinguish between types of pho¬ tographers as much as types of photography. Practitioners of pictorial photog¬ raphy were among the most vocal in their opposition to street photography; they used aesthetic grounds to excuse an opposition obviously based in class. The vast majority of photographers were in fact portrait makers for the mid¬ dle classes, whose representational goals might be summed up by the goals of the Photographic Society—“to define what is already known”—and whose fortunes, like their philosophies, were unquestionably linked to the continued progress of realism. Accurate as their products might be, such photographers must not suppose “that the mere powers of imitation constitute a talent,” warned one reader of the Journal of the Photographic Society. “Were such the fact, a letter-copying machine, albeit made of cast iron only, might be dubbed a ‘clever fellow,’ with about as much reason as a mere mechanical photogra¬ pher might be dubbed a ‘photographic artist.’” Of concern, even alarm, to the author are not so much the products of photography as the possibility that any individual may join the ranks of photographers. He reflects on the evolution of photography from its early days when it was an enterprise open even to those without “genius”: In order to produce a pure photographic image upon either glass or paper, it re¬ quired ... no more education, talent, or application than sufficed to teach any individual the art of blacking shoes, and nothing like the education or talent nec¬ essary for acquiring the merest elements of the most insignificant mechanical trade. So soon as the tyro had mastered the difficulty of obtaining a clean plate,

9 Mr. Foard, “The Connection of Art with Photography,” Liverpool Photographic Journal, February 10, 1855, 16.

•

42

Framing the Victorians

focusing his object, calculating his time, and weighing his ready-mixed chemi¬ cals, his “art” was learnt—so far as its mechanical principles were concerned, and the tyro at once soared high upon his full-fledged wings a “Professor” of photog¬ raphy, claiming to rank both as a gentleman and an artist.

Note that the writer’s criticisms of those persons lacking the education to be¬ come photographic artists have nothing to do with the value (or lack there¬ of) of the pictures they produced; rather they focus on the ease with which a photographer might transform himself from a bootblack to a dangerous Icarus, by implication doomed to fall. Even where the writer, C. S. Herve, does at¬ tend to the quality of contemporary photography, he is offended not merely by its aesthetic poverty but by its ubiquitousness: Our streets and thoroughfares are thronged with pictorial display, exhibiting every abortion of art, in the shape of hard, harsh, crude, unsightly representa¬ tions, void of all natural grace or artificial elegance, destitute of all actual per¬ spective, without any balance of light and shade or proper disposition of attitude, and, in short, so destitute of all those artistic attributes which go to constitute pictorial merit, that not even the unquestionable fidelity of resemblance can rec¬ oncile the said production to the eye of even moderate taste.

There are, however, some exceptions to this rule, and it is, after all, to these exceptions that Herve addresses his letter, writing as he is in the pages of their journal: “That there are now, and always have been, even from the beginning, photographers who are educated men, who are competent artists, and who are even men of extensive science, is not to be denied; and that they have pro¬ duced photographic pictures worthy of being called works of even high art is perfectly unquestionable. But how, and why has this been? Because they were artists before they became photographers.”10 Photography, the author implies, cannot be used as a pair of wings to reach new social heights. A photographer must be an artist and a gentleman first be¬ fore his photographic works can be considered art. Photography’s frequent fig¬ uration as mechanical work and its association with menial labor were obvi¬ ously in part the consequence of anxiety about the wide social range of photographers and no doubt contributed to its metaphoric evolution as a product of science rather than art between the mid and late nineteenth cen¬ tury. The themes underlying photography’s progress as a subject of discourse reveal a startling consistency of concerns through the years. While the pho¬ tographer’s status was often ostensibly left to one side, photography as a topic 10 C. S. Herve, letter, Journal of the Photographic Society of London, May 21, 1858, 223.

43

*

Pencil of Fire

and practice was shaped by analogies relentlessly informed by class and, in¬ evitably, gender. Threatening in its otherness, photography was imaged as both worker and woman. Frank Floward, speaking to members of the Liverpool Photographic Soci¬ ety in 1853, was not the first to claim the “true value” of photography was to be a “handmaid or assistant of the fine arts.”11 The previous year Sir William J. Newton in an address to the society, “Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and in Its Relations to the Arts,” stated his opinions “respecting the mode of applying Photography as an assistant to the Fine Arts.”12 But if pho¬ tography was a servant to the artistic world, it was a very troublesome one. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, herself a photographer and married to the first pres¬ ident of the Photographic Society of London (from 1894 the Royal Photo¬ graphic Society of Great Britain), wrote in 1857 of the difficulty of control¬ ling the handmaid: “You are dealing with one of those subtle agencies which, though Ariel-like it will serve you bravely, will never be taught implicitly to obey.”13 Photographers in their most eloquent or pretentious moments de¬ scribed photography as a divine muse, a goddess of truth and nature; but they also frequently figured it as a distraction and a siren, lying in wait to seduce the serious artist from his path. Newton warns of “the seductive nature of. . . Photography . . . calculated to divert [the artist] from his principal object in the earlier part of his studies”; George Shadbolt, one of the founders of the Photographic Society of London and later (1857-1864) the editor of the Liv¬ erpool and Manchester Journal which became the British Journal of Photography, calls photography “this seductive pursuit”; Eastlake conflates the two im¬ ages of servant and female by observing the potential of photography, “the bondwoman,” to make art into a “freewoman.”14 Metaphors of class and gen¬ der are neither accidental nor infrequent in the history of photographic dis¬ course. The richest sources of such associations were the journals of those so¬ cieties—most notably, the Photographic Society of London—whose readers did not depend upon photography for a livelihood. The first premise upon which such societies were founded was that photography was indeed an art, and one that could be of democratic benefit. It is especially intriguing, then, that their proceedings generated such evidence of unease concerning the role

11 Frank Howard, “Photography Applied to Fine Art,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London, January 21, 1854, 154. 12 Sir William J. Newton, “Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and in Its Relations to the Arts,” ibid., March 3, 1853, 7. 13 Eastlake, “Photography,” 456. 14 Newton, “Upon Photography,” 7; George Shadbolt, “On the Renovation of Collodion That Has Become Spoilt by Keeping,” Journal of the Photographic Society, July 21, 1853, 88; Eastlake, “Photography,” 466.

• 44 Framing the Victorians

of photography in society in general and its artistic merits in particular, while commercially oriented publications, such as London’s Photography: The Trade Journal of the Amateur, the Profession, and the Trade (1888), enjoyed jokes at the expense of working-class photographers but expressed no concern about their approach to the portals of high art. Although Elizabeth Eastlake’s 1857 essay on photography was not published in a photographic journal (it reached a wider audience through its publication in the Quarterly Review), it betrays all the contradictory concerns expressed by the Photographic Society and plays off various popular romantic notions of what the act of photography entailed. Picturing photography as an erratic Ariel, for example, an irrepressible force that will not be contained, Eastlake goes on to create a mythical history for photography, and traces its genesis to the deistic “magician who first attempted to enlist the powers of light in his service,” referring not to chemistry but to “the sorcery of Niepce.” The photographer who has come into this magical inheritance assumes mystical pow¬ ers, so that “at the delicate film of collodion—which hangs before him finer than any fairy’s robe, and potent only with invisible spells—he literally does no more than wink his eye, tracing in that moment, with a detail and preci¬ sion beyond all human power, the glory of the heavens, the wonders of the deep.”15 The language of magic and mysticism was a popular resource for writers not yet focused on the meaning of photography but fascinated with the romance of its accomplishment. “Photography,” concluded Friese Green in his paper on Fox Talbot, is like magician’s charm— We nurse the absent, in affection warm Present the distant, and retain the dead Shadows remaining, but the substance fled; For faces vanish like the dreams of night But live in portraits drawn by beams of light. Exquisite Nature caught in changing dress; Motion in photography appears at rest.16

15 Eastlake, “Photography,” 453. Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) was one of the earliest experimenters in photography. “Although the only example of his camera work that remains today appears to have been made in 1827,” writes Beaumont Newhall, “his letters leave no doubt that he had succeeded in fixing the camera’s image a decade earlier” (The His¬ tory of Photography [New York: Museum of Modern Art and Little, Brown, 1982], 13). 16 Friese Green, “Fox Talbot—His Early Experiments,” The Convention Papers. Supplement to Photography 1.36 (1889): 6.

45

'

Pencil of Fire

Green’s poem recalls an advertising slogan for daguerreotypy that echoes the same intimacy with mortality: “Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade,” it warned; “Let Nature imitate what Nature made.”17 There is a certain irony, of course, to the omnipresence of death in the Victorian culture of photography. Early subjects for the camera were corpses, frequently of children, who were represented as sleeping, or (with some careful cutting and pasting) as angels in clouds above their parents’ heads. On a less literal level, photography’s on¬ tology participates in the obsessively mortal by inviting, even insisting on, the contemplation of time’s passage. The irony lies in photography’s concomitant association with modernity, with the absolutely new, the up-to-date—its as¬ sociation, that is to say, with the rise of scientific realism and that culture’s ef¬ forts to escape the picturesque, the decadent, the morbid, the self-conscious¬ ly romantic. Figuring the photographer as a magician or an agent of the supernatural mystified the proceedings of photography while it diverted at¬ tention from its semiotic. But it also removed the photographer to the farthest reaches of society’s imagination, placing him at the social as well as artistic fringes of its world. Whereas Eastlake clearly delighted in her images of the photographer as a figure of magical genius and her representation of photography as a wiley fe¬ male genie, the major part of her essay in fact draws a rather less mystical pic¬ ture of photographs themselves. Far from being the results of unusual and cre¬ ative minds, treasured by the privileged few, in Eastlake’s essay photographs are the objects of mass production and ownership, consumed and found every¬ where, “in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the dingiest attic—in the soli¬ tude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the London gin-palace—in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and patterns of the millowner and manufac¬ turer, and on the cold brave breast on the battle-field.”18 The apparently class¬ less appeal and possession of photographs were the subject of continued, al¬ most obsessive observation. Decades later Andrew Pringle recalled: “Fifty years ago what poor man had a portrait of his wife and children? what moth¬ er could look on a picture that reminded her of the features of a son in foreign lands? what lover could carry near his heart her portrait? Now, what cottage so lowly as not to have its portrait album? Art, or, if you prefer it, portraiture, was then for the prince or the plutocrat; it is now for all.”19 Of this availability Eastlake professes to approve; indeed, she finds it a “pleasant” characteristic of photography “that it unites men of the most di-

17 Newhall, History, 32. 18 Eastlake, “Photography,”

443.

19 Andrew Pringle, Convention address, Photography

1.41 (1889): 486.

•

46

Framing the Victorians

verse lives, habits, and stations, so that whoever enters its ranks finds himself in a kind of republic, where it needs apparently but to be a photographer to be a brother.” The republic of photographers, in her vision a utopia charged with a holy mission, unite[s] in one uncertain and laborious quest the nobleman, the tradesman, the prince of blood royal, the innkeeper, the artist, the manservant, the general of¬ ficer, the private soldier, the hard-worked member of every learned profession, the gentleman of leisure, the Cambridge wrangler, the man who bears some of the weightiest responsibilities of this country upon his shoulder, and, though last, not least, the fair woman whom nothing but her own choice obliges to be more than the fine lady.

This last, of course, is Eastlake herself, slyly intruding into her own categories, squeezing anonymously into the democratic ideal. Yet just as she sets up this republic of brothers (and sisters), so she simultaneously threatens the communality of the vision, for there is, she observes, a distinction between pho¬ tographers. At the date of writing, Eastlake records 147 “higher representa¬ tives of the art,” but she also wonders “who can number the legion of petty dabblers, who display their trays of specimens along every great thoroughfare in London, executing for our lowest servants, for one shilling, that which no money could have commanded for the Rothschild bride of twenty years ago?”20 The bond between the “petty dabblers” and the “higher representatives” cannot hold up; indeed, Eastlake’s essay serves to render it meaningless. The upper-class photographer—frequently an amateur, a hobbyist—employs the services of the handmaid Photography and thereby creates Art. The working photographer—the operator, peddler, or street vendor—is himself employed by the “lowest servants” to produce what Herve describes as those “hard, harsh, crude, unsightly representations, void of all natural grace or artificial elegance.”21 If Eastlake’s professional photographer has any bonds, they are economic; his work is ruled by market forces. The new republic of photogra¬ phy is for the photographer an old autocracy. Other writers and journals promoted a more genuinely revolutionary image of the photographer as iconoclast, breaking old boundaries and dissolving both social and artistic distinctions. Fox Talbot, in his early book The Pencil of Nature (1844), sees photography as “an Art of. . . great singularity, which employs processes entirely new . . . having no analogy to any thing in use be-

20 Eastlake, “Photography,” 443, 444, 443. 21 Herve, letter, 223.

47

*

Pencil of Fire

fore.”22 As images, of course, photographs themselves were familiar rather than strange, extraordinary only in the degree to which they were able to assume likeness. It was the photographic process itself that was so unlike that of its pictorial ancestors and thus so fascinating to its observers, and the novel¬ ty of that process in turn influenced the popular figuration of the photogra¬ pher. Sharp witted, on the fringe, a harbinger of modernity, “the average pro¬ fessional photographer,” observed the American Journal of Photography, is “possessed of more than the average share of ingenuity.”23 “Photography is not content to follow,” wrote H. P. Robinson in a work serialized by the Journal of the Photographic Society of London, “but has traced a path for itself beside the other branches of the fine arts, and nobly maintains its way.”24 Moreover, the psychological independence of the photographer might find its way into his works, elevating them, despite their mechanical origins and reproductive ca¬ pabilities, into the provinces of art. Thus, in his book Pictorial Effect in Pho¬ tography, Robinson declares, “There is something different in each man’s mind, which, somehow, gets communicated to his fingers’ ends, and thence to his pictures,” for the photographer actually has a choice between fabricat¬ ing “a dry matter-of-fact map of the view, or a translation . . . [bearing] indi¬ cations of what is called feeling in art, and which almost rises into poetry.”25 The Journal of the Photographic Society of London, at this time under the edi¬ torship of Dr. Hugh Diamond, also claimed that its potential to reflect inde¬ pendent vision could raise photography to the level of artistry. To flesh out its message of individuality and idiosyncrasy, the journal employed metaphors of the unique craftsman: “Those who are proficient in the art of photography im¬ press all their pictures with an individuality—a something peculiar to them¬ selves,—an individuality, so to speak, perfectly distinct from choice of subject, or apart from manipulation. ... we have the mysterious impress of the indi¬ vidual mind upon each production.”26 Distinguishing between copy and imi¬ tation, the journal insists that the uniqueness of the photograph (the product of the “proficient”) guarantees it to be art. Photography is a craft, but a craft of artistic potential; or it is a laboratory, and its hero is a chemistry wizard. “All photographers,” says Eastlake, are “ex¬ perimentalists.”27 As a scientist, claims the Liverpool Photographic Journal, the 22 William H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, vol. i (London, 1844; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1964), n.p. 23 Charles Truscott, “Some Photographic Heresies,” American Journal of Photography 8.6 (1887): 98. 24 Henry Peach Robinson, “Photography, Artistic and Scientific,” Journal of the Photo¬ graphic Society of London, October 21, 1858, 48. 25 Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (London, 1869), 13-14. 26 Editorial, Journal of the Photographic Society of London, October 21, 1858, 37. 27 Eastlake, “Photography,” 452.

•

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Framing the Victorians

photographer has specialized knowledge: “He is not one of those who, work¬ ing by the rule of thumb, dissolves a little of this in some of that, and then stirs it into some of the other thing; on the contrary, he has accurately weighed and measured all his ingredients, and can compound the same again with the greatest certainty.”28 Educated in what were humorously called the black arts, the early photographer was set apart from painters and other artists by the very language that described his work.29 But although this particular rendition of the photographer figured him as shut away from society in the solitude of his darkroom, that darkroom was in fact portable, its surrounds changeable; and if the photographer was cut off from certain parts of society by the nature of his work, still he might think of himself as belonging to a society of photographers. Of course, the pedigree of that society was uncertain. Sir William Newton reminds his peers that pho¬ tography is “a wide field in which all persons are at full liberty to roam”; more¬ over, the photographer, free of a burdensome tradition of art history, “may take from photography what he requires; he is not bound or tied down to any rule that I know of.30 Eastlake represents the photographer as social libertine, mo¬ bile adventurer, entrepreneurial evangelist enjoying freedom from all re¬ straint. Servant to the lowest servant, the “petty dabbler” of her essay moves promiscuously from town to town, “wanted everywhere and found every¬ where,” so that “where not half a generation ago the existence of such a vo¬ cation was not dreamt of, tens of thousands... are now following a new busi¬ ness, practising a new pleasure, speaking a new language, and bound together by a new sympathy.”31 The sympathy that bound Eastlake’s “dabblers” (paradoxically, profession¬ als) with their “higher representatives” (more often leisured) was conspi¬ cuously absent for some of her readers; in fact, the Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Journal was so offended by the very idea of a brotherhood of pho¬ tographers that it extracted Eastlake’s essay at great length in order to demon¬ strate its absurdity, derided it for its “lofty strain of high-flown verbiage,” and summed up the whole as a “one-sided, unjust, and incorrect collection of state¬ ments.” Particularly distasteful were the passages detailing Eastlake’s vision of equality among photographers, and exemplary of “all the faults” of her essay

28 G. R. Berry, “Common Sense Applied to Photography—The Laws of the Science,” Liverpool Photographic Journal, January 14, 1854, 3. 29 The use of the term “black arts” grew from the use by early photographers of certain chemicals that dyed their hands black and whose poisonous fumes in a few rare instances killed the photographer. 30 Sir William J. Newton, Journal of the Photographic Society of London, June 21, 1853, 76-77. 31 Eastlake, “Photography,” 443.

49

‘

Pencil of Fire

were those extracts about brotherhood I have quoted. “We are truly pained,” said the reviewer, “to see an article like that... in the pages of one of our lit¬ erary organs of such sterling reputation for accurate and discriminating judg¬ ment.32 It is likely that the reviewer would have been doubly pained to learn the identity of its anonymous writer, since Eastlake’s apparently slim grasp of the chemical principles of photography proved that the writer must be not a pho¬ tographer but “an artist, possessing but a very shallow acquaintance with the principles of the science.”33 Eastlake, to the contrary, was a highly successful and prolific amateur photographer. Ironically enough, however, her essay’s im¬ agery reveals less her true enthusiasm and more her own ambivalence and dis¬ belief in a photographers’ “republic,” for in clarifying the social and artistic differences among photographers, she uses an imagery of social hierarchy to accord artistic value to the products of the gifted minority. “The broader the ground which the machine may occupy,” she writes, “the higher will that of the intelligent agent be found to stand.”34

The Open Field The distinction between art and photography was argued in several differ¬ ent guises, most frequently under the auspices of the art-science debate, but more pointedly during the middle decades of the century as part of an ongo¬ ing discussion concerning the photographer’s status. What did it mean to identify one photographer as an amateur, another as a professional? What claims did either have to be an artist? “On no photographic question is there such a wide diversity of opinion, such narrow limitation by some, such wide freedom by others,” said an editorial in Photography.35 Grace Seiberling has written at length on the culture of amateur photogra¬ phy in Britain and its influence on the history of photography. She points out in her study of work by members of the amateur Photographic Exchange Club: This group of people had traditionally had the right to the title of gentleman, and their education and way of life produced the outlook implicit in the amateur tradition. Other important early photographers . . . came from a group of uppermiddle class people whose status derived from their knowledge or profession, at

32 33 34 35

Editorial, Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Journal, May 15, 1857, 97, 95, 98. Ibid., 96. Eastlake, “Photography,” 468. “The Amateur Question,” Photography 1.12 (1889): 139.

•

50

Framing the Victorians

a time when professions such as medicine and law were becoming more special¬ ized and more highly respected, or even from their wealth.36

The early exclusivity of photography, owing in large part to its expense, guar¬ anteed its pretensions to art and determined the nature of its subjects. Its prac¬ titioners were educated in the history of the arts and represented their own world in their photographs of landscapes, country houses, still lifes, and por¬ traits. “Lady Blanche Hyems,” wrote Cuthbert Bede in 1855, assures me that she considers Photography to be par excellence the scientific amusement of the higher classes. . . . For the present at any rate, Photography has the patronage of aristocratic—may we not add, Royal?—amateurs. It has not yet become too common; nor indeed is it likely to become so. The profanum vulgus keep aloof from it; it is too expensive a pastime for the commonalty. And, what¬ ever the progress of the invention may do toward cheapening the apparatus re¬ quired by the Photographer, yet, I am inclined to believe that, at present it is only people with long purses who can afford to take up Calotyping as an amusement. And, more than this, it is only people with plenty of spare time on their hands who can afford to pay attention to it.37

Stripped to its essentials, the difference between amateurs and profession¬ als was one of class. Amateur photography claimed distinction for itself as art not merely on its merits but also through its practitioners (the upper middle class) and its patrons (nobility). During the furor over the classification of photography as mechanical for the International Exhibition of 1862, Antoine Claudet, a widely respected professional photographer, suggested a novel method for determining the artistic status of photography. “What more con¬ vincing proof,” he wrote, that photography is an art do we find than in the interesting fact that the Queen of England, who is so highly distinguished by the most refined taste in all mat¬ ters connected with the fine arts, has been induced (if not with her own fingers, at all events in directing personally the whole process) to work herself at pho¬ tography? From the beginning of photography Her Majesty has shown the great¬ est interest for that wonderful discovery, following from year to year the progress of the art, visiting with the most minute attention all the various Exhibitions of

36 Grace Seiberling with Carolyn Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7. 37 Cuthbert Bede, Photographic Pleasures Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil (London, 1855), 54, quoted in Seiberling, Amateurs, 99.

5i

*

Pencil of Fire

the Photographic Society established under her immediate Royal protection, and honoured by His Royal Highness The Prince Consort as its joint Patron. . . . ... is it not well known that Her Majesty has every year selected for her pri¬ vate collection the finest photographs exhibited? Surely the pictures selected by the Queen must have been stamped by some particular merit and a certain re¬ finement in the artistic feeling of the productions! It cannot be denied that in wishing to possess them, the Queen has herself classified photography among the fine arts!!38

His humorous tone notwithstanding, Claudet appears to be asserting that the aesthetic value of photography is determined by the class of persons wishing to purchase it, and he is of course absolutely right insofar as what is held to be artistic merit necessarily translates into monetary value. But in indexing the artistic value of photography to the social value of its purchasers, Claudet ig¬ nores the potential of the individual photograph to be good or bad, just as he seems to ignore the status of the photographer. In his version, its identification with royalty makes photography worthy regardless of who makes the pho¬ tographs and how they do it. (This conclusion may have something to do with Claudet’s own position as a professional and his friendship with leading ama¬ teurs.) The photographer, whether worker or gentleman or lady, ostensibly does not enter into this evaluation, but it is unlikely that Claudet could have meant anything anything other than amateur photography when he talked of the queen’s making her choices from the walls of the exhibition. Amateur sta¬ tus was prerequisite for entry into art’s very small republic; professionalism im¬ plied work and necessity and, usually, exclusion from artistic competition and exhibition. Professionalism, in fact, implied all that was suggested by the clas¬ sification in 1862 of photography as mechanical, its operators as mere me¬ chanics. The images of professional photographers which emerged in the pages of journals between i860 and 1900 were not simply those of mechanics, how¬ ever, but frequently of charlatans, cheats, even thieves. One reason photog¬ raphy was not widely considered one of the fine arts by the close of the cen¬ tury was its stigmatization as the product of work rather than leisure. The pioneering amateurs, whose images form the early canon of nineteenth-cen¬ tury British photographs, largely abandoned photography by the mid-sixties;39 it had indeed become, as Newton said, a “wide field,” a mass culture, and the site of work. Having lost its exclusivity as a practice, photography as work was

38 A. Claudet, Letter, “On the Classification of the International Exhibition of 1862 as Re¬ gards Photography,” Photographic Journal, August 15, 1861, 243. 39 Seiberling, Amateurs, 7.

•

52

Framing the Victorians

doubly removed from the provinces of art by being called dishonest work, bearing the mark of fraud and imitation, stamped by its very nature with fakery. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, the progress of empiricism lent everincreasing resonance to the uses of photography in the sciences. In the service of modernity and of the middle classes (the former implicitly identified by the latter, indeed, as being one and the same), photography was perceived to be doing something quite respectably other than intruding on the fringes of art. In 1897 the famous illustrator Joseph Pennell addressed a wide audience in the Contemporary Review with his essay “Is Photography among the Fine Arts?” Pennell resurrects the old image of the photographer as “the bold in¬ dependent who has broken loose from tradition and asserted his individuali¬ ty”; now he is a cheat, mountebank, and counterfeiter who asserts this indi¬ viduality by “sticking his head into a black box, and at the crucial moment letting a machine do everything for him”: “With his machinery and his chem¬ icals, he can put upon canvas, upon paper, upon metal, pictures which look to himself and his friends surprisingly like the real thing. The man who sells mar¬ garine for butter, and chalk and water for milk, does much the same, and ren¬ ders himself liable to legal prosecution by doing it.”40 Pennell’s slide here from “pictures which look . . . like the real thing” to his analogy of sleazy substitu¬ tions is revealing. It is not, after all, that photographs are like phoney butter because they are not the real thing; as two-dimensional representations they make no pretensions to being the thing itself. The analogy is faulty. Pennell’s real complaint has rather to do with the substitution of photography for draw¬ ing and painting. More effectively than either, a photograph can indeed look “like the real thing.” Pennell’s real anxiety is not lest its viewers mistake a pho¬ tograph for its original subject but rather that the photograph is a superior kind of painting, that painting as he knows it and painters such as he is have been superseded by the technology of the camera. The implication that photographers belonged by association to a class of persons that made its livelihood in a socially unacceptable manner was, by the end of the 1860s, a cliche reinforced by the sheer number of working people who took up photography as a profession. According to Elizabeth Heyert, “the census of 1861 reveals that the number of professional photographers in En¬ gland had grown from 51 to 2,534 m ten years.”41 During that time period, wrote Henry Mayhew, “in the eastern and southern districts of London . . . such as in Bermondsey, the New-cut, and the Whitechapel-road, one cannot 40 Joseph Pennell, “Is Photography among the Fine Arts?” Contemporary Review 72 (1897), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 212. 41 Elizabeth Heyert, The Glass-House Years (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld and Schram, 1979), 83.

53

*

Pencil of Fire

walk fifty yards without passing some photographic establishment.”42 Mayhews London Labour and the London Poor, which is illustrated with engravings from photographs, offers the narrative “A Photographic Man,” in which a photographer explains how he came to take up the business in preference to “busking and drag-pitching with a banjo.” The photographer describes in de¬ tail the many “dodges” to which “we are obliged to resort,” ranging from mar¬ keting ploys such as the “American Air-Preservers” (homemade cardboard covers fictitiously claimed to prevent fading) to the sale of photographs to cus¬ tomers other than their subjects: Anybody who sit we take him; or we do one another, and the young woman in the shop who colours. Specimens are very useful things to us, for this reason,— if anybody comes in a hurry, and won’t give us time to do the picture, then, as we can’t afford to let her go, we sit her and goes through all the business, and I says to Jim, “Get one from the window,” and then he takes the first specimen that comes to hand. Then we fold it up in paper, and don’t allow her to see it until she pays for it, and tell her not to expose it to the air for three days, and that if then she doesn’t approve of it and will call again we will take her another. Of course they in general comes back. We have made some queer mistakes doing this. One day a young lady came in, and wouldn’t wait, so Jim takes a specimen from the window, and, as luck would have it, it was the portrait of a widow in her cap. She insisted upon opening, and then she said, “This isn’t me; it’s got a wid¬ ow’s cap, and I was never married in all my life!” Jim answers, “Oh, miss! why it’s a beautiful picture, and a correct likeness,”—and so it was, and no lies, but it was¬ n’t of her.—Jim talked to her, and says he, “Why this ain’t a cap, it’s the shadow of the hair,”—for she had ringlets,—and she positively took it away believing that such was the case; and even promised to send us customers, which she did.43

Photography, as Heyert observes, had “negative associations of a social char¬ acter that made it undesirable for [people] to pose”; Elizabeth Gaskell, for ex¬ ample, wrote to Samuel Fry following his request to photograph her, claiming to “feel a strong insurmountable objection to it” based almost certainly upon those associations.44 It is worth noting that hostility toward photography dur¬ ing this period seems to have found its focus in the reviling of portraiture. The much-touted “democratizing potential” of photography was not, after all, a promise that all trees or buildings might be rendered equal in aesthetic terms; it was a threat that photography could destroy social difference between sitters. 42 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861; New York: Dover, 1968), 3:204. 43 Ibid., 206, 208. 44 Heyert, Glass-House Years, 37, 41.

'

54

Framing the Victorians

The “insurmountable objection” of which Gaskell wrote was almost cer¬ tainly due in part to the anxiety generated by the experience of sitting for a photograph at a time when Eastlake could still describe the camera as “the sworn witness of everything presented to her view.” In one of the few parts of her essay to win approval from the Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Jour¬ nal, Eastlake observes that “her business is to give evidence of facts.”45 With this view, critics were widely in accord. “The grand claim of photography,” said Jabez Hughes in a paper read to the Photographic Society of London, “is, that it is true. Deprive it of this virtue, and all its other merits are valueless.”46 It was with this sentiment in mind that critics so berated photographers such as Robinson and O. G. Rej lander, for using photography in ways that had nothing to do with the facts but everything to do with artifice. Pictorial or, as it was sometimes termed, Pre-Raphaelite photography, was pursued most fa¬ mously during the late 1850s and 1860s by gentlemen photographers who used models, both professional and “aboriginal,” as Robinson put it, and who in¬ vented dramatic tableaux or played on theatrical or literary themes.47 In Robinson’s famous picture, Fading Away, for example, a young girl reclines on a couch in the last stages of consumption, surrounded by her stricken relatives (fig. 6). The photograph offended many, largely because of its distressing sub¬ ject matter, but doubling the offense was Robinson’s admission that the mod¬ el was in fact “a fine healthy girl of about fourteen, and the picture was done to see how near death she could be made to look.”48 The disclosure of this in¬ formation, Margaret Harker reports, “provoked a storm of protest from those who felt they had been deceived.”49 Presumably they believed an ethics of photography had been violated. One long essay printed in the Photographic Journal coneming staged pictorial photographs finds such work “offensive and incongruous,” on a moral plane with the hoaxes of trick photography: The class of this thing [is] typified by a picture I have seen exhibited, entitled “The Spirit’s Flight.” Here photography is employed to portray the disembodied spirit winging its course to regions no mortal eye has seen. Apart from the liber¬ ty taken with a sacred subject which will jar on the feelings of many, the utter impossibility of such a thing ever being presented to the camera, the absolute cer¬ tainty that the figure is that of a young woman in the flesh, travestying the ide-

45 Eastlake, “Photography,” 465, 466. 46 Jabez Hughes, “About Light and about Lighting the Sitter; with Some Reflection about the Room in Which He Is Lighted,” Photographic Journal, July 15, 1865, 106. 47 Henry Peach Robinson, Letters on Landscape Photography (London, 1888), 20. 48 Robinson, Elements, 102. 49 Margaret Harker, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892-1910 (London: Heinemann, 1979), 27.

55

*

Pencil of Fire

Fig. 6.

Fading Away. Henry Peach Robinson. 1858. George Eastman House,

Rochester, N.Y.

al rendering which imaginative painters have given to spiritual beings, at once impresses the beholder with the untruth of the whole thing. It is not only not a fact or possible to be a fact, but it is alike untrue to nature and art, and carries its untruth and incongruity on the surface.50

Whereas street photography with its “unquestionable fidelity of resem¬ blance,” as Herve writes, was so literal as to be inartistic, pictorial photography was inartistic because of its poorly defined relationship to the truth.51 Moreover, if the subject itself was not authentic, its manner of presentation was likely to be equally mendacious. As photographers experimented by applying certain artistic principles to photography, critics raised violent objections, whose force revealed the strength of dissent about what photography ought to be permitted to do. Ac¬ cording to one school, the photographer’s foremost responsibility was to truth¬ ful representation, which therefore prohibited the use of touch-ups or exper¬ imentation with focus. Debates about such practices fill the pages of the largely amateur-penned journals of the fifties, and the subject of focus in par-

50 Respice Finem [pseud.], “The Legitimacy of Combination-Printing,” Photographic Jour¬ nal, September 15, 1865, 156. 51 Herve, letter, 223.

Framing the Victorians

v'.

*.#4

■'■

■

J

' mantic and realist versions of photography, a tension that emerges with startling frequency in nineteenth'Century texts dependent on or preoccupied with notions of truth in visual representation. Kerlin’s work is markedly different both in effect and in style from that of the Englishman Diamond, but the differences appear to be the consequence of specific intention related to individual circumstance rather than unconscious or widespread cultural impress. Kerlin’s interest in photography seems to have been coincidental to his interest in representing his patients, where' as beyond his medical practice, Diamond was highly active in London’s pic' torially conscious photographic society. Whereas the theatricality of Dia' mond’s photographs stresses extraordinary delusion and, in some cases, equally extraordinary recovery, Kerlin’s work is subdued and discreet. His pictures of the children are simple, even studiously undramatic, and reflect their maker’s intention of minimizing the difference between reader and subject. Diamond was well aware of Kerlin’s small work, and despite its aesthetic shortcomings, gave it a favorable review in the Journal of the Photographic Society. The jour' nal found a deeply interesting record contained in this little work which comes to us from across the Atlantic, and tells the story of what has been done in an Institution established near Philadelphia for the reception and education of idiot children. The individual cases are graphically narrated, the gradual improvement under watchful care and judicious training well described, and the appearances of the children illustrated by photographic portraits. It is true that these are scarcely worthy of the literary contents, being deficient in intensity and wanting in that true arrangement of the subjects as regards light and shade (both physical and 50 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image, 17.

163

•

The Mind Unveil’d mental) so essential where expression is the object of the photographer. But this application of the heliographic art is of such vast importance, and will, in time, become of such great practical value, that we record with pleasure the appearance of this little book as a forerunner of other and more elaborate works in which the art of photography will be employed to illustrate this painfully interesting subject.

The lament for the absence of physical and mental chiarascuro and the ob¬ servation that in fact “expression is the object of the photographer” certainly echo Diamond’s conviction that the most effective use of photography in the sciences would be that which attended most carefully to the conventions of portraiture; as with Diamond’s own photographs, the review assumes the “deeply” and “painfully” interesting subject will be best served by art and il¬ lustration, by the “true arrangement” that will preserve “intensity.” As med¬ ical testimony the book is limited by its failure to match visually its “literary contents,” and thus Kerlin’s careful efforts to avoid sensationalism prove, from this review’s perspective, the book s greatest weakness. The introduction to Kerlin’s book was written by the supervisor of the Ger¬ mantown asylum, who produced his own version of a diagnostic photograph¬ ic text some thirty years later. Dr. Parrish’s Photographs of Inmates of the Imbe¬ cile Asylum, however, stands simply with no text at all either to define or to ground its pictures and was never intended for publication or fund raising. Pre¬ cisely why Parrish went to the effort of photographing the boys and girls un¬ der his care is unclear, nor is it even certain that he himself made the small pictures. If, as appears, the album was for purely private purposes, then per¬ haps he was using the pictures to record and classify the children as a way to improve his understanding of the individual ailment of each.

No notes ac¬

company this book. Boys come first, then girls. All are simple portraits in the manner of cartes de visite. Some echo poses familiar to nineteenth-century child portraits. Yet although Parrish’s book resembles Kerlin’s in the simplic¬ ity of its photographs, its attention to the documentation of type at the exJournal of the Photographic Society of London, September 21, 1858 30. No name^ at¬ tached to the review, but in as much as the journal was under Diamond s it is likely the review was at least commissioned, if not written, by dence of transatlantic interest in photography’s use in the asylum, see Sellers, Photography

,886) For an account of his work, see also Parrish * nsanity and Its Problem , Awncan Pjy Magical Journal , (July ,883): 208-, 5. Diamond claimed, The portraits ofThe In ane ate received into Asylums for protection, give to the eye so clear a ca that on their re-admission after temporary absence and cure-I trait of more value in calling to mind the case and treatment, than any verbal descr.pt,on may have placed on record” (“On the Application, 24).

•

164

Framing the Victorians pense of personal narrative, together with a shift in emphasis during the thir¬ ty intervening years, suggest a different method of reading each. Kerlin’s book is representative of the early photographically illustrated books in having prints of photographs stuck into the book itself; the technology did not exist in 1858 to permit on-page reproduction, and high production costs prohibit¬ ed the mass manufacture of textbooks accompanied with photographs. Illus¬ trations of medical textbooks at this period were thus frequently line drawings and, later, in more expensive books, engravings or lithographs from original photographs. The artist s interpretation of either model or photograph was therefore a relevant factor in determining the accuracy of the illustration. Ker¬ lin’s commentary in The Mind Unveil’d may be regarded as analogous to the intervention of the artist in its arrangement of the subject in ways coincident with the larger aims of the book. Parrish s work of 1886, on the other hand, entered the world of picture books at a time when the increasingly available assistance of photography in providing illustrations and models for visualizing insanity afforded the med¬ ical profession a far more precisely objective and hence more satisfactory method of classification than it had thirty years earlier. American and Euro¬ pean medical textbooks of the 1850s and 1860s were preoccupied with the problem of visualizing insanity—preoccupied, that is, with the difficulties of representing in words and images the physical effects of mental disorder. Wil¬ helm Griesinger’s book Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychichen Krankenheiten (1845), according to Sander Gilman “the most popular textbook of the mid-nineteenth century,” discusses in detail the problem of visualizing the in¬ sane; it has, significantly, no illustrations.33 James Abbott’s Handbook ofldiotcy (1856) also defines various forms of insanity through its outward manifes¬ tations. Written as a letter to members of Parliament, this narrative was a request for funds, which aimed to win sympathy by descriptions of the physi¬ cal accompaniments to insanity. Abbott’s particular goal was to debunk the generalized picture of the lunatic in the public imagination and inform his lis¬ teners of the specific types and degrees of insanity. Later books shifted their focus from the problem of visualization and intensified their efforts toward a more thorough classification and documentation of subjects. P. Martin Dun¬ can s Manual for the Classification, Training, and Education of the Feeble-Mind¬ ed, Imbecile, and Idiotic, for example, echoed Abbott’s call for a classification of different types of insanity, and included, in lieu of illustrations, detailed de¬ scriptions to enable the reader to recognize “bodily and mental deficiency.”34 Because of its intensified stress on the benefits of close visual scrutiny, how-

33 Gilman, Disease, 42. 34 Martln Duncan, A Manual for the Classification, Training, and Education of the FeebleMinded, Imbecile, and Idiotic (London, 1866), 11.

165 ‘ The Mind Unveil’d

ever, photography’s most obvious impact in the medical sciences was to rein¬ force a particular relationship between physician and patient within which the patient was reduced to a set of readable symptoms and the physician loomed ever more powerfully as reader-translator. Books such as Parrish s, in which the text was always secondary, sometimes (as in this case) even absent, placed all their emphasis on visual diagnosis, for which end they had been de¬ liberately created; their implied readers provided the necessary codes by which their various constellations of signs might be interpreted. In the introduction to his Types of Insanity, Allan McLane Hamilton notes that observation of mental patients was a vital part of their treatment: “As we progress in our study of insanity, we are constantly reminded of the physical changes that take place in the patients committed to our charge. Disease of the brain makes itself known by well-marked bodily symptoms, that are in themselves almost as im¬ portant as the many variations of disordered mental action. The disorder and disease Hamilton wishes to identify and cure can be found at the places in which the subject’s body expresses in “well-marked” ways a divergence from the normal. This is the goal of reading the subject s photo¬ graph: to see where he or she does not fit the template, where the jaw is too wide, the forehead too domed, the mouth too full. In the act of diagnosis, therefore, the reader must read with reference to a standard of normalcy. Where does the text indicate that its subject is disordered and diseased? It is where the text does not fit its standard. In the case of invisible disorders or in¬ ternal abnormalities, the body is read as a signifier in the most literal way, as it points to something beyond but also contained by its own surface. In visu¬ al diagnosis the flesh really is word; body is text and the physician its reader. But photography, inserted between the patient’s text and the physician’s eye, abstracts and decontextualizes the process of reading, by removing the possi¬ bility of disruption from diagnosis (the patient moving, or speaking, for ex¬ ample). In works such as Parrish’s, photography flattened its subjects into case studies or typologies, which in turn provided a system of reference to assist in the diagnosis of others and which served as an apparently scientific justi ica tion for visual paradigms of psychic normalcy. , In 1857 B. A. Morel used lithographic reproductions of photographs in the atlas to his classic treatise on regeneration in order to illustrate his conviction that the insane formed a category representing “the invariable, distinct an immutable characteristics which distinguish the natural race from its degen¬ erate variants.”36 “As there is so much difference in the minds of men, wrote 35

Allan McLane Hamilton, Types of Insanity: An Illustrated Guide in the Physical Diagnosis

of Mental Disease (New York, 1883), introduction. 36 g a Morel, Traite des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles, et morales de lespece maine et des causes que produisent ces varietes maladises: Atlas de XII planches (Pans, . 857), qu ed in Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 171-

• i66 Framing the Victorians

Joachim Zender in 1869 of the practice of reading facial features, “we must study the standard truth, the standard good, and therefore the standard beam tiful from the majority of opinions and tastes.”37 Writing specifically of the insane in his Compendium of Insanity (1898), John Chapin agreed that the idea of a norm was necessary and that its absence might be inferred from a simple act of looking: “From observation and experience a fair estimate may usually be made of those qualities of mind which together go to form for each person a distinct normal character and standard of development, as well as of any changes that may have occurred or of departures from the usual standard.”38 The forty-one years that separate Morel’s work from Chapin’s produced a number of narratives whose developmental history reflects a movement from pre- and early post-Darwinian efforts to define what was “natural,” to work that identified the standard for natural (as northern European, male, and so forth), to later texts that loosely incorporated such abstractions in their defi¬ nition of the “normal.” Such works belong to—indeed, may almost be said to define a genre Sekula identifies as “instrumental realism,” which produced “representational projects devoted to new techniques of social diagnosis and control, to the systematic naming, categorization, and isolation of an other¬ ness thought to be determined by biology and manifested through the lan¬ guage of the body itself. Instrumental realism, writes Sekula, engineered “a regularized flow of symbolic and material power. . . between fully-human sub¬ ject and less-than-fully-human object along vectors of race, sex, and class.”39 From the 1850s, and with increasing authority, photography as a practice em¬ bodied, documented, and justified the “flow” or, rather, imbalance of power between the standard (subject) and its aberrations (objects) in popular phys¬ iognomy as much as in medical textbooks. While its representational authority was obviously enhanced through its scientific applications, photography’s reputation was somewhat tarnished by its associations with physiognomy. Ironically, however, it was the pseudo- or nonscientific works, such as Flamilton’s Guide and Schopenhauer’s essay “On Physiognomy” (“every human face is a hieroglyphic which can certainly be deciphered, in fact whose alphabet we carry about ready-made”), which real¬ ly provided the context and framework for the serious diagnostic use of pho¬ tography.40 As Samuel Wells wrote in the introduction to his New Physiognomy, “We must be able to read men as an open book. Physiognomy furnishes the alphabet.” That sentiment was shared by physiognomist and physician 37 Zender, Anthroponomy, 30. Z J0,hr! B' Chapin’ A Compendium of Insanity (Philadelphia, 1898), 28. Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs,” 16. 40 Schopenhauer, Parerga, 2:634.

41 Wells, New Physiognomy, xxii.

167

*

The Mind Unveil’d

alike, as was the frequently expressed opinion that a photograph of the face spoke more eloquently than words were able to do and in ways that made lam guage itself unnecessary, even misleading. “The close observer,” wrote Thomas Woolnoth, “should be taught how to watch the shifting process of the face without trusting to the mechanism of speech.”42 Not only was it more trustworthy than the words of its subject, a photo¬ graph was privileged above even the words of its photographer-reader: Robert Sommer, professor of psychiatry at Giessen in Germany, declared that the pho¬ tograph must “replace the written record (or at least supplement it), since it is “uncontaminated by the interpretative problems inherent in language.”43 Diamond believed similarly that photography had an advantage over other media because its information was immediate, innocent of preconception and the sullying influence of words. Premising his evaluation of photography on his faith in optical empiricism, Diamond therefore claimed superiority for the determinate vision of the camera over and above that of language-bound philosophers and doctors in the diagnosis of mental patients: The Metaphysician and Moralist, the Physician and Physiologist will approach [diagnosis] with their peculiar views, definitions and classifications

The Pho¬

tographer, on the other hand, needs in many cases no aid from any language of his own, but prefers rather to listen, with the picture before him, to the silent but telling language of nature —It is unnecessary for him to use the vague terms which denote a difference in the degree of mental suffering, as for instance, dis¬ tress, sorrow, deep sorrow, grief, melancholy, anguish, despair; the picture speaks for itself with the most marked pression and indicates the exact point which has been reached in the scale of unhappiness between the first sensation and its ut¬ most height —similarly the modification of fear, and of the more painful passions, anger and rage, jealousy and envy, (the frequent concomitants of insanity) being shown from the life by the Photographer, arrest the attention of the thoughtful observer more powerfully than any laboured description.

What words can ade¬

quately describe either the peculiar character of the palsy which accompanies sud¬ den terror when without hope, or the face glowing with heat under the excite¬ ment of burning anger, or the features shrunk and the skin constricted and ghastly under the influence of pale rage? -Yet the Photographer secures with unerring accuracy the external phenomena of each passion, as the really certain indication of internal derangement, and exhibits to the eye the well known sympathywhich exists between the diseased brain and the organs and features of the body 4 42 Woolnoth, Facts and Faces, 5. _ T , , . . 43 Quoted in Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 189. See Robert Sommer, Lehrbuch der psychopathologischen UntersuchungS'Methoden (Berlin, 1899), 5 IO-

44 Diamond, “On the Application, 19—20.

• i68 Framing the Victorians

In this passage Diamond’s rhetoric clearly emphasizes two things: first, that photography is superior to human language, being (somewhat paradoxically) itself a language, and not just any language but the “telling language of na¬ ture”; and second, that the language of photography is also that of contem¬ porary science in its allegiance to precision. Photographs, Diamond asserts, can tell “the exact point which has been reached in the scale of unhappiness”; the external phenomena of each “passion” are secured with “unerring accura¬ cy.” Clearly, the two claims are significantly interdependent. The “language of nature” is Diamond’s term for a universal language according to whose lex¬ icon nature,

standard,” and “normal” may be defined as meaningful terms.

The perceived existence of such a language was, indeed, the necessary pre¬ requisite for—as well as the product of—the work of instrumental realism. Photography s precision in “speaking” the language of universal provided its license to practice science.

Romantic Heroes, Saved Souls Whereas it might seem at times that the goal of photography is to muffle or silence the voice of its subject in order to substitute images that would avoid Professor Sommer’s “interpretive problems,” the aim of many physicians working in insane asylums was by contrast to assert the voice of their patients. As Parrish put it m his address to the 1883 meeting of the New Jersey State Medical Society in Atlantic City, “I am here today to speak for these 2000 insane of New Jersey.” Kerlin’s paper the following year to the Eleventh National Conference of Charities and Correction in St. Louis opened with the obserTti0m iS n0t Strange tKat the daimS °f idiotic and feeble-minded children should have waited a hearing ... for this clientage is almost a voiceless one, hidden a way often from its nearest neighborhood, shunned of companionship and until the last census but half reported.”46 Whether in speeches on their behalf or in the promotion of their images, as the photographer-doctor provided a voice for those unable to speak for themselves, so he also came at times to be figured—or to figure himself as_ the romantic hero of the asylum, philosopher and artist as well as explorer of the natural sciences. Perhaps none slipped so easily between the roles as Dia¬ mond. “The Photographer catches in a moment the permanent cloud, or the passing storm or sunshine of the soul,” he wrote, “and thus enables the meta-

45 Joseph Parrish, “Insanity,” 210. r o I,sf^Newton Berlin, Provision for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Children, National Institute or Health Pamphlet 5199: 9 (Boston, October 16, 1884), 3.

169 * The Mind Unveil’d

physician to witness and trace out the connexion between the visible and the invisible in one important branch of his researches into the Philosophy of the human mind.”47 For Diamond, his photographs were complicated articulations of their subjects’ illnesses, matrices not just of the progress of individu¬ als but of their creator’s own powers as philosopher, artist, and healer, both ex¬ pressive and diagnostic, things in themselves, and a clue to other things.48 In her discussion of Hawthorne’s Marble Faun} Wendy Steiner describes “the stock elements of the romance,” that is, “the myth of Eden, the Sleeping Beauty archetype, the isolated observer, the cold observation of science and heartless art, the division of the self into watcher and watched, the relation between antirealism and memory, and finally, the mockery of past romances themselves vis-a-vis the artistic present. 49 Clearly, according to this list at least, psychiatric photographs have romantic potential simply by virtue of their chosen subject matter. Diamond’s motivation for taking his photographs, he claimed, was that the act of photography was capable of awakening the sleeping soul of its subject, and that enforced division of the self into watch¬ er and watched (through presentation with his or her photographic image) could result in a moment of realization and cure. One of his anecdotes recalls a patient who believed herself to be a queen, but who gave the doctor “the ho¬ nour of a sitting—I told her that it was my wish to take portraits of all the Queens under my care.” The patient was amused, Diamond relates, by seeing the portraits: “Her frequent conversation about them was the first decided step in her gradual improvement . . . she was discharged perfectly cured, and laughed heartily at her former imaginations.”50 The significance of the pho¬ tograph in this narrative depends solidly upon its embodiment of the gap be¬ tween sane present self and past lunatic other. As Susan Sontag has observed, photography reifies the tension between past and present.51 By focusing our attention on the moment photographed, a photograph forces us to see that moment, as it were, through a tiny pinlight, in which the weight of subsequent history impresses significance on the image. Psychiatric photography, at least as described by its practitioners, makes doubly strange the relation between past and present, because the very consciousness of the subject may have

47 Diamond, “On the Application,” 20. 48 John Tagg describes the site of Diamond’s work as “the point where discourses of psy¬ chiatry, physiognomy, photographic science and aesthetics coincided and overlapped where “the knowledge and truth of which photography became the guardian was inseparable from the power and control which it engendered” (“Power and Photography, 42). 49 Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 97. 50 Diamond, “On the Application, 23. Sontag, On Photog51 On the distinctive relationship of photography and temporality, see

raphy; Barthes, Camera Lucida; and most recently, Mavor, Pleasures Taken.

•

170

Framing the Victorians

changed and the relation between Steiner’s “antirealism and memory” is giv¬ en visible shape by the camera. It is hard to decide how the subjects themselves truly regarded this work, for as Parrish noted, they had no voice. Accounts of patient response to the experience of being photographed and of regarding its results are necessarily given by their doctor-photographers and, for this reason, must be considered prone to their authors’ exaggeration; but such accounts can of course be re¬ vealing in their versions of what constitutes a success and a cure, as well as in their insights into the physicians’ ambitions and desires. After reading a lec¬ ture on photography by Diamond, T. N. Brushfield, the superintendent of the Chester County Lunatic Asylum, wrote enthusiastically of his own success with photography: I have found, notwithstanding my imperfect attempts, that patients are very much gratified at seeing their own portraits, and more particularly when associ¬ ated with a number of others on a large sheet of Bristol board, framed, and hung up as an ordinary picture in the ward. In our worst female ward I have had a pos¬ itive (on glass) framed and hung up for nearly eighteen months, and it has nev¬ er yet been touched by any of the patients, although nearly all know whom it rep¬ resents. Last week a patient, who was formerly one of our most violent cases, begged for a portrait of herself, that she might send to her son, who was in Ire¬ land, to show how much better she was.52 The physician John Conolly, who used photographs by Diamond to illustrate his own work on insanity, wrote in a similarly positive vein the following year of patient response to photography: The taking of portraits has become one of the pleasures of which the patients cheerfully partake in our lunatic asylums; [it] helps ... to diversify and cheer the days passed in necessary seclusion from the busier, but scarcely happier world, without. One incidental effect of these artistical amusements is to draw the at¬ tention of the patients themselves to their own costume, and sometimes also to their general appearance, as to face and figure; and this direction of their notice may lead to salutary results. In the case in question, the patient made some ob¬ jection to her own dress, which she evidently thought not very becoming: and she at length made it a condition of her sitting quiet that she should be repre¬ sented with a book in her hand. The book, indeed, was held upside down; but it did quite as well. Her sense of propriety was gratified, and her face shows that she required no printed page to suggest thoughts to her yet busy mind.53 T. N. Brushfield, Letter, Journal of the Photographic Society of London, May 21, 1857 289 John Conolly, ‘The Physiognomy of Insanity: No. 9, Religious Mania,” Medical Times Uazette, ns 17 (1858): 83, quoted in Gilman, Face of Madness, 11.

171

*

The Mind Unveil’d

Brushfield’s anecdote, like Conolly’s observation of the “salutary results” of self-recognition, echoes Diamond’s belief in the curative potential of photog¬ raphy. Diamond himself gave three reasons to pursue the patient with the camera: first, for future study; second, to aid in treatment of the mentally ill, for presenting them with images of themselves apparently led, as we have seen, to sudden alteration in their mental states; and third, for possible future iden¬ tification. I have discussed the first, and of the third, more later; here 1 wish to consider the suggestion that presenting a patient with a photograph might bring about a dramatic change. Diamond’s interest lay not only in showing photographs as a divertissement along Brushfield’s lines: “There is another point of view in which the value of portraits of the Insane is peculiarly marked. —viz. in the effect which they produce upon the patients themselves —I have had many opportunities of witnessing this effect —In very many cases they are examined with much pleasure and interest, but more particularly in those which mark the progress and cure of a severe attack of Mental Aberration.” To illustrate this claim, Diamond described the case of a woman to whom he showed four photographs of herself during the course of her illness (fig. 36), commencing with that stage of Mania which is marked by the bristled hair, the wrinkled brow, the fixed unquiet eye, and the lips apart as if from painful respi¬ ration, but passing, not to a state in which no man could tame her, but happily through less excited stages to the perfect cure —In the third portrait the expres¬ sion is tranquil and accompanied with the smile of sadness instead of the hideous laugh of frenzy —The Hair falls naturally and the forehead alone retains traces, tho’ slight ones, of mental agitation. In the fourth there is a perfect calm —The poor maniac is cured.

Here the photographs are instructive, rather than part of the cure; they are witnesses to a previous state of consciousness that would otherwise be lost to its subject, who remembers nothing of this period. The photographs thus serve as a warning reminder to the subject of what had happened and might per¬ haps occur again: “This patient could scarcely believe that her last portrait representing her as clothed and in her right mind, would even [stc] have been preceded by anything so fearful; and she will never cease, with these faithful monitors in her hand, to express the most lively feelings of gratitude for a re¬ covery so marked and unexpected.”54 The consequence of these photographs presumably matched Diamond s in¬ tention in showing this pictorial progress report to the patient (as well as to his audience at the society), in their display of the physicians triumphant re-

54

Diamond, “On the Application,” 21.

36. The Four Stages of Puerperal Mania. Hugh Diamond. 1856. Lithograph of pho tographs by Diamond. Royal Society of Medicine. Fig.

173

•

The Mind Unveil’d

assertion of “a perfect calm.” The photographs are among the very earliest before-and'after pictures, marking a passage of time, with the significant action itself invisible from the pictures (we do not see, for example, how the mania was treated and cured). The emphasis lies on the last picture, with its reassertion of order and sanity. The patient is fully and formally clothed; her rough¬ ly shorn head is hidden by a bonnet. Beyond the probable exaggerations of such accounts, as a cure photography seems theatrical in conception, as, indeed, do many of Diamond’s pho¬ tographs.55 The premise on which the cure was to be effected was based on a gothic moment of revelation—a horror of the self in the mirror offered by pho¬ tography, a romantic collision with the doppelganger. Moreover, the typolo¬ gy of Diamond’s photographs indicates an intuition of madness as temporary artifice or folly, the consequence of an emotional self-indulgence, which al¬ most certainly conflicted with his professional knowledge of his patients’ mal¬ adies. Figure 37, for example, recalls the peculiarity of Robinson’s “taming” and dressing of “wild” models in the countryside. Diamond’s photograph shows a female patient in a Greek, almost suggestively bacchic outfit, which seems to imply deliberate or careless loss of sanity. Is the doctor’s choice of her dress intended as commentary on her irresponsibility? Are we to imagine that she in fact selected the costume on her own in a happy moment of self-recog¬ nition? Is she, indeed, truly mad, or just acting the part, as her costume might imply? Figure 38, an equally troubling picture of the type of religious melan¬ choly, shows its subject wearing a crucifix, her pose of weary contemplation effectively complementing the particular mania her physician intends her to represent. The shadow in which she sits, the light apparently, surely artifi¬ cially, streaming down from above, her direct gaze at the viewer—all are in the tradition of romantic portraiture which glorified individual struggle, while the presumed specific insanity of this particular subject is subsumed by the larger iconology of classic melancholia. The photographs make sense only if one recalls that this doctor-photogra¬ pher, albeit a scientist on the fringes of a new world, was also a romantic and an artist. The construction of Diamond’s photographs as art was a significant factor in shaping how they were read and understood in exhibition. They were, of course, party to the same discrimination as other photographs, re¬ gardless of their subject matter. Enthusiastic reviews, however, immediately 55 Theatricality certainly informed other institutional photographs of the period, tor ex¬ ample, the photographs taken in Britain during the 1870s of inmates ot Dr. Thomas John Barnardo’s home for boys. Before-and-after pictures of the children were presented in pseu¬ do-cartes de visite as (fund-raising) records of their dramatically changed appearances in their new environment. The photographs were, in fact, taken the same day, rags being supplied to authenticate the “before” photograph. See Mavor, Pleasures Taken, 39.

PIG* 37* Patient, Surrey County Asylum. Hugh Diamond. 1856. Royal Society of Medicine.

Fig. 38. Patient, Surrey County Asylum. Hugh Diamond. 1856. Royal Society of Medicine.

•

176

Framing the Victorians

located Diamond’s work within an established tradition of portraiture. On New Year’s Day of 1857 Diamond exhibited some photographs of his patients at the Royal Photographic Society annual show. The review published by its journal the following month picked out Diamond’s work from those displayed: “Dr. Diamond’s studies of maniacs are perfect as Hogarth’s”—more perfect, perhaps, for Diamond’s work had the advantage of scientific, artistic, and even religious affiliation: A third woman of a better class of life, a servant, or at least a respectable cottager . . . sits disconsolate, with her blank, unspeculating eyes and sullen face turned to heaven with a strange sort of demoniacal patience and yet mute complaint, godless, hopeless and fearless. Her arms are doubled up and extended upon her pillow, like those of a crucified person; she is probably in that fearful form of mental disease termed catalepsy. The deprivation of reason is such an awful physical mystery, that any comment upon it has interest, whether in Dr. Diamond’s photographs, Shakspere’s [sic] Lear, or Scott’s Gallatly.56

The language of the review is revealing not only for what it suggests about the need to identify photographic works with specific artists and its description of insanity as an “awful” mystery but in its effort to interpret the photograph according to particular codes that are heavily informed by the context in which the reviewer finds it. The contextual associations of Diamond’s exhibition work validated this reading of the photographs in terms of Christian typolo¬ gy, in which the patient’s upturned face and outflung arms assume religious as well as scientific mystery. As with the Crimean exhibition, the annual show of the photographic society profited from the choice of site for its exhibition (both, indeed, were the same). The Gallery of the Society of Painters in Wa¬ ter Colours in Pall Mall provided a setting against which the photographs were already identified as art, the photographers as artists to be compared (howev¬ er implicitly) with Shakespeare and Scott. (Of course, the introduction of Scott into our picture of Diamond’s portraits is particularly apposite, since, as I have suggested, the doctor’s understanding and creation of his photograph¬ ic subjects looks back for its inspiration to the gothic romance, rather than, as one might expect, forward to either the realism or the decadence of the late nineteenth century.) At the annual show of 1859 Diamond again exhibited portraits made in the asylum; this time the review given in the society’s journal (of which Diamond

The Photographic Exhibition, Journal of the Photographic Society of London, February 1857, 217.

177 ‘ The Mind Unveil’d

was by that date editor) was a collection of reprints from other papers. Discussing Diamond’s work, the reviewer for the Athenaeum focused on the practical purpose of the pictures, noting that the “‘Illustrations of Mental Disease’ . . . have not merely a photographic, but a scientific value. . . . These photographs of the Doctor’s should be used to illustrate some great work on mental disease; for they show all the diagnosis of different stages of mental disor¬ der, and are of great value.” The Daily News commented that Diamond “applies the art to the forwarding of medical science” and regarded the pic¬ tures as both “useful and novel.” The Literary Gazette found the pictures “painfully vivid.”57 But the pictures were not just read according to their practical value. Mere¬ ly by framing and exhibiting photographic representations of his patients, Di¬ amond benefited from distinctively different forms of visual authority. While the style of his photographs placed him in a tradition of portraiture established by painting and popularized by the daguerreotype, the authority of their sci¬ entific perspective (the combined effect of photography and medicine) si¬ multaneously instructed readers that these pictures were made to be not beau¬ tiful but instructive—“useful.” They organized knowledge about insanity and made it accessible through its transference to the pictorial. It was this trans¬ ference to the pictorial and, above all, to the aesthetic which permitted read¬ ers a sense of control over the most unruly and unpredictable ot illnesses. By presenting his works not just as case studies but as art objects to be exhibited, Diamond exercised a newly vigorous control over the very idea of mental in¬ stability. Contained within the frames of art and fitting simultaneously into the schemas of science, Diamond’s version of insanity—predictive, analogi¬ cal, iconographically informed—was organized and set safely apart from its audiences. As this photographer-doctor thus created a role for himself as artist-creator, so the image was inverted and played out in the photographic journals in which the photographer was figured as a family helper with curative powers. In keeping with the journals’ internal paradoxes and inconsistencies, the same magazine that carried a piece on the documentary qualities of photography and the necessarily concomitant absence or insignificance of the photogra¬ pher might offer an essay the same week on the public image of the photog¬ rapher as an artist and on the necessity for him to cultivate a bedside manner as though he were the family physician. The photographer Gabriel Harrison, for example, writes in the Photographic Art'Journal of being summoned to the deathbeds of his sitters to perform the final photographic rites; in the case of 57

Quoted in “The Exhibition in Suffolk Street,” ibid., January 21, 1859, 145. 148.

•

178

Framing the Victorians

Fox Talbot v. Laroche (a copyright infringement suit), Talbot’s lawyer refers to the sitters as “patients.”58 What may seem to us an unlikely analogy of photographer with doctor was in fact neither arbitrary nor unusual, although the photographer’s power was perceived to be over the mind more often than over the body of the subjectpatient. Popular literature of the 1880s continued the tradition of tales of strangely empowered photographs and photographers possessing peculiar in¬ fluence over the psyches of their absent subjects, and there are countless melo¬ dramatic revisions of the earlier fascination with camera mesmerism.59 The photographers potential to play with the mind or soul, however, is perhaps more analogous in some ways to the role of the psychiatrist or the priest than to that of the doctor. Certainly accounts such as Gabriel Harrison’s lent weight to the photographer’s most extreme heroic-romantic incarnation in popular fiction as guardian or caretaker of the invisible, present at significant moments in life and, in distinctively Victorian style, present at moments of death too.

Policing the Patient At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dr. Joseph Parrish’s father, also Joseph Parrish and also a physician, took notes from Benjamin Rush in his “in¬ structive lectures :

The physician in his conduct towards his unhappy pa¬

tients, should preserve a firmness and dignity from which he ought never to depart; every improper familiarity as laughing, &c. should be strictly avoided, and every promise faithfully complied with; his prescriptions ought not to be given in the presence of the patient, but it should appear as though they came from some other source.”60 Rush, the same doctor who had called for the vi¬ sual representation of disease, held that a physician should be an authoritari¬ an presence, dissociated from the pain or displeasure that his prescriptions might bring. Firm and dignified, he should be paternalistic, even godlike, con¬ siderate but detached. Much of what I have said in this chapter implies a de¬ gree of self-consciousness on the part of the Victorian physician which is hard to prove, but Rush’s words as recalled by Parrish indicate at least that the de¬ liberate self-fashioning of the physician as a figure of authority was no inno¬ vation of the Victorian age but was the subject of reflection and commentary 58 Gabriel Harrison, “Lights and Shadows of Daguerrian Life,” Photographic Art-Joumal 1.3

(1851): 181; “Talbot v. Laroche,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London, December 21 1854, 85. 5) For references, see Rudisill, Mirror Image, 197-225. 6° Joseph Parrish (1779-1840), An Inaugural Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon the Body, in the Production and Cure of Diseases.... (Philadelphia, 1805), 40.

i79

*

The Mind Unveil’d

at least as early as 1805. Moreover, Diamond’s scrutiny of the role of photography in medicine, especially with regard to its potentially wide lay readership, suggests that he was sensitive to how the romantic context he cultivat¬ ed for his photographs shaped public regard for both his own work and that of the psychiatric profession generally. With the assistance of various represen¬ tational technologies, medicine as a profession and doctors as professionals thus began to emerge as sources of authoritative knowledge, creatures of what Daniel Fox and James Terry have termed a “culture of medicine [which] be¬ came visible in the closing decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.”61 The many photographs doctors took or permitted others to take of their patients, specimens, wounds, operations, hospitals, and colleagues made visible that authority by articulating it in various ways to project par¬ ticular images of the profession.62 The growth of the “culture of medicine” was paralleled by a shift in em¬ phasis within the field of psychiatric medicine. Whereas the first seventy years of the century saw a development of the theory that individuals must fight their insanity through assertion of morality and pure will (ideas about insan¬ ity which were, as Skultans notes, “consonant with the prevailing philosophy of individualism”), later decades witnessed a radical change. Under the influ¬ ence of photography and other methods of empirical classification, the “moral treatment” yielded to a growing interest in typology, which shifted the em¬ phasis from the individual to the social category. Skultans’s collection of Vic¬ torian writings on insanity bears out the theory that during the last twenty or so years of the nineteenth century physicians were more interested in “hered¬ itary endowment” and “character” than they were in “moral force” or “will.” Yet in relinquishing their emphasis on individualism (as we see it occasional¬ ly surface, for example, in the words and images of Diamond), and moving to¬ ward classification, typology, and quantification, physicians scarcely changed their self-image. It seems that there was increasingly good reason for doctors to perceive themselves as “guardians of the moral order and agents of social control.”63 In 1839, the year photography was invented, Robert Gardiner Hill, an ad¬ vocate of the moral treatment of the insane without the use of physical re-

61 Daniel M. Fox and James Terry, “Photography and the Self-image of American Physi¬ cians, 1880-1920,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 435.

62

For bibliographies on the history of medical photography, see Alison Gernsheim, Med¬

ical Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” Medical and Biological Illustration 11.2 (1962). 85—93; Fox and Terry, “Photography”; Edward Lucie-Smith, The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of

Photography, 1839—1914 (New York: Paddington, 1975); ant^ Oliver Matthews, Early Pho¬ tographs and Early Photographers (London: Reedminster, 1973b 63 Skultans, Introduction, Madness and Morals, 2, 9.

• i8o Framing the Victorians

straint, wrote in defense of his views: “It may be demanded, ‘What mode of treatment do you adopt, in place of restraint?. . . How do you provide for the safety of the attendants?’ In short, what is the substitute for coercion? The answer may be summed up in a few words, viz.—classification—watchfulness— vigilant and unceasing attendance by day and by night.”64 A discipline of watching inmates was crucial both to the moral treatment Hill advocated and to the later development in psychiatry of what Henry Maudsley described as “the tyranny of organization.”65 Within this organizational labyrinth of “classification” and “watchfulness” there existed a hierarchical structure under whose terms the watcher-classifier exercised power over the watched and classified. The maintenance of that structure, on which the authority of the doctor depended, required that it be occasionally visible. Not only must patients be subject to an authoritative medical gaze, they must be made aware of their subjectivity. Thus, a footnote to Hill’s observations adds: “It is essential . . . that the patient should be aware that he is observed . . . and aware also that the person who observes him is powerful enough to control him.”66 It has become something of a cliche to note that within this paradigm the camera ranks with the peephole and the panopticon.67 Nevertheless, it is a tenet so central to an understanding of photography’s wider semantic that it is worth restating in the explicit words of Allan Sekula: “Every work of photographic art has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the archives of the police.”68 Every instance of photography has a potential to be used against its subject.

Photography was, of course, used widely in medical fields other than psychiatry, and during the last decades of the century its translation of the visihie elements of physical diseases into pictorial texts rapidly replaced or at least supplemented verbal descriptions.69 At the 1894 photographic convention in Dublin, the photographer Andrew Pringle observed that “no department of science has received more benefit from photography than has the art of heah ing. ... for such work as recording the state of a patient from hour to hour, the fluctuations of a disease from day to day, or its gradual progress after the time of operation until recovery or the reverse, photography stands pre-eminent.”70 64 Robert Gardiner Hill, Total Abolition of Personal Restraint in the Treatment of the Insane

(London, 1839), excerpted in Skultans, Madness and Morals, 142.

65

Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind (London, 1873), 76, quoted in Skultans, Madness and Morals, 2. 66 Hill, Total Abolition, 144. For this cliche the extraordinarily influential work of Michel Foucault is largely respon¬ sible. See The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975). 68 Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs,” 16. See Robert Ollerenslaw,

Medical Illustration: The Impact of Photography on Its His¬

tory,” Journal of the Biological Photographic Association 36 (1968): 3-13. 70 Andrew Pringle, “The Uses of Photography in Medicine,” Photography 6.297 (1894): 452.

181

•

The Mind Unveil’d

A year later the journal Photography recorded: “Almost all the medical publications of importance are illustrated by its means, and in our hospitals are found many practising photography among the professors and students, some of them having their cameras always ready for the reproduction of interesting events. So much is this the case that the photographic outfit is as much esteemed as that of the microscope.”71 In symbolic terms, microscope and camera are thus equals; to photograph the sick is to enact their subjectivity to the authority of the physician; the resulting photographs, as I have suggested, may be read as signs of the physician’s control over the disease. Presented first to the medical gaze, the patient is constructed as a text, and the subsequent act of photographing signifies the transformation of the patient into type. The process to which Pringle refers—the gradual improvement or decline of the patient as marked by the progression of photographs—creates its own narrative of control in which the patient’s changes are charted by pictures with beginning, middle, and end. The narrator of this story must be not the photographer but the physician, who has watched and made it happen; in the case that photographer and physician are the same person, they exercise a double control over their images. Photographers themselves were responsive to the new demands and possi¬ bilities medicine offered them, and they made of the work a new field with particular requirements. Speaking at a photographic congress in Chicago in 1893, Ellerslie Wallace of Philadelphia described the art of successful medical photography as one of choice and artistry: The first step toward success is to know what to take, what not to take, and how to pose and light the subject to be taken. For instance, all portions of the human body that are not too complex in structure, and have decided outlines, with wellmarked contrasts of colour, will be good subjects for the camera. Bones, either healthy, diseased, or fractured, and with or without the ligaments belonging to them, photograph well.

Most interested in what aberrations make “good subjects for the camera, Wallace obscures the patient altogether, making of him or her a set ot framable disorders and adding only as an afterthought that the photograph¬ er should always demand the fullest instructions from the medical man as to what the finished photograph is to show, and how much subject is to be included.”72 At times it appears that Wallace himself was able to determine what he would take for his own collection, and his preference is predictable: As I be-

Photography 7.331 (1895): 172. 72 Ellerslie Wallace, “Medical Photography,” Photography 5.252 (1893): 562. 71 “Medical Photography,”

•

182

Framing the Victorians

fore hinted, all deformities and diseases that are striking to the eye make good photographic subjects. I have succeeded well with children with hydro¬ cephalic heads or with advanced cases of black gangrene of both feet, and with cases of advanced starvation.”73 The disinterested tone is striking, suggesting that Wallace’s method of viewing these hospital patients affords him a dis¬ tance within which as photographer, if not doctor, he can exercise his own version of the medical gaze. At the same convention, O. G. Mason of Belle¬ vue Hospital, New York, lectured at length on the appropriate behavior for the photographer engaged in medical work, in terms that echo Rush’s pre¬ scription for the appropriate bedside manner: The photographer in charge of the illustrative department of a great hospital, should at all times be attentive to his duties. He should be respectful, and com¬ mand respect from others. He should remember the responsibilities of his posi¬ tion, and maintain the dignity of his profession. Patients should be received in a quiet, respectful manner, and if in any way reluctant to be photographed, which is seldom the case, they should be led to understand that all is being done for their own good, and for that of others. They should be kindly and gently in¬ structed how to do their part, as to position and immobility.74

Mason’s words recall those of psychiatrists years earlier when they described the use of photography in the moral treatment. The patient was paramount, and the justification for photographing was the greater good (the photogra¬ pher helped the patient; the patient helped fellow human beings). Whatever its motivations, however, medical photography of the late nineteenth centu¬ ry ultimately functioned, like its earlier counterparts, to distance the viewer from the subject. In photography whose authority depended on an apparent absence of agency—in photographs, that is, where realism was paramount— the eye behind the camera must be perceived to be the eye not of the indi¬ vidual but of society. Only in this way might photography suggest itself as the voice (and vision) of a unified national consciousness and thus as the “shared social experience” that, Jerome Buckley maintains, was sought by the Victo¬ rians.75 As the century drew to a close, the rapid growth of photography in the promotion of realist ideologies thus necessarily wrote out the photogra¬ pher as the creative hero of a mystical process. Photographs such as Dia73 Ibid. 74 O. G. Mason, “Photography for Illustrating the Practice of Medicine and Surgery in a

Great Hospital,” Photography 5.252 (1893): 564. 75 Jerome H. Buckley, “Victorian England: The Self-conscious Society,” The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef L. Altholz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 15.

183 • The Mind Unveil’d

mond’s, whose iconographical semantics refer us back to the eye of their artist' creator, were ultimately viewed as scientific failures for their inclusion and admission of the human artistry that had brought them about. The culture of realism which rejected Diamond’s interpretive accounts of psychological disorder nevertheless thoroughly embraced the intensified emphasis of science on visual diagnosis, with the ironic consequence at the century’s end of a vigorous market in books reflecting renewed interest in phrenology, in dogmatic and persistent antiscience, and in magic and psychic interests. Physiognomy, wrote Samuel Wells in 1894, “is now attracting more attention than at any previous time since the death of Lavater.”76 By the late 1880s the technology was widely available to allow photographs to be print' ed in books, lending these works their own imagistic authority. John Chapin’s photographically illustrated Compendium of Insanity both apologized for its quack roots and defended them: In the early history of medicine the reciprocal influences that were supposed to exist between the body and the mind were noticed, and became the basis of a classification founded upon mental characteristics that seemed to accompany certain physical developments. Although the division of certain qualities of mind and body into so-called temperaments—the sanguineous, lymphatic, bilious, and nervous—may not be strictly scientific, and may be the result partly of specula¬ tion, yet it is a recognition of the common observation that certain prominent mental qualities are usually found to be associated quite uniformly with physical constitutional development and conformations.77

Chapin’s “common observation” is the substitute, even the antidote, for “strict” science, and “speculation” on what is “usually found provides him with the vaguely populist authority that unites such works. Indeed, much of the ef¬ fort of physiognomy seems to be spent in convincing readers that their own ty¬ pological existence is privileged in its membership. The common knowledge (otherwise known as ideology) to be found in the anti-intellectualism of phys¬ iognomy assures them Buckley’s social experience, not to say existence. Perhaps the single most striking concern of the later physiognomy books, however, is their shared professed aim to protect readers from the chaos of the future, to arm them against the threatening unknown by providing human maps of possible dangers. Popular works such as Nelson Sizer’s Hands and Faces (1885), John T. Appleberg’s Know Thy Future (1892), LaVergne Belden Stevens’s Faciology (1893), and William Seymour’s Key to Character, or Every-

New Physiognomy, xvii. Chapin, Compendium of Insanity,

76 Wells, 77

25-26.

• 184 Framing the Victorians

body Their Own Detective (1894) played very deliberately on readers’ fears of a more fluid society in which they might come into contact with undesirable persons. Wells’s introduction to New Physiognomy could have been lifted from almost any physiognomy book of the period: “With physiognomy universally understood and practiced, villainy would be almost impossible. The thief, the gambler, the roue, the robber, and the murderer wear labels on their foreheads. If we fail to read the inscription, it is merely on account of our imperfect knowledge of the language in which it is written.”78 Textbooks and scholas¬ tic essays, such as James Shaw’s “Facial Expression as One of the Means of Di¬ agnosis and Prognosis in Mental Diseases”(i894), and Physiognomy of Mental Diseases and Degeneracy (1903), reaffirmed the emphasis on physical textuality and its predictive powers. As with the popular publications, such work as¬ sumed greater scientific credibility through inclusion of photographs. In 1895 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero published in London a trans¬ lated extract from their work on criminology La donna delinquente, in which they proposed a method of identifying criminals through differentiations based on biological and sociological grounds. It was a mistake, they said, to believe that the criminal female might be understood in the same terms as the noncriminal. “Is it a fact,” they asked, that the criminal population is composed of ordinary men? Is there any evidence to show that the great army of offenders who are passing through our prisons, penitentiaries, and penal servitude establishments in a ceaseless stream is made up of the same elements as the law-abiding sections of the community? On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that vast numbers of the criminal pop¬ ulation do not live under ordinary social and biological conditions. It is indeed a certainty that a high percentage of them live under anomalous biological and social conditions. And it is these anomalous conditions acting upon the offend¬ er either independently or, as is more often the case, in combination which make him what he is.79

In order to persuade its readers that “what he is” is intimately related to what (s)he looks like and to reveal the “anomalous social and biological conditions” determining her behavior, the authors illustrated The Female Offender with plates not of photographs but of paintings. The lurid appeal of the book is en¬ hanced by its bizarre narratives about extraordinary and gruesome crimes com¬ mitted by women. Its counterpart, Criminal Man (1911), was illustrated with photographs of the morally insane and invited similar reflection on the 78 Wells, New Physiognomy, xxiv-xxv. 79 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (London, 1895), viii-ix.

185 * The Mind Unveil’d

enormity of the difference between its readers and the book’s subjects (who were not only insane but convicted criminals and thus doubly deserving of institutionalization). Lombroso explains his understanding of bis work of diagnosis as cumulative rather than isolationist in principle: “When in ’66, fresh from the atmosphere of clinical experiment, I had begun to study psychiatry, I realised how inadequate were the methods hitherto held in esteem, and how necessary it was, in studying the insane, to make the patient, not the disease, the object of attention.”80 Following his shift to a holistic approach, Lombroso further illuminated the difference between criminals and the rest of humani¬ ty when he got the chance to do a post-mortem on a “famous brigand.” On opening up tbe head of the criminal genius Vitella, Lombroso was struck: This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent super¬ ciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handleshaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irre¬ sistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.bl

The classification of Vitella as an animal type draws on Darwinian principles inverted to serve Lombroso’s ends. It sets off the subject from the reader in the manner of physiognomy’s blazons, taking his features to pieces to describe, an¬ alyze, and finally identify their determining significance, dismembering Vitel¬ la as, we learn, his type loves to dismember. Vitella, after all, is not man but monster, a vampire with superhuman physical powers, luxurious appetites, and resistance to pain. Here is no surprise but a confirmation that the nature of the criminal” is unnatural, a gothic nightmare. As lurid as this picture of hap¬ less subject speciments pinned across the pages may be, the most startling thing about this short extract—and indeed, about Lombroso s work general¬ ly—is the image it draws for us of its author-doctor. The picture of Lombroso, poised above the opened head of the lunatic criminal, is truly the image of the terrible, supernaturally empowered scientist, lit up by his revelations on a “vast plain under a flaming sky.”

80 Cesare Lombroso, Introduction, Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, by Gina Lombroso-Ferrero (London, 1911), xii—xiii. 81 Ibid., xiv-xv.

• i86 Framing the Victorians

Lombroso’s work is quite different from that of his predecessor Diamond. For one thing, although his photographs occasionally suggest otherwise, Diamond s ultimate aims were to promote the cause of his patients. If he saw his photographic role in somewhat fanciful terms—a catcher of clouds, meta¬ physician’s helper—he worked within the practical context of the moral treatment, using the camera to benefit his sitters as well as for his own artistic ends. Lombroso, however, used photographs of sitters in a Lavaterian manner. Whereas Diamond’s photographs refer to a romantic paradigm of lunacy as a temporary disorder, a struggle to be waged by the individual sufferer, the pic¬ tures and text of Lombroso s work turn away from the notion of individual moral responsibility toward class and typology. In Lombroso’s work the indi\ idual is at the mercy of biology and society (not to say popular mythology); his or her path is largely predetermined by the architecture of face, jaws and cheekbones, arches, ears, and palms. The photographs of the criminal types, then, which Lombroso provides for the reader have a far more obviously overt policing function. They are designed not for the betterment of the subject but for the protection of the reader. “To command the mind,” wrote Thomas Woolnoth, “is to control the features; the one is consequent upon the oth¬ er. To recognize the features, suggests Lombroso, is to recognize the mind; the one is consequent upon the other. Diamond, whose original purpose in making photographs of the insane was to encourage their change and their cure, had foreseen the use of such pictures for policing. “It is well known,” he wrote, “that the portraits of those who are congregated in prisons for punishment have often times been of much value in recapturing some who have escaped, or in proving with little expense, and with certainty a previous conviction.”83 But the role of photography not just in pursuing the fugitive body but in unveiling the criminal mind is more prob¬ lematic than Diamond suggests. Its use as a means of tracking the Other is rei¬ fied in the image of Dr. Lombroso on his own journey into the interior as he opens the skull of his subject. As the next chapter shows, criminal photogra¬ phy had little of the curative and no less of the fantastic about it. 82 Woolnoth, Facts and Faces, 4. 83 Diamond, “On the Application,” 23-24.

CHAPTER

6

Signs of the Things Taken Testimony, Subjectivity, and the Nineteenth-Century Mug Shot

L

ombroso’s careful fingers moving through the head of his dead subject offer a graphic image of science in pursuit of signs, of the search for meaning in human skulls, hands, and faces; and by the side of the sleuth-scientist, now authorizing the quest as well as recording

those signs, was the camera, metaphoric eye for his work. Its utility to the act of tracking, its role in the hunt for the elusive human psyche and, more literally, for the fugitive body itself, was by century’s end conspicuously, if ambiguously, established in the writings of both American and British law courts. In 1911 in Illinois a man named Thomas Jennings was convicted of murder on the evidence of photographs that were introduced into court. The photographs were of a freshly painted fence on which Jennings had left his fingerprints during his escape from the site of the murder. Eyewitness accounts of the occurrence had been deemed inadmissible owing to their uncertainty, but the photographs were admitted and were responsible for Jennings s com viction. In its record the court stated: A great deal has been written and said in the past concerning the doubtful nature of testimony identifying persons. Men’s faces, like their handwriting, may be so similar that the keenest observer may be baffled in seeking to discover differ¬ ences. “The witness,” says Whartonf’s book on Criminal Evidence], is asked how he knows that the prisoner at the bar is the person who fired the fatal shot, and his answer is, ‘I infer it from a similarity of eyes, of hair, of height, of manner, of expression, of dress.’ Eluman identity, therefore, is an inference drawn from a se-

• 187 •

• i88 Framing the Victorians

ries of facts, some of them veiled, it may be, by disguise and all of them more or less varied by circumstances.”1 The court was correct in acknowledging that, for its purposes at least, identi¬ ty is cumulative, the result of repetition, either in the individual (in having a sufficient number of similarities between him- or herself and the person he or she is supposed to be) or of evidentiary signs (in pointing repeatedly to the same individual human source). The similarities between Jennings in court and the figure spotted leaping over the fence were insufficient to make the tes¬ timonies of three eyewitnesses convincing, but the evidentiary signs of his fin¬ gerprints on the wet paint were so convincing that they alone were held suf¬ ficient to convict. The case, unusual only in its precocious use of fingerprints as evidence, illustrates the fallibility of human testimony. Although three per¬ sons saw Jennings leap the fence, none was permitted to testify. The agentless camera, on the other hand, was presumed infallible. Although testimony may falter because of the testifier’s poor memory, ner¬ vousness, or deliberate lies, it is obviously central to the process of a trial.

Black s Law Dictionary defines it as “evidence given by a competent witness under oath or affirmation; as distinguished from evidence derived from writ¬ ings, and other sources. Although, as Black’s says, “in common parlance, ‘tes¬ timony and evidence are synonymous[, testimony properly means only such evidence as is delivered by a witness on the trial of a cause, either orally or in the form of affidavits or depositions.”2 Testimony, then, begins life as the spo¬ ken word and is, in its legal use at least, distinguished from evidence, which may include writings and other artifacts. Quine and Ullian describe the mech¬ anism of testimony in its more general use as “an extension of our senses. It was the first and greatest human device for stepping up the observational in¬ take. Telescopes, microscopes, radar, and radio-astronomy are later devices to the same end.”3 The testimony of these instruments has been deemed suffi¬ ciently reliable to allow the world to be represented according to their evi¬ dence. In court the testifier presents certain pieces of information, which may or may not be deemed relevant. The function of the jury, assisted by counsel, is to reassemble the pieces and decide whether the narrative they are able to fashion from these bits of testimony is credible. Ideal testimony, then, would logically be that from which only limited nar¬ ratives are possible, so that juries would necessarily believe the same story. It would consist of what Quine calls “observational sentences”—sentences that

1 People v. Jennings,

96 N.E. 1081 (Ill. 1911).

Campbell Black, Black’s Law Dictionary (St. Paul: West, 1979), 1324. W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random, 1978), 51.

2 Henry

189

4

Signs of The Things Taken

require no external information in order to bring one to the conclusions of the testifier; sentences that make, in other words, no assumption of additional information other than what anyone would see were the object of the sentence before one. Ideal testimony, of course, is an impossibility—the nature of the subjective experience will not allow otherwise—but as a model it shares the same place in the courtroom as the ideal photograph, which is self-explanatory, self-evident, and in consequence, undeniably true. Unlike ideal testi¬ mony, however, which is acknowledged to be impossible, the ideal photograph is frequently produced in evidence. During photography’s early decades, the distinction the courts made be¬ tween it and other forms of evidence lent credence to the theory that a photograph might function as an observational sentence, that it could be a self-evident and self-explanatory truth. Well into the twentieth century pho¬ tographs were described by the courts as light printed pictures produced by the operation of natural laws and not by the hand of man, as inerrant maps drawn by the subtile forces of sunlight.”4 5 More than sixty years after the in¬ vention of photography, human agency was still denied or overlooked in the interests of empowering the scientific “truth” of the photograph. Despite their figuration by courts as images produced “not by the hand of man,” in certain circumstances, photographs have been held to constitute “written evidence.”^ The word writing as used in article 1, section 8, of the Constitution, which secures to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries,’ has on occasion been construed to mean photographs.6 This interpretation infers (by grouping the photograph¬ er with the author and the inventor) that photography does indeed involve human artistry and that it can produce not only something to which it is worth having exclusive rights but something to which it is possible to have exclusive rights. The nineteenth-century photograph’s status as nonwriting or more pre¬ cisely, nonverbal artifact was centrally significant to the disagreement over whether photography was testimony or merely testimonial in nature. A pho¬ tograph appeared to many to make ideal testimony by virtue of the fact that

4 Porter v. Buckley, 147 F. 142-43 (3d Circ. 1906); State v. Clark, 196 Pa. 371 (Or. 1921), Charles C. Scott, Photographic Evidence (St. Paul: West, 1969) 2:294. 5 The Uniform Rules of Evidence, rule 1, subsection 13, define writing as follows: Writ¬ ing’ means handwriting, typewriting, printing, photostating, photographing and every ot er means of recording upon any tangible thing any form of communication or representation, in¬ cluding letters, words, pictures, sound or symbols or combinations thereof.” Scott, / holograph¬ ic Evidence 2:305-6. There is contradictory authority, however. See, for example, Charles 1. McCormick, McCormick on Evidence (St. Paul: West, 1984), 705-6. 6 Scott, Photographic Evidence, 2:304.

•

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Framing the Victorians

it does not consist of words and seems (therefore) to be more easily understood and more immediately effective through the apparently simpler relation it has to the object it represents; yet technically, and ironically, a photograph was not admissible as testimony in court precisely because it was not verbal. Photographs were instead admissible as illustrations of oral testimony. If a wound, for example, were being described by a doctor, it was acceptable to use a photograph to illustrate the description. One such case in 1882 inspired the court to offer its opinion that photographs were indeed preferable to oral testimo¬ ny: “We cannot conceive of a more impartial and truthful witness than the sun, as its light stamps and seals the similitude of the wound on the photo¬ graph put before the jury; it would be more accurate than the memory of wit¬ nesses, and as the object of all evidence is to show the truth, why should not this dumb witness show it?”7 The language of the opinion reveals what was well before the 1880s part of the cultural baggage accompanying photography: its products, metaphorical¬ ly, spoke. Although a photograph was denied the stature of true testimony in court, it was nonetheless figured as an “impartial and truthful witness” (albeit dumb). It is an image that posits the photograph as cognizant. As a matter of law, however, the photograph could not (and cannot) stand alone. Actual pieces of the fence were exhibited in the Jennings case, and the photographs of the fingerprints on the painted fence were introduced in addition to oral testimony. These photographs apparently were able to reveal the fingerprints more clearly than the naked eye could perceive them, and were admissible as verification of the fact that Jennings did indeed leave his prints upon the fence. In order for any photograph to be admissible, accompanying testimony must be supplied by a witness who can state that what the photograph shows is an accurate representation of its subject. In the early years, that testimony came from the photographer, but owing to the rapid and wide spread of photogra¬ phy, expert witness was not long considered necessary. Any reliable person might testify that the photograph was an accurate picture of its subject. Nev¬ ertheless, a photograph could not, despite the implications of popular terminology, stand alone as a witness.8

8? Franklin v. State, 69 Ga. 43 (1882); Scott, Photographic Evidence, 2:297. Current use of photography in court is given much wider range. Photographs are admit¬ ted under two theories, the pictorial-testimony theory and the silent-witness theory. In the irst instance, the photograph illustrates testimony; in the second, most recent category no percipient witness is necessary for the photograph to be admissible as testimony against an in¬ dividual. An example of this use would be the film or photograph made of the midnight bank robber whose image is recorded by automatic camera. Admissibility of silent-witness pho¬ tographs became necessary at the turn of the century with the invention of the x-ray, which produces independent testimony of a state of affairs which the human eye cannot hope to con-

191

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Signs of The Things Taken

Testimony in the courtroom was matched outside by a wide and related interest in personal reflection and autobiography. Most especially during the last decades of the nineteenth century, prisoners and other social deviants were encouraged to record their life histories as a contribution to the study of crim¬ inal motivation.9 What Foucault calls a “turning of real lives into writing” functioned “as a procedure of objectification and subjection.”10 The life of the individual became the subject for study at the moment in which (and because) the subject was marked off as aberrant, objectively different. The popularity of transformational narratives can best be understood within the larger active context of Allan Sekula’s “instrumental realism,” for such publications func¬ tioned primarily for containment and supervision in their application of “techniques of social diagnosis and control.”11 Biographies, journals, and oth¬ er accounts of the construction of subjectivity paralleled and complemented photography’s role in the identification and isolation ot otherness. To the number of persons recording their own histories, we can add the many detec¬ tives and policemen who began to write down their experiences of dealing with criminals, as well as those individuals who were responsible for pseudoau¬ tobiographies, such as The Autobiography of a Thief, a work of confessional ven¬ triloquism “recorded” by its “editor, Hutchins Hapgood, who assumes the voice of Jim, an “ex-pickpocket and burglar,” in order to tell the story of his downfall. Hapgood’s apparently willing subject begins his recitation with the unlikely statement that “I shall tell my story with entire frankness. I shall not try to defend myself. I shall try merely to tell the truth. Perhaps in so doing I shall explain myself.”12 Like Lavater’s line drawings and Diamonds pho¬ tographs, Jim’s effort to “explain” himself has diagnosis as its motivation, and the diagnosis proceeds according to the principle that what can be narrated or shown can be controlled and, ultimately, solved. firm. Now, according to Scott, photographs are admissible as evidence “not merely as diagrams or maps representing things about which a witness testifies from his independent observation, but as direct evidence of things which have not been described by any witness as being wit la¬ in his observation. ... a photograph is just as much substantive evidence as the testimony o a witness describing the features of a scene or object without a photograph would be (Scott, Photographic Evidence, 2:298-99)- For a consideration of the implications of this contemporary reliance on photography in legal affairs, see Benjamin V. Madison, “Seeing Can Be Deceiving: Photographic Evidence in a Visual Age—How Much Weight Does It Deserve?” William and Mary Law Review 25 (1984): 705-42; and Steven I. Bergel, “Evidence—‘Silent Witness The¬ ory’ Adopted to Admit Photographs without Percipient Witness Testimony State v. I ulphus, 465 A.2d 153 (R.I. 1983),” Suffolk University Law Review 19 (1985): 353-599 Tagg, “Power and Photography,” 47. 10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 191-92. 11 Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs,” 16. „ . , 12 Hutchins Hapgood, ed., The Autobiography of a Thief (New York: Fox, Duftield, 1903k 15-

•

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Framing the Victorians

The Testimonial Photograph The joint tasks of control and solution were early assigned to photography in the public imagination. In act 4 of Dion Boucicault’s melodrama The Oc¬

toroon, an American Indian, Chief Wahnotee, is accused of murdering a young slave boy. At the scene of the crime is a broken camera belonging to the over¬ seer, Salem Scudder, who, together with assorted bystanders and the true mur¬ derer, Jacob M’Closky, holds an impromptu trial. Scudder believes Wahnotee to be innocent, but he has no proof. Then Pete, a slave, finds sticking out of the “telescopic machine” (the camera) a photographic plate. There in the pic¬ ture is the image of M’Closky in the act of murder. Scudder is triumphant in his accusation: “You slew him with that tomahawk; and as you stood over his body ... you thought that no witness saw the deed, that no eye was on you—but there was, Jacob M’Closky, there was. The eye of the Eternal was on you

the blessed sun in heaven, that, looking down, struck upon this plate

the image of the deed. Here you are, in the very attitude of your crime!” M Closky of course repudiates the image, but his verbal denial, observes Scud¬ der, is meaningless against the photographic plate before him: “ ’Tis true! the apparatus can t lie. Look there. . . . Look there. O, you wanted evidence—you called for proof—Heaven has answered and convicted you.” But “What court of law, asks M’Closky, “would receive such evidence/”13 The answer to his question (“this would”) hints that the use of photographs in court, if not yet commonplace, at least was well on the way to becoming standard practice. By 1859, the year of The Octoroon's first performance,14 the apparent inability of “the apparatus” to lie had been acknowledged by both the American and the British legal systems, which recognized in photography a new kind of documentary evidence, a valuable substitute for a less compact or more fragile original. One of the earliest appellate court cases in the United States involving pho¬ tographic evidence (tried in the same year The Octoroon was written) arose out of a claim for a land grant in which the government’s defense was that a document of title was a forgery. Original documents were used in the trial court, but in the appellate court photographs were used , and the counsel stated in his brief:

By the employment of the beautiful art of photography, this tribunal can exam¬ ine the assailed title, and contrast it with papers of undoubted genuineness, with

n Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana (1859; Miami: Mnemosyne, I969), 32.

14 In New York at the Winter Garden Theater on December 6, 1859.

■l

193 Signs of The Things Taken

*

the same certainty as if all the originals were present, and with even more con¬ venience and satisfaction-These photographs are now presented, that the members of the court may apply the evidence to them, and observe tor them¬ selves not only the differences pointed out, hut others, that each eye will soon detect for itself.1" The satisfaction photography here offered the courts was conclusive; as evi¬ dence, the photograph admitted no ambiguity. The testimonial value of pho¬ tography was indeed regarded, even more than twenty years after this case was decided, as symbolic of the sophistication of the society that employed it:

All civilized communities rely upon photographic pictures tor taking and pre¬ senting resemblances of persons and animals, of scenery and all natural objects, of buildings and other artificial objects. It is of frequent occurrence, that fugitives from justice are arrested on the identification given by them. The Rogues Callers " is the practical judgment of the executive officers of the law on their ef¬ ficiency and accuracy. They are signs of the things taken.10 The things taken by the camera—people, for the most part—became in turn things taken by the courts as true and convincing; their referents or original subjects might in consequence of the making of these signs be themseh cs the more easily “taken.” The discourse of appropriation latent in Cowley v. People had, in fact, so shaped photography’s signifying powers by the last decades of the century that the pun suggests not so much a play on words as a ct itical col¬ lapse, where photography was concerned, between representation and posses¬ sion. Proprietary metaphors from fields as diverse as psychiatric work and w ar reportage resurfaced in American courts as they negotiated the rights of the individual subject in the (nonhuman) face of increasingly sophisticated rep¬ resentational technologies; for by century’s end photography lvad proved itself the agent of possession, and while the camera’s colonialist allegiance remained for the time being European in resonance, America’s expansionist potential, not to mention its cultural preoccupation with staking a claim, with landow nership, was growing as its frontier disappeared. What

1 am saying here is that

where photography provides a subject for American courts in the late nine¬ teenth century we see (at least) two levels of appropriation and transforma¬ tion: first, the linguistic appropriation of metaphors that have their cultma indices in British life, together with their semantic transformation into com¬ plementary but distinct metaphors for American concerns; and second, the

,s Luco v. United Suites, O4 U.S. (23 How.) 530 (1859); Scott, Photographic krulenee, 1:3. 16 Cou'ley v. People, 477: Chemoff and Sarbin, Photography and the Law, 123.

194 Framing the Victorians

appropriation of photography itself as a mode of discourse by which those con¬ cerns may be addressed—a transformation of the apparent subject into mate¬ rial for philosophical speculation. Photography helped identify recidivists, but for many it held more promise as a method of classifying them as a physically distinct group. Used in this way, photography defined, as Sekula writes, “both the generalized look . . . and the contingent instance,”17 answering to the type of aberrancy as well as satisfying curiosity about the individual. The identification photograph was a sim¬ ple personal portrait, in its early form frequently hard to distinguish from the drawing room pose or the carte de visite; but in the context of law it was made to be read differently, in some instances by behavioral scientists whose inter¬ ests lay in understanding the generalized behavior rather than the individual character of the subject and who read the subject’s face as tendentially symp¬ tomatic rather than personally expressive. Clearly, the power of photography, whether of persons or of things, was in¬ dexed in a legal context to the objectivity of each individual photograph, giv¬ en that the value of a photograph as evidence was directly contingent upon its truth value. Necessarily viewed as without artistry or human intervention, identification and evidentiary photographs both promoted and depended on the myth of authorial absence, just as the photographs of the Crimean War, apparently sui generis to many reviewers, effaced their own human agency. Early court cases employing photographs as evidence do not fall into any immediately identifiable category, but include patent cases, real property cas¬ es, and forgery cases. Critics and enthusiasts early predicted the greatest po¬ tential for photography in the recording of personal identities. As early as No¬ vember 1839 German newspapers published reports of a husband “who had succeeded in photographing his wife during a tryst without being discovered and winning a divorce when the daguerreotype was presented as evidence.”18 The necessity for long exposure times (twenty to thirty minutes would not be unusual), the immobility required of the subject for the duration of the expo¬ sure, and the unwieldy and hopelessly indiscreet apparatus necessary to make a daguerreotype in 1839 cast a good deal of doubt on the credibility of this sto¬ ry, but it does reveal some apprehension from the very beginning about possi¬ ble uses of pictures against their subjects. In the United States the earliest appellate case that recognized in-court photographic identification was decided in 1871. By means of a photograph witnesses identified the corpses of two men removed from a river.19 The pho18 Sekula, The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1987): 7. 18 Evich Steng«, The History of Photography: Its Relation to Civilization and Practice, trans. Edward Epstean (Easton, Pa.: Mack, 1939), 106; Scott, Photographic Evidence, 1:2. Ruloffv. People, 45 N.Y. 224 (1871); Scott, Photographic Evidence, 1:4

195

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Signs of The Things Taken

tograph of the dead was thus suggestively used as a substitute for the exhibit tion of the corpses and did not itself testify to anything other than that the subjects of the photographs were recognized by witnesses. The photograph did not affect the court’s decision in any more complex way than to establish the identity of the dead. In a murder case decided three years later, however, pho¬ tographs were introduced of the victim when alive. The court upheld their ad¬ missibility: There seems to be no reason why a photograph, proved to be taken from life and to resemble the person photographed, should not fill the same measure of evi¬ dence [as a painting}. It is true that the photographs we see are not the original likenesses; their lines are not traced by the hand of the artist, nor can the artist be called to testify that he faithfully limned the portrait. They are but paper copies taken from the original plate, called the negative, made sensitive by chem¬ icals, and printed by the sunlight through the camera. It is the result of art, guid¬ ed by certain principles of science.

The court added that the competency of the evidence in such a case depends on the reliability of the photograph as a work of art, and this, in the case before us, in which no proof was made by experts of this reliability, must depend upon the judicial cognisance we may take of photographs as an established means of producing a correct like¬ ness. . . . [Pjhotography, of which we have had nearly a generation s experience, . . . has become a customary and a common mode of taking and preserving views as well as the likeness of persons, and has obtained universal assent to the cor¬ rectness of its delineations. We know that its principles are derived from science; that the images on the plate, made by the rays of light through the camera, are dependent on the same general laws which produce the images of outward forms upon the retina through the lenses of the eye. The process has become one in general use, so common that we cannot refuse to take judicial cognisance of it as a proper means of producing correct likenesses.20

Producing photographs of the victim when living was in this instance deemed relevant and did not interfere with the jury’s ability to do its duty, although the pictures doubtless emphasized that the victim had once been truly living and was now, as the result of the defendant’s action, well and truly dead. The court’s justification here for the use of the photographs is rather cloud¬ ed and encapsulates well the ambiguity and uncertainty with which pho20 Udderzook v. Commonwealth, 76 Pa. 353 (1874); Scott, Photographic Evidence, 1:4.

•

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Framing the Victorians

tographs were classified and described. It argues first that a photograph should be admissible on the same grounds as those on which paintings may be admissible—that is, so far as they are representative of their subjects. That a photograph is not “traced by the hand of the artist,” however, is cause not for sat' isfaction, as one might expect, but for apology. The admissibility of the photograph does not depend on its scientific value but instead on its value as a “work of art.” The court then adds that because the photograph is widely used as art, such general use should permit its use in court. It concludes in confusion that, after all, the photograph is significant because “its principles are derived from science”: the camera works like the eye; so it must reflect what it sees. Yet it was apparently with the notion of usage that the court felt most comfortable, for finally the opinion sidesteps the issue of science or art altogether, appealing again to common usage outside the court to justify its acceptability within it.21 Whether or not in this particular case the photographs met evidentiary requirements, the court’s observations concerning the widespread use of photography to record personal likeness were correct; indeed, by the date of this decision, photography was commonly used within both American and British penal institutions as a method of recording inmates. In England, according to Phillip Thurmond Smith, the adaptation [of photography] to police purpos¬ es” began in 1854, when the governor of Bristol Gaol began making da¬ guerreotypes of the prisoners.2" During the fifties and sixties Birmingham pris¬ oners were photographed.23 In 1868 the home secretary gave approval to the setting up of photographic equipment in Scotland Yard.24 The histories of photography and the organized police are, as several critics have noted, closely connected. John Tagg, for one, observes that the begin¬ nings of photography coincided with the beginnings of a police service in Britain.25 He implies that the need and desire for photography in that counSimilarly vague language and logic abound wherever photographs were deemed worthy of comment in court opinions. The primary reason for the admissibility of photographs appears to have been their common general application. One court wrote that there was no good rea¬ son not to regard the photograph as evidence: “If they are relied upon as agencies for accurate mathematical results in mensuration and astronomy there is no reason why they should be deemed unreliable in matters of evidence. Wherever what they disclose can aid or elucidate the just determination of legal controversies, there can be no well formed objection to resort¬ ing to them” (Frank v. Chemical National Bank, 26 N.Y. Sup. Ct. [1874], affd, 84 N.Y. 209 [1874], quoted in Albert S. Osborn, Questioned Documents (Albany: Boyd, 1929), 62. The con¬ clusion here is that where the court decides that the photograph may be employed to reveal the truth, then it is to be admitted. The loophole, presumably, would be that the photograph was inadmissible if it did not fit the desired outcome of the case in question. “ Phillip Thurmond Smith, Policing Victorian London (London: Greenwood, 1985), 121. 23 Tagg, “Power and Photography,” 23. 24 Smith, Policing, 121. 25 Tagg, “Power and Photography,” 23.

197 * Signs of The Things Taken

try grew out of its rapidly expanding government-controlled police force. Fou¬ cault’s famous documentation of the nineteenth-century institutionalization of surveillance in France, moreover, has made it something of a commonplace to observe the emergent relationships there between various kinds of realisms and systems of monitoring human behavior. America’s public surveillance op¬ erations also gave rise to a heightened awareness of the powers of imagistic and literary realism, but they were organized rather differently. In 1839, the year Daguerre’s invention was announced (and the end of the first decade of the London Metropolitan Police), all New York had no more than eight hundred watchmen and one hundred constables.26 The first mod¬ ern American city police force was founded in New York City in 1844 by an act of the state legislature. Other American cities soon followed suit. Chica¬ go founded its own police force in 1851, Cincinnati and New Orleans the fol¬ lowing year. Philadelphia and Boston joined them in 1854, and by 1857 Newark and Baltimore had their own forces.27 Centralization was not an aim, largely because it was understood to be a fundamental abridgment of the right to local government. Police forces were sensitive to their position; perhaps be¬ cause of the awareness of public sentiment, uniforms were not widely adopt¬ ed for several years, so that the police did not at first create a visible presence. Further, for the same reasons, emphasis was deliberately placed on the pre¬ vention and punishment of crime, rather than its detection. But as a conse¬ quence of the desire to limit police power in this way, its effectiveness in ap¬ prehending criminals was curtailed. Fugitives might slip with ease through holes in a police net that spread only patchily across America, and the ardu¬ ous job of tracing the progress of a person from state to state was frequently abandoned at the borders. Ironically, perhaps inevitably, the desire to keep or¬ ganized policing to a minimum ultimately led to the creation of a new and quintessential^ American system of operational law, the detective agency, which operated precisely according to those rules of surveillance that the po¬ lice had deliberately avoided. Private detective agencies did not just consist of a number of faceless sleuths; on the contrary, detectives frequently wore conspicuous uniforms, as in Chicago, where members of Pinkerton’s agency paraded the streets in uni¬ form five years before the city police were similarly marked off from the crowd. Indeed, Frank Morn notes that in general, despite the fact that the private detective’s portfolio always contained such services as spying on workers and gathering evidence for divorce cases, the private agency with its corps of de26 Frank Morn, “The Eye That Never Sleeps": A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 12.

27 Samuel G. Chapman and Colonel T. Eric St. Johnston, The Police Heritage in England and America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1962), 34.

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Framing the Victorians

tectives and army of patrolmen—clearly resembled an urban police depart' ment.”2b The private detective was in this sense more “public” than the city police. The fundamental difference between public police and private detective agency, however, remained the most troubling: the private agency was owned by those who could afford to hire its services, and thus it operated for the client, not the public interest. Agencies wielded unregulated power, their methods of surveillance unchecked by government restrictions. Newspaper reporter Harry Marks expressed a common concern in his memoirs of 1882 when he observed, “The private, or, as it might be called, the amateur detective ser¬ vice of New York, is conducted on veritable laisserfaire principles.” Moreover, he went on to explain, detectives themselves were not highly regarded: There is something in the very name of ‘private detective’ which is repulsive to the frank and honest mind. . . . the power [detectives] wield is, by some of them, used as often for evil as for good. The system under which they work is so lose [sic] and so dangerous that it virtually gives the reputations of the whole community into the keeping of a totally irresponsible and frequently untrustworthy class.29

Even detectives were distrustful of their fellows. The detective, wrote George McWatters in 1877, “is the outgrowth of a diseased and corrupted state of things, and is, consequently, morally diseased himself. . . . He is a miserable snake, not in a paradise, but in the social hell.” Nevertheless, the profession had for McWatters a certain nobility deriving from the detectives deistic om¬ niscience. He is “ever about in public places, exercising his calling for the pro¬ tection of the thousands who know him not”; he is “the guardian of. . . thou¬ sands.”30 La Fayette C. Baker observes in less grandiose but equally revealing terms that “the work of the detective is simply deception reduced to a science or profession.”31 Old fears of the potential for abuses by an intrusive centralized intelligence were rekindled in the second half of the century by the role of spying in de¬ tective work, and photography provided a focus for these fears. Subject iden¬ tification was the most important step in surveillance, and photography also appeared to offer an effective means of retaining records of those subjects for future use. By the 1870s one of the largest criminal photograph collections in 28 Morn, Eye, viii. Harry H. Marks, Small Change, or Eights and Shades of New York (New York, 1882), 13. 30 George S. McWatters, Detectives of Europe and America, or Life in the Secret Service (Hart¬ ford, 1877), 831-32, 844-45. La Fayette C. Baker, History of the United States Secret Service (Philadelphia, 1868; Lon¬ don: AMS Press, 1973), 44.

199 * Signs of The Things Taken

the entire United States had been amassed by Allan Pinkerton, himself originally a fugitive from Scotland, who had founded his detective agency in 1850. Like other private agencies, Pinkerton’s served employers who desired detec¬ tive supervision of their employees to forestall problems ranging from labor unrest to theft in the workplace. Detective work in general was thus very closely bound up with safeguarding the status quo and its referent, property, and as a result of these associations, Pinkerton’s trademark, a large open eye, and its motto “We Never Sleep,” came “to embody a meaning that tran¬ scended mere professional competence.”32 The eye was to those under its ju¬ risdiction the eye of the invasive and unregulated private police, the eye of re¬ pressive supervision. But it was also the symbol of the individual, the self or “I” whose rights to privacy were being redefined as they were being eroded. The court’s acceptance of the photograph as a true vision legitimated an al¬ ready powerful relationship in the public imagination between the camera and the eye. It was inevitable that the camera should become the most potent sym¬ bol of the detective’s twin tasks of surveillance and representation. As J. H. Harris notes in his introduction to Baker’s account of his work as a spy during the Civil War, “Doubtless, the principal reason for the general disfavor toward the police department, arises from the espionage inseparable from it. People do not like to be watched.”33 At stake was the precious but never-defined threshold of private space, which photographic study of the personal appearance might be perceived as violating. It perhaps suggests an intuition of this violation and certainly ar¬ gues a belief in the camera’s powers of surveillance that there was vigorous re¬ sistance to enforced photographing. Although a photograph was not admissi¬ ble as testimony in the courts, as mug shots began to be made by force in jails and police stations, they functioned as such. By photographing a man s body against his will, after all, in a sense one forced him to testify against himself. To clear up the gray area surrounding one’s rights to refuse to be photographed, the courts established that one’s appearance is not a private concern but in ef¬ fect belongs to the public domain; photographing a defendant against his or her will was (and is) “sometimes considered as non-testimonial and therefore not within the privilege against self-incrimination.”34 Yet the photograph,

32 Frederick Voss and James Barber, “We Never Sleep”: The First Fifty Years of the Pinkertons, catalog (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery, 1981), 8. 33 J. H. Harris, Introduction to Baker, History, 21. 3« See Williams v. State, 396 S.W. 2d 837 (Ark. 1965), the case of a man whose chest was photographed, showing the burn mark made by a flatiron the victim had been using w en s e was raped. “A photograph of the scar was held to be admissible over the objection that it vio¬ lated [the] defendant’s privilege against self-incrimination” (Scott, Photographic Evidence 2:307-8).

•

200

Framing the Victorians

though viewed as nontestimonial, was in fact used as testimony to bear wit¬ ness against its subject. The use of the photograph against its subject both inside and outside the courts obviously called for a redefinition of notions of privacy, the interest in which only intensified in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Decid¬ ing a case in 1902, Judge Gray concluded that “taking photographs without the previous consent of the subject . . . [had] the characteristics of ‘a species of aggression, hut he asserted that such aggression was in fact “an irremedi¬ able and irrepressible feature of the social evolution.”35 Courts held that the face was public property, so that forcing individuals to have their photograph taken could not, at least from a legal standpoint, violate their privacy.3^ Re¬ sistance to this “species of aggression,” however, was widespread. Writing for the journal Photography in 1889, Arthur Bowes noted that “it is surprising, at first sight, to see the evident objection to the process raised by these sitters. They refuse to pose in graceful attitudes, and decline in spite of all entreaty to look pleasant.’”37 The violence occasionally involved in making the identi¬ fication photograph ultimately emerged in popular terminology, which origi¬ nally labeled such pictures mug shots in reference to the ugliness of the sub¬ ject (from the tradition of drinking mugs bearing grimacing faces), but which suggests to the modern mind at least that the subject is being “mugged,” or as¬ saulted, by the camera. The mug shot was conceived almost as soon as knowledge of daguerreotypy spread. Charles Scott quotes an article apparently published by the Munches er Morgenblatt in November 1841: The Paris Police now have daguerreotypes of the features of all criminals passing through its hands and attaches these portraits to the respective reports. When set free and suspected of a new crime, the portrait is shown to all police officers, who soon seek out their man. Da¬ guerre certainly never dreamed that his art would be used for such a pur¬ pose. In the same month (and presumably from the same source) the Philadelphia Public Ledger noted on its front page with apparent approval: When a discovery has been made in science there is no telling at the time to what useful purpose it may afterwards be applied. The beautiful process invented by Daguerre, of painting with sunbeams, has been recently applied to aid the police

'5

Robertson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., 64 N.E. 450 (N.Y. 1902), quoted in W. J. Wag¬

ner, “Photography and the Right to Privacy: The French and American Approaches,” Catholic Lawyer 25 (1980): 199. The same principle holds for the fingerprints, of course, and, interestingly, for the voice Arthur Bowes, “Crime and the Camera,” Photography: The Journal of the Amateur, the Professional, and the Trade r.54 (1889): 649. Munchener Morgenblatt, November 1841, quoted in Scott, Photographic Evidence, 1:2.

201

‘

Signs of The Things Taken

in suppressing crime. When any suspicious person or criminal is arrested in France, the officers have him immediately daguerreotyped and he is likewise placed in the criminal cabinet for future reference. The rogues, to defeat this oh' ject, resort to contortions of the visage and horrible grimaces.39

The subjects of these pictures, unwilling to have accurate likenesses of them¬ selves stowed in the “criminal cabinet,” did indeed try to make their features unrecognizable. Frequently, however, the mug shot reveals enough of an au¬ thoritative presence in the shape of an iron clamp holding the subject’s head or a hand grasping the hair, to suggest that the grimaces are a response to phys¬ ical violence outside the frame of the photograph. Illustrations in detective histories as well as novels and popular magazines display the force apparently necessary to make a subject submit to having the photograph taken (fig. 39)- In 1882 Harry Marks recorded how photographs “these useful works of art”—were procured for the most part by means of a struggle between the subject, who tried to prevent the making of a true like¬ ness “by closing his eyes, [and] distorting his features,” and the police, who eventually succeeded “in tiring their man out.”40 By 1888 the science of photography was able to overcome the problem of resistance to the camera as George W. Walling, former chief of the New York Police, testified: First-class “professionals” undergo the process of having their faces handed down to infamy with bad grace. Not infrequently they resist the taking of their photo¬ graph in a most vigorous manner. Under the old method, such a prisoner was dif¬ ficult to photograph. Even when force was used it was found impossible to obtain other than distorted features for the gallery. Now-a-days, however, by means of the instantaneous process, and by catching the reluctant sitter at an unguarded moment, portraits sufficiently correct for the required purpose are always ob¬ tained.41

By the time Walling wrote, photographic collections of criminals had been es¬ tablished in every major city across the country; the extensive collection of the New York police had been swelling for thirty years. The photographs were intended to arm the police detective with a means of identifying his subjects and also to protect the supposed possible future victim, the private citizen. In 1857 Police Sergeant William H. Lefferts had suggested that an ambrotype Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 30, 1841, quoted ibid. 40 Marks, Small Change, 53. 41 George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (1888; Montclair, N.J.:

39

Patterson Smith, 1972), 193.

Fks. 39- The Bashful Model. Harper’s Weekly 17 (1873).

203

•

Signs of The Things Taken

gallery be founded in the detective office of the New York City police. The gallery would be open to the public, particularly to victims of crime, who would come to make identifications.42 The gallery would remind visitors that the individual should be vigilant in the crowds of the city. The public would become its own detective.

Detective Manuals and Private Collections Several publications of the late nineteenth century stressed the need for personal awareness of crime, implicitly urging the possibility of retaining am thority over one’s personal life by becoming in a sense the guardian of it. Clear¬ ly the appeal of such texts was more powerful than their superficial claims that by being a watchful and alert citizen one could assist the police in its work. The books in fact were offered largely as a defense against the police, or, more precisely, against the need for the police, and the unsophisticated precautions they recommended were intended to protect individual liberty not just from a burgeoning criminal population but from the similarly expanding police force. The physiognomy-based methods of self-protection involved learning to read human beings in terms of types—a project with obvious racial implica¬ tions. The popular Seymour’s Key to Character, or Everybody Their Own Detec¬ tive (1894) includes essays on the classification of the human race, palmistry, physiognomical expressions of character, modes of walking, grades of charac¬ ter, the chin, the mouth, the nose, and so on. For devotees, there is even a chapter on how to select a husband or wife. Consistent with the text’s imper¬ ative to make standard its preferred types of human being, and assuming that the purpose of selecting a mate is to produce the best possible offspring, the chapter’s advice is oriented toward creating the illusory but scientifically de¬ sirable mean, the average human being. Thus, Seymour instructs women in search of husbands: “If you are fair in color of complexion and hair, then se¬ lect one who is dark. If you are medium in color of complexion and hair, then medium may be chosen in the opposite sex. If your eyes are blue, select one who has dark eyes. If yours are gray, then you can select either light or dark.”43 By dark, of course, Seymour means only gradations on a Caucasian scale, the goal of this chapter being the refinement of European features through a merging of categories. At first glance out of place, the chapter in fact simply furthers the larger project of the book, which is the identification of Other42 Augustine E. Costello, Our Police Protectors: A History of the New York Police, 3d ed. (1885; Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1972), 403. 43 William Seymour, Seymour’s Key to Character, or Everybody Their Own Detective (Philadelphia, 1894), 120-21.

' 204 Framing the Victorians

ness. Anonymity has no part in Seymour’s work, since it constitutes a threat to personal morality; one secret agent in Paris lamented, “It is almost impossible to maintain good behavior in a thickly populated area where an indivkb ual is . . . unknown to all others and thus does not have to blush in front of anyone.”44 The goal of the personal detective guide in mid to late nineteenthcentury America was in fact to eradicate the possibility of such a situation. The individual subject, through the confessional of the body and the media¬ tion of photography, should never again be “unknown to all others.” Given the emphasis of the guides, as of regular detective work, on reading and identifying certain signs, illustration was obviously important. Grannans

Pocket Gallery of Noted Criminals of the Present Day is typical of the genre in its use of engravings made from mug shots. Accompanying each picture is a small narrative of personal exploits and revealing mannerisms, much in the style of Isaac Kerlin’s Mind Unveil’d. Indeed, despite their superficially diver¬ gent aims, the works of psychiatrist-photographers and of detectives are equal¬ ly invested in the shared tradition of optical determinism, and both are effec¬ tively authorized by photography. The detective agency that put together Grannans guide made note of the work of tracking down both information and photographs: “The photos from which these fine engraved likenesses have been made, with the descriptions, have been obtained by special effort, from the authorities of States Prisons, Chiefs of Police of the larger cities, from the U.S. Secret Service Department and from our own Gallery.” The miniature collection (the book is smaller than pocket-size), while obviously aimed at a popular audience, boasts its own professionalism: “No Detective, of course, will think of being without it.” A more telling observation by its author is that, although the criminal might currently speed all over the country thanks to the luxury of modem transportation systems, still “he cannot evade his own likeness.” The image itself, runs the reasoning, polices its own subject as though connected like a shadow.45 Books such as these accentuated the gradation in methods of policing, which ranged from public policy and control to private agencies to the indi¬ vidual taking up a book in order to police society alone. Histories written by retired police officers predictably enjoyed a surge in popularity during the last quarter of the century. Ranging from the elegant Victorian apocrypha of

44

Adolphe Schmidt, Tableaux de la revolution frangaise, publiees sur les papiers inedits du de-

partement et de la police secrete de Paris (Leipzig, 1870), 3:337, quoted in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 40. 45 Joseph C. Grannan, Grannans Pocket Gallery of Noted Criminals of the Present Day Com taining Portraits of Noted and Dangerous Criminals, Pickpockets, Burglars, Bank Sneaks, Safe Blowers, Confidence Men, and All-Round Thieves, 4th ed. (Cincinnati, 1892), 5, 6, 4.

2°5

*

Signs of The Things Taken

Walling to the garbled moralizing of George W. McNutt, these publications display on occasion similarities to later writings by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, with their emphasis on the detective’s infallibility and su¬ perior wisdom, their penchant for exotic locations, their grisly crimes and sus¬ picious foreigners. George McWatters’s Detectives of Europe and America, or Life in the Secret Service (1877) offers short histories with titles redolent of the contemporary taste for melodrama: “The Gambler’s Wax Finger,” “The Skele¬ ton,” “A Spanish Gang of Coiners and Counterfeiters,” “The Handsome Egyptian Girl”—the truthfulness of his accounts being apparently uncompro¬ mised by such sensational headings. Every text, inevitably, is accompanied by certifications of the truthfulness of all, beginning, in the case of G. W. Mc¬ Nutt (former chief of detectives in Des Moines, Iowa), with truly bizarre state¬ ments by his bank manager and sundry owners of local grocery stores that the narrator is indeed a trustworthy source of information. More often, titles offer years on the force as their guarantee of truth: Thomas Furlong’s Fifty Years a Detective and John H. Warren Jr.’s Thirty Years’ Battle with Crime establish their status as historical documents by reference to the many years in which their authors were engaged in the pursuit of criminals. George Walling’s Recollecdons of a New York Chief of Police draws on almost thirty-eight years of service with the New York Police. However much McNutt’s title, My Twenty-three Years Experience as a De¬ tective, might enhance his credibility, his testimonial is so incoherent that the reader cares little whether it is accurate or not. Walling’s crafted tales, how¬ ever, despite their frame of supposed fact, like the majority of such histories, share in a distinctive tradition of literary fiction. Indeed, in his introduction Walling shows himself to be highly conscious of the fictional atmosphere of his stories, both excusing and justifying it with the late nineteenth-century truism that “no fiction could be so rich in sensational incident as the true record of the lives of great criminals.” The former police chief declares that what the reader is about to witness is “a plain unvarnished statement of in¬ disputable facts.”46 Clearly, there is a growing tension in these books between the “facts” they profess to be displaying and the manner of their presentation, which is self-consciously theatrical and artificial, notwithstanding Warrens disclaimer in the introduction to his own work: “We have photographed, so to speak, in a series of sketches, prostitution as it lives and flourishes between Murray Hill and Water Street. The pictures have been taken from original scenes, and are neither caricatures, nor exaggerations of the hideous reality. 47

46 Walling, Recollections, 3, 4. 47 John H. Warren Jr., Thirty Years’ Battle with Crime, or The Crying Shame of New York, as Seen under the Broad Glare of an Old Detective’s Lantern (1875; New York: Arno, 1970), vii.

• 206 Framing the Victorians

The subtitle of Warren’s work (The Crying Shame of New York, as Seen under the Broad Glare of an Old Detective’s Lantern) is a fairer indication of the per¬ spective that shapes the author’s descriptions of beggars, paupers, and prosti¬ tutes, but equally telling is the ease with which he adapts the model of pho¬ tography as a yardstick for realism, moving comfortably into the suggestion that what he is doing is presenting a picture rather than an essay and, more¬ over, that “a series of sketches” will be more convincing than other kinds of written reports. What each detective and reporter claims to do in these in¬ troductions is resist interpretation, avoid judgment, present only the facts as they are—act, in other words, as a camera. Illustrating their alleged facts are many carefully chosen pictures. Furlong’s Fifty Years a Detective offers photographs of many of the subjects of his thirtyfive “real” detective stories, but because of the cost and technical difficulties involved in reproducing photographs for publication, the majority of pictures in detective books are line drawings or engravings. Walling’s book, though, assures the reader of the reliability of its illustrations by subtitling each with the legend “From a Photograph,” “From a Photograph When under Duress,” or “From a Photograph in the Rogues’ Gallery.” Walling’s praise for the use of photography in the police force is consistent, and throughout his book’s many chapters, he returns frequently to what is apparently a favorite theme: “I don’t believe that over ten rogues in a hundred are ever caught by the printed de¬ scriptions of them. . . . But when the authorities are furnished with a photo¬ graph of the suspected criminal, the case is different. A man cannot change the expression in his eyes.”48 Walling’s evident fascination with portraiture was shared by a vast number of people, for whom criminal photographs were especially interesting. In 1866 the detective office of the New York police had to close its photographic gallery to the public and rule that a likeness could be exhibited only for a specific reason to a viewer accompanied by an officer of the department. There were simply too many people who wanted to visit the gallery.49 In 1880, five years before Walling retired as chief of police, Inspector Thomas Byrnes was made head of the New York detective office. Like Walling, Byrnes was a great proponent of criminal photography and continued to build up the department’s collection; in 1886 he published his Professional Criminals of America, not, however, as a handy pocketbook but rather as an exhaustive, expensive, and weighty work, notable for the high quality of its photograph¬ ic prints. Sharing the professed purpose of the smaller manuals, it promised self-protection against dangerous individuals. To this end, Byrnes believed, as 48 Walling, Recollections, 566. 49 Costello, Our Police, 403.

207

'

Signs of The Things Taken

he explains in the preface, that photographs were so useful that, coupled with short histories of their subjects’ activities, they might actually put an end to crime altogether: Aware of the fact that there is nothing that professional criminals fear so much as identification and exposure, it is my belief that if men and women who make a practice of preying upon society were known to others besides detectives and frequenters of the courts, a check, if not a complete stop, would be put to their exploits. While the photographs of burglars, forgers, sneak thieves, and robbers of lesser degree are kept in police albums, many offenders are still able to oper¬ ate successfully. But with their likenesses within reach of all, their vocation would soon become risky and unprofitable.50

Following this assertion of the amateur market at which his book is aimed, however, Byrnes validates the volume’s status as a serious tool in crime pre¬ vention by noting that it will be invaluable to the professional detective in the active pursuit of criminals, in addition to offering protection from them. The dual aims of the book, like those of other detective publications, and Byrnes s gestures toward both aims encapsulate the ambivalence of the public attitude toward criminal photography, with its desire for social order and personal safe¬ ty tempered and even undermined by fears of photography’s authority and its policing eye. The protection from crime Byrnes offers his readers is the opportunity to arm themselves with the “facts.” To this end a collection of measurements, histories, and general apocrypha accompany and indeed illustrate the pho¬ tographs: In the following pages will be found a vast collection of facts illustrative of the doings of celebrated robbers, and pains have been taken to secure, regardless of expense, excellent reproductions of their photographs, so that the law-breakers can be recognized at a glance. By consulting this book prosecuting officers and other officials will be able to save much time and expense in the identification of criminals who may fall into their hands, (v)

The work thus offers convenience as one of its many benefits it will make identification easy and cheap—but more significant than this boast is Byrnes s implied claim, the unspoken assurance underlying the entire book, that its contents are reliable and worth consulting: the histories are true, the pho50 Thomas Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America (1886; New York: Chelsea House, 1969), v, hereafter cited in the text.

•

208

Framing the Victorians

tographs look like their subjects. Obviously, without the assumption of reliability Byrnes’s book loses its claim to being an aid to the fight against crime in the real world. Yet in fact, the several diverse chapters that accompany the photographs and describe aspects and methods of a life of crime do little to assure the reader of the reliability, or even the identity, of their narrators. Byrnes published the book, and one assumes therefore that the text is his creation; yet for some reason he felt it necessary to couch his own narratives of crime in voices other than his own. Some chapters function as testimonials, such as the two that describe in the first person their authors’ introduction to and struggles with opium addiction (of their identities the reader must remain ig¬ norant). In the chapter titled “Why Thieves Are Photographed,” Byrnes uses a complicated narrative frame in which a reporter, after spotting a well-dressed thief in elegant surroundings, discusses with a police inspector the facial char¬ acteristics of thieves. The police inspector is identified halfway through the narrative as Byrnes himself, who then holds forth on the value of his rogues’ gallery in the identification of the criminal. The story is told in such a way as to make it seem deliberately fictional: Byrnes, as omniscient narrator, sets the scene in a particularly melodramatic style; by using the third person he avoids the immediacy of first-person testimony and allows the reader to interpret the text as though it is romantic fiction; but most intriguingly, he reinvents his own persona in the process, self-consciously promoting his image as om¬ nipresent, omnipotent detective—as a personification, in short, of “the eye that never sleeps.” The picture illustrating this chapter further indicates Byrnes’s awareness of the potential to dramatize and thus play off standard fictional and romantic notions about the powers of the police. The photograph, ambiguously titled

The Inspector s Model, reveals a man held by four police officers, to whose framing points he is the center, in the act of having his photograph taken (fig. 40). There is no indication either of photographer (Jacob Riis) or of photograph¬ ic apparatus within the frame of the picture. Instead of showing us merely the individual’s face, however, this picture of the making of a mug shot is intend¬ ed to display the structure within which the resulting picture had meaning. Thus, to one side of the officers’ frame and quietly balancing the violence of the five men, stands Thomas Byrnes himself. The contortions of the one who must have his picture taken contrast with the dispassionate gaze of the in¬ spector, who, a model for the reader, figures the way in which we are urged to regard the ostensive subject of the picture. The inspector’s power lies in his passivity, in his ability and need to do nothing but observe. The hierarchical relation between the police and the single aberrant individual is thus both ex¬ pressed and distilled here in a picture that records not the facial features of the captive, but his status as subject of the authorial, authoritative, professional gaze.

209

*

Signs of The Things Taken

Fig. 40. The Inspector’s Model. Jacob Riis. From Thomas Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America. New York, 1886. This photograph was published in the 1895 edition of Professional Criminals under the title Photographing a Rogue. Jacob Riis Collection, Mu¬ seum of the City of New York.

Byrnes’s choice of illustration in fact illuminates the real meaning of the chapter. Falling rather short of answering satisfactorily its own title question (“Why Thieves Are Photographed”), the chapter leaves the residual impres¬ sion that any individual is helpless before the camera’s superior powers of recording details, no matter how distorted the details may be. The very men says the fictional, self-created Byrnes, “who have gone to the most trouble to make their pictures useless have been betrayed by them (53)- The chapter is as much a warning against as a celebration of the power of the policing eye. Concerning the photograph’s power to reveal the psychic characteristics of the criminal, however, Byrnes is surprisingly cynical, responding to the re¬ porter’s question, “Is physiognomy any guide?” that it is a very poor one. Judge for yourself. Look through the pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery and see how many rascals you find there who resemble the best people in the country. The conclusion, despite the invitation of the book itself to peruse and know the criminal through a study of his or her features, is that it is a bad thing to judge by appearances, and it is not always safe to judge against them (55). The inspector’s emphasis on visual records was remarked by Augustine

•

2 10

Framing the Victorians

Costello, who undertook a history of the New York police at the time Byrnes was in charge of the detective department. Like Pinkerton, claimed Costello, Byrnes “lifted the prosaic and plodding life of a Detective into the realms of romance [by being] a consummate judge of human nature, [able to] ‘size a man for all he’s worth’ with an unerring judgment that is intuitive.”51 Lincoln Stef¬ fens, an admirer of Byrnes and most likely the unnamed reporter in the chap¬ ter previously described, declared that Byrnes actually created the circum¬ stances within which romantic fictions appeared to play themselves out. The stylized devices of the various chapters of Professional Criminals of America may indeed have had their sources in art rather than life; Steffens claimed to have actually discovered a secret hoard of detective stories belonging to Byrnes and “recognized in them the source of his best narratives. Thus I discovered that instead of detectives’ posing for and inspiring the writers of detective fiction, it was the authors who inspired the detectives.” The adventures leading to one arrest were, in Byrnes s telling, “so perfectly modelled upon the forms of the conventional detective story, that the cynical police reporters would not write it. Byrnes was not alone in his fondness for the romance of detective work; the publisher confessed in the preface to Harry Marks’s volume of true crime stories to having, in some instances, “slightly modified the stiffness of stereo¬ typed newspaper phraseology” (although otherwise the tales are “statements of verified facts ).55 George Walling, too, revealed his understanding of po¬ lice work to be colored by his vision of the detective as actor and hero: “In de¬ scribing not so much a perfect detective as the peculiarities of his calling, I should be doing an injustice if I did not state that there is a certain element of romance about his work. The detective must have, at times, histrionic traits, and must be able not only to wear a disguise, but to enact the person¬ age he assumes to be.”54 Byrnes s accumulation of criminal photographs was paralleled in the private sphere by collections such as that of George Grantham Bain, whose news agency, during the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, gathered photographs of police activities, including mug shots. Judging by a letter addressed to him on March 23, 1908, from the Cincinnati, Ohio, po¬ lice, Bain habitually wrote to request selections of photographs from police files, in this particular instance of local individuals. The six photographs sent to Bain with this letter are remarkably similar in quality and design to the

51 Costello, Our Police,

410.

Quoted by Arthur Schlesinger in his introduction to Byrnes, Professional Criminals, xix 53 Marks, Small Change, 3.

54 Walling, Recollections,

519.

Signs of The Things Taken

carte de visite, and were accompanied by short descriptions of their subjects, as, for example, 1. Edward McCarthy, alias “Hair Lip” [sic] Kelly. He is a dangerous pickpocket and has a record running back to before 1896, when he came under our knowl¬ edge. He operated successfully in Chattanooga, Tenn. and Chicago, Ill., this lat¬ ter named city being his home. He there shot and killed a police officer and was sent to the penitentiary at Joliet for four years. He is regarded as desperate.

On the back of each card is a standardized form filled out by the officer, de¬ tailing name, alias, coloring, crime, and so on (fig. 41). The photographs themselves are remarkable for the violence they reveal: in three of the six pic¬ tures, the subject is being forcibly restrained by police (figs. 42-44). Isma Mar¬ tin, alias Irma Martin, though apparently passively seated before the camera, has firmly closed her eyes to its lens. “It will be observed,” the accompanying letter notes, “that Irma has distorted her features; whether or not she at¬ tempted to cheat the picture or cover an extraordinary physical defect of the face, will remain a mystery, except with herself, for in opening her eyes and looking steadily at one object, both eyes would reveal a convergent strabis¬ mus, making the face more hideous than the puckering up of the lower lip and closing of the eyes.”55 The police commentary betrays a curiosity concerning motivations which is unrelated to Martin’s crime of mail fraud but intuitive¬ ly focuses on her refusal to have her picture taken. Is it to cheat the picture (as she attempted to cheat, we are told, several Kentucky families) or, from personal vanity, to hide a “hideous’ defect? The answer to the mystery is lo¬ cated in the individual, who, an unlocked code, gives up no answers and in¬ deed deliberately resists allowing herself to become the subject of police scruti¬ ny and interpretation. The photograph itself is useless as an identification card. Moreover, since Martin had already served her eighteen months in a house of correction at least eight years before (during which lapse of time she might have changed in appearance, reformed, or simply moved), it is unlike¬ ly that Bain’s reason for requesting a selection of mug shots was to guard against their subjects. The pictures within the context of Bain’s photographic collection were per¬ haps supposed to be instructive about the general class of persons known as criminals, just as Kerlin’s and Parrish’s books of their patients’ photographs im¬ plicitly sought to define the mentally ill as a physically distinct and definable 55 Cincinnati (Ohio) Police, letter to George Grantham Bain, March 23, 1908, George Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs, Washington, D.C.

F. 60.

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Occupation.yC...vC.. Bate of Arrest24 Arrested by Charge Sentence

.

^—

Photo taken Marks

8ER0T Fig. 41.

Edward McCarthy, identification card. Bain Collection. Library of Congress.

Fig. 42.

Edward McCarthy. Bain Collection. Library of Congress.

Fig. 43. Isma Martin. Bain Collection. Library of Congress

Fig. 44. J. B. Black. Bain Collection. Library of Congress. Bain’s letter from the

Cincinnati police states that Black “was arrested at San Francisco, Cal. June 17, 1902 for forgery and designated by the San Francisco department as a ‘forger’ and ‘Bogus check man.’”

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2l6

Framing the Victorians

group. Notwithstanding their attention to individual narratives, the organic zational method within which subject photographs of criminal or psychic aberrency are contextualized and thus made reader ready predetermines the purpose of reading as classificatory. Just as readers are to affirm their own unlikeness from the pictures and thus to register themselves, in the most ele¬ mentary way, as distinct from those persons imaged, so they are enabled to per¬ ceive likenesses between pictures and thus implicitly to consent to the existence of a group whose theoretical existence photography proves to be grounded in material signs. Collecting photographic likenesses was, in both Europe and America, part of a more or (frequently) less organized study of human nature in which the subject was held, sometimes in both senses of the word, to reveal traits about its species as a whole. As a hobby, as I have already suggested, the making of such collections found both reinforcement and justification in the contem¬ porary imperialist discourse of expansionism, whose paradigms were well and conveniently established in literature and other arts. Such paradigms facili¬ tated the simple but ruthless separation between subject and object necessary to the positivistic study of human beings and their cultures if they were to be of scientific use in the abstraction of general laws from specific images or ar¬ tifacts, just as they affirmed and necessitated a distinction between domestic cultures, shown by a newly emergent professional class to be observably dif¬ ferent from ordinary, everyday bourgeois culture. Of course the very reason for the existence of these particular mug shots sent to Bain’s news agency was guarantee of their subjects’ identification as Other, a necessary first step in stripping them of agency. Identification initially set criminals off from society, through incarceration and various other ways in which the criminal’s body is differentiated from that of the noncriminal; but through their photographs, read in the context of positivistic determinism, their features might place them among a group of persons who, even after pun¬ ishment, would be forever different, as they were before they committed their crime. The appropriation of mug shots by the social sciences thus doubled the identificatory potential of photographs, permitting them to testify not just to a subject’s personal identity but additionally to his or her typological status on the sliding scale of humanity. The impetus of physiognomy and phrenology which informed many read¬ ings of nineteenth-century subject photography was not toward therapy and rehabilitation but rather toward their polar opposite, fatalism. Advocates were well aware of the charge that physiognomy could lead only to the abdication of personal moral responsibility, but if there was truth to this “sentimental ob¬ jection,” insisted Caleb Weeks in one of the many phrenological studies of the

2 17

*

Signs of The Things Taken

period, then “so be it.”56 The overriding goal of this method of policing humankind was the early recognition of tendencies articulated in figures of flesh, which inescapably determined from birth what path the mind could take.57 As Carol Shloss has noted, “The experience of being the ‘targets of surveil¬ lance,’ to use Michel Foucault’s harsh language, is at the heart of the experi¬ ence of human powerlessness.”58 And whereas individual resistance to being made the subject of photographic scrutiny certainly suggests fear that surface signs might determine the future, in that the photograph might police its own subject, it also signifies a very basic apprehension regarding the relationship between representation and power: to resist representation is to attempt to re¬ tain agency. To refuse representation is to refuse to become Other.

Policing the Horizon The police, like the public, greatly overestimated the efficiency of the pho¬ tograph as a means of tracking down fugitive identities. The main reason that 56 Caleb S. Weeks, Human Nature Considered in the Light of Physical Science, Including Phrenology (New York, 1893), 44. m 57 Allan Sekula makes the point that one goal of physiognomy and phrenology was to le¬ gitimate on organic grounds the dominion of intellectual over manual labor, contributing to “the ideological hegemony of a capitalism that increasingly relied upon a hierarchical division of labor” (“Body” 12). 58 Shloss, In Visible Light, 255. 59 The fear was prophetic. Physiognomy’s most zealous advocates were active not in the nineteenth century but in this one. During the Red Scare raids, for example, J. Edgar Hoover acted on a Lombrosian faith in typology. Describing the citizens who would be liable under proposed legislation for a new sedition bill, Hoover explained in testimony prepared for Con¬ gress in 1919: “If there be any doubt of the general character of the active leaders and agita¬ tors amongst these avowed revolutionists, a visit to the Department of Justice and an exami¬ nation of their photographs there collected would dispel it. Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type (Quoted in Robert Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of]. Edgar Hoover [New York: Free Press, 1987J, 72-73). ^ 1938 the German photo historian Erich Stenger described the popular history of composite photography, in which images were “produced by photographing several different heads of the same size, superposed by successive exposures on the same plate, or by printing from several negatives on a single print, of the members of a racial, vocational or particular class group. The composite photograph is supposed to represent the typical racial, class an vocational characteristics. . . . Scientists of various faculties, officers and soldiers, Jewish stu¬ dents, murderers, thieves, sick persons, and all kinds and classes of peop e were compe e to furnish their ‘type’ photographs. The results always led to controversy.” Stenger adds uncriti¬ cally, “At the present time this type-photography has been introduced again as an aid to re¬ search in ethnology and other divisions of anthropology” (History of Photography, 70).

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2l8

Framing the Victorians

the photograph proved an unwieldy clue was the sheer volume of mug shot ah bums built up throughout the 1850s and 1860s, symptom of a growing crimb nal population in America and reflective also of the growing number of po¬ lice forces. Further, photography was a useful addition to already established but complex ways of recording details of identity such as the Bertillon system, which involved the painstaking measurement of body parts so as to reduce the subject to a set of statistics that might the more easily be filed away.60 George Bain’s collection includes several posed photographs of police officers taking measurements according to this system; the function of the pictures seems to be similar to that of Byrnes’s Inspector’s Model, in that the photographs display a method, rather than an individual instance. It is the system, rather than the subject, that defines the picture (figs. 45 and 46).

Mug shots were soon perceived to be useless without some organizational method. One problem was the sheer exhaustion of witnesses asked to make an identification from several hundred photographs. Another problem was how to store great volumes of pictures in albums in such a way as to be able to crossreference subjects. Ironically, as photography grew rapidly, the usefulness of criminal photographs—their portability, their two-dimensional reduction of unwieldy humanity—was equally rapidly undermined for practical purposes by the sheer enormity of the collections. Photography had appeared to offer a method for controlling and making transportable data that were previously uncontrollable and untransportable; but this reduction and organization of materials now created the need for a new science to classify and reduce pho¬ tography itself. Meanwhile, the classification or systematized analysis of human features permitted through the agency of photography had widespread effects on no¬ tions of personal appearance generally and on theories of human type spe¬ cifically, just as the making and reading of photographs themselves were influenced and informed by the same prevailing discourses. Criminal photog¬ raphy’s testimony concerning the human race was distinctively different from other kinds of records of experience in that it was both visual and nonconsensual, but these qualities served only to accentuate its assertions. The cam¬ era recorded despite the objections of what it recorded, and as it did so, it di¬ vided the world into viewers and viewed, into those permitted to represent and those whose lot it was to be represented. It took personal appearance into the public domain and there performed its analysis. 60 The system devised by Alphonse Bertillon was the most widely used method of classify¬ ing the apprehended convict. Bertillon first explained the method in an address to the Inter¬ national Penitentiary Congress at Rome in 1885, and it was later published under the title The Identification of Criminal Classes by the Anthropometrical Method (London, 1889). For a study of the wider implications of Bertillon’s system see Sekula, “Body.”

Fig. 45. Measuring features as part of the Bertillon system. Bain Collection. Library

of Congress.

Fig. 46. Bertillon system. Bain Collection. Library of Congress

Signs of The Things Taken

The divergent public attitudes toward the use of photography in police work express profound tensions at the heart of nineteenth-century American and European culture—the pull between romance and realism, between human expression and documentation, between the governing of society and the private freedoms of the individual—so much so that the criminal photograph it¬ self offers an unusually rich site for mapping those tensions, or double-pulls. Photography’s policing eye was officially welcomed as a method of recording, as a visual shorthand easier to comprehend and recall than Bertillon’s system of measurements. But the essence of the criminal photograph, and the funda¬ mental cause for public distrust of its use in police work, is that it is taken re¬ gardless of the consent of its subject and in order to serve its purpose it must be made public. When Foucault talks of the procedure of objectification and subjection called for in turning life into art—translating intangible experi¬ ence into tangible documentation—no instance can illuminate his claims quite so well as that of the nineteenth-century police photograph, which took the image into the public domain so that it might be matched with its live subject. The public and reproducible “signs of the things taken” there policed the private self with photography’s apparently irrefutable testimony. As a comprehensible means of signification, photography depends on a shared understanding of the world, shared, that is, among those who experi¬ ence similar worlds, who are, to borrow a term of Hans Robert Jauss, bound by the same “horizon of expectations,” to which those subject to it are blind.61 If, as Jauss claims, the horizon is adjusted only by the workings of representa¬ tion, which may be said to suggest its limits by signifying the labors of culture and history-bound imagination at the very margins of possibility, we can ar¬ gue that photographs may and perhaps must be read as policing the horizon, defining just as much as describing the reality of the world that horizon cir¬ cumscribes. Just as the literary text has a dialogic relation with its author’s own horizon, so the photograph participates in a continual restructuring and read¬ justment and frequent reaffirmation of the same. Like literature, too, photog¬ raphy is a musical score of potential as well as past meanings, some never to be recovered in performance or reading, others yet to be endowed. As Jauss notes of great literary works, photographs read in their particular horizonbound moment should always be considered as answers to prevailing and his¬ torically contingent questions and can be evaluated according to how ably they answer those questions. For Jauss, this method provides a means of eval¬ uating and distinguishing between works; but in this book I have made no at¬ tempt to evaluate or rank any of the photographs I have considered. Judging 61 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (St. Paul. Uni¬ versity of Minnesota Press, 1982).

Framing the Victorians

their aesthetic qualities has been of less interest to me here than asking, What does this picture do? How and what did it mean?” That there is a perfectly good argument for introducing aesthetics into a discussion about reading Vic¬ torian photography is something of which I am well aware.62 To do so, how¬ ever, would be to shift my focus very distinctly from readers to objects, to iden¬ tify value, if even implicitly, as residing in a particular photograph, and its meaning therefore as something extractable. Ultimately it would be to with¬ draw my attention, if only temporarily, from the social context within which photography made sense. My readings of some Victorian photographs here have therefore been a response to my question: not “What is it?” or even “What did it mean?” but rather “How does it work?” or “How was its meaning produced?” But what might other “prevailing and historically contingent” questions be with regard to some of the photographs reproduced in this book? That is to say, to what kinds of queries or anxieties or simple ruminations might the pho¬ tographs be read as answers, assertions, or affirmations? The Crimean pho¬ tographs, I suggest, are a response to simple, curiosity-driven questions such as “Is the war as bad as we hear?” and “What does the Crimean Peninsula look like?” But they also give unambiguous answers to more abstract questions, per¬ haps only half-consciously articulated, such as “How terrible is warfare?” and “What is history and who makes it?” Questions to which Dr. Kerlin’s pho¬ tographs or those of Dr. Diamond might be answers range from the specific, “What is puerperal mania?” to the philosophic, “What are the bounds of san¬ ity?” Mug shots generally and physiognomy books particularly proffer answers to questions apparently asked over and over again: “What is the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity? Between outer and inner selves? Be¬ tween mind and body?” “What is normal?” “What is deviant?” “How shall we guard the limits to deviation?” The recurrence of the same questions (marked by the proliferation of physiognomy books, detective guides, and mug shot col¬ lections) is not evidence that photography failed to provide satisfactory an¬ swers. Rather, there was something extraordinarily reassuring about photog¬ raphy’s repeated affirmation that difference is quantifiable, so that while the issues were sufficiently troubling to inspire the same questions, photography’s visually determinate explanations and assertions were in equally constant demand. As explanations and assertions, photographs provided answers to pressing, if unspoken, questions; in fact, figuring out the questions to which particular nineteenth-century photographs are the answers is one way of 62 For one thing, the aesthetic status of photography was never far removed from the de¬

bates of photographic journals and thus as an issue can be said to have shaped prevailing meth¬ ods for evaluating photography—notwithstanding that such discourse, as I have already shown, masked other interests.

223

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Signs of The Things Taken

determining the extent to which Victorian photography naturalized its pan ticular version of the world and reveals, most obviously in the sciences, its socially complicit prescriptions for future paths to knowledge. It forces the conclusion that there is no such thing as an innocent photograph; that in its substitution for epistemological query (“how to see”) the finger that points (“look”!) also asserts: “This is.” Being, like any other, a social form of representation, photography is at its most effective in the public space of exhibition. What photography (and, most acutely, self-consciously “realist” photography) both reflects and determines is a social reality to which everyone who is “real” belongs. The vision of a lu¬ natic or criminal world displayed by nineteenth-century photographs in pub¬ licly differentiated spaces of varying sizes—the exhibition hall, the police sta¬ tion, the courtroom, the pages of a book—created a bond between viewers who saw themselves as unlike the unreal or abnormal subjects of the pho¬ tographs. The differentiation between viewer and viewed was unifying in ef¬ fect, for just as it separated the aberrant subject of the photograph from the normal world, so it united viewers in the face of aberrancy by giving shape and form to the horizon of expectation. Indeed, photography’s contribution to in¬ strumental realism was largely to preserve the horizon of bourgeois subjectiv¬ ity by populating its nethermost regions with groups of persons whose very ex¬ istence appeared to threaten the boundaries of culture beyond which they were perceived as living. Mug shots reveal, as I have maintained, a competition for agency won in every instance by the context of the photograph. The metaphors that shaped their meaning in law in a sense affirmed this victory in their insistence upon the absence of authorial involvement and in their figuration of photographs not as creations of individual genius, skill, or mere involvement but, instead, as the products of the natural workings of a science that had been discovered, not invented. The light rays passing through the camera were dependent on the same general laws” as those of vision (Udderzook v. Commonwealth)', they were “produced by the operation of natural laws and not by the hand of man (Porter v. Buckley); they were “drawn by the subtile forces of sunlight (State v. Clark). Where the courts denied human agency, they substituted the work¬ ings of nature, thus effacing the conventional set of discourses within which photography might be said to speak and naturalizing the relationship between photographer and photographed. Not only were photographs depicted in opinion after opinion as agentless, they were also held to be self-explanatory. Like physiognomy, and contributing to its authority, photographs provided the courts with their own selfcontained meaning; they offered no room for error in interpretation. The photographic sign, like its physiognomic counterpart, had a limited number

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224

Framing the Victorians

of referents, and its testimony was therefore as ideal as testimony could possi¬ bly be. In its limited interpretive space testimonial photography—photography used as proof of someone or something—had its literary partner in autobiog¬ raphy and journalism, which taught its writers to subdue the narratological “I” in favor of the more inclusive eye of realism. Of course, as Michael Schudson points out, there was nothing new in the realists’ belief that art should be mimetic; what was important, as he claims, was that “realists identified reali¬ ty with external phenomena which, they believed, were subject to laws of physical causality as natural science revealed them and as social science might reveal them.”63 The detective’s work of writing truthful accounts of his deal¬ ings with crime was complemented by his work with the camera to give sim¬ ilarly truthful accounts. Ironically, the truthfulness of both was frequently un¬ dercut by the intrusion of narrators into their own written and photographic texts. In the case of memoirs, detective authors romanticized their work, mim¬ icking art by turning their recollections into parodies of popular thrillers. In the case of photographs, the police often intruded into the pictures, creating not just images of an aberrant individual but pictures in which their own pow¬ er over that individual was also charted. My conclusion on looking at these photographs of criminals, of the men¬ tally ill, and of soldiers in the midst of unresolved war is that it is in those rare moments of authorial intrusion that we are best able to see the importance of the questions to which photography provided the answer, for where the “au¬ thor” of the photograph steps across the frame to become a part of the picture itself we see an anxiety regarding the power of this form of representation which can hardly be contained. In his own photograph exhibited with the Crimean display Roger Fenton is posed in Zouave military outfit, playing (French) soldier rather than (British) photographer, like many a later an¬ thropologist or ethnographer who would have his photograph taken in local costume when abroad (fig. 47). Fenton thus echoes, through his picture’s im¬ plicit association with the genre, imperialism’s widespread transformation of cultural difference into tourist’s curio; Zouave dress becomes here no more than a reductive anthropological arrangement. Representing the type both of soldier and of photograph, Fenton demonstrates the facility of photography to define a group; yet at the same time, his decision to be photographed in cos¬ tume at all suggests a confidence in the camera’s ability to reveal both the genre and the natural transcendence of British identity, which is defined nei¬ ther by the genre nor by the assumed clothing of another.

63 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 73-74.

225

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Signs of The Things Taken

Fig. 47. Roger Fenton in a borrowed Zouave uniform, taken by his assistant, Marcus Sparling. 1855. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Voluntary self-display in police photographs, like that in medicine and oth¬ er fields in the process of self-definition, asserts the subject s identity and pro¬ fessionalism through its construction of a scopic hierarchy that occasionally rests, as with the photograph of and by Inspector Byrnes, on the abject pres¬ ence of the unnamed objectified. Again, as with Fentons self-portrait, it is worth noting that such photographs share important features with pho-

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226

Framing the Victorians

tographs made by nineteentdvcentury anthropologists.64 By writing them' selves into the photograph, policeman and doctor announce the significance of their authority, just as they indicate their sense that such authority must be recorded in order to be rendered real. The most insistent displays of control thus suggest most volubly the subjecnauthor’s insecurity, by marking that such control requires affirmation; the most graphic displays of difference imply questions of similarity between human beings which photography in the sen vice of instrumental realism seeks to put to rest.

64

See Edwards, Anthropology and Photography.

CODA

Other Pictures, Other Worlds

T

he use of photography as testimony is premised on a belief in a com' mon world. While romanticism’s interest lies with the individual, the unusual, the private, realism is concerned with the social, the normal, the communal. That communality, of course, is to some de¬

gree established by realism itself, which, as John Tagg puts it, “works by the controlled and limited recall of a reservoir of similar ‘texts’, by a constant rep¬ etition, a constant cross-echoing. By such ‘silent quotation’, a relation is es¬ tablished between the realist ‘text’ and other ‘texts’ from which it differs and to which it defers. It is this mutuality which summons up the power of the real.”1 Elizabeth Ermarth also stresses the importance of similarity between the texts of realism, identifying it as a “genial consensus” implying “a unity in human experience” which provides reassurance that human beings both live in “the same world” and share a common lexicon of meanings.2 3 Thus, the pho¬ tograph in the culture of realism is a text whose audience is potentially every¬ one—everyone, that is, who inhabits “the same world. But the narrator of the realist photograph (the documentary picture, the medical record, the mug shot) is, as Ermarth remarks of the realist text,

no¬

body.’” The narrator “is not individual, and it is not corporeal. . . . [It] is a col¬ lective result, a specifier of consensus.”1 As I suggested in Chapter 3, consen¬ sus concerning the homogeneity of world experience can exist only through

1 Tagg, “Power and Photography,” 53. 2 Ermarth, Realism and Consensus, 65. 3 Ibid., 65-66. •

227

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228

Framing the Victorians

dissociating writers or photographers from their productions; it is inevitable and, in fact, necessary that a realist work’s source of production should lack an easily identified entity. Photography’s audience is limitless, but it is precisely realist photographs—where narrator(s) are most deliberate, exert most power, have the most at stake—that have, or must be seen to have, no narrator. This was never more true than with the emergence of a kind of photogra¬ phy which was testimonial and thus drew upon the idea of a shared universe, but which presented a universe (and sometimes a photographer) invisible to the eye. As the body might be policed with photography’s witness, so even the most private part of the self—the soul—did not go undetected. In a bizarre but wholly logical extension of the camera’s surveillant authority, photogra¬ phy moved in the late century into a new testimonial service, rendering spir¬ it material. Realism’s world had previously ended at the grave, but those ea¬ ger for visual testimony of life after death perceived an apparently convincing answer in photography. In a sense, the great popularity of spirit photography, which began in the late nineteenth century and flourished as a practice dur¬ ing the first two decades of the twentieth, was a product of the tyranny of re¬ alism, a sign of a widespread conviction that the eye of science had the pow¬ er to pursue its subjects beyond the physical world. Throughout the Victorian era apocrypha abounded concerning the naivete with which the public regarded the process of photography. Whether or not anyone ever believed that the camera could steal souls or that photographs could reveal hitherto secret details about their subjects is less interesting than that photographic journals repeatedly printed such accounts. What amount¬ ed to a faith in science which conceived no limits to its abilities but assumed the camera was capable of seeing past material surfaces into a world of spirit was on occasion exploited by photographers both to aggrandize their work and to differentiate themselves from their gullible subjects. Stories to this end be¬ gan to surface very early on. The photographer Gabriel Harrison, who became known as the “Poet Daguerrean” for translating “poetry in types”4 wrote fan¬ cifully of his summons to the deathbed of a child: The mother held up a white cloth to give me reflected light to subdue the shad¬ ows. All was still, I took the cap from the camera. About two minutes had elapsed, when a bright sun ray broke through the clouds, dashed its bright beams upon the reflector, and shedding, as it were, a supernatural light. I was startled— the mother rivetted with frightful gaze, for at the same moment we beheld the muscles about the mouth of the child move, and her eyes partially open—a smile

4 Gabriel Harrison, “Lights and Shadows of Daguerrian Life,” Photographic Art'Journal 175.

229

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Coda

played upon her lips, a long gentle sigh heaved her bosom, and as I replaced the cap, her head fell over to one side. The mother screamed— “She lives! She lives!” and fell upon her knees by the side of the couch. “No,” was my reply; “She is dead now, the web of life is broken.” The camera was doing its work as the cord that bound the gentle being to earth snaped [sic] and loosened the spirit for another and better world.5

In the same year, the Daguerreian Journal published a photographer’s anecdote of a couple who wished to be daguerreotyped together: “When our arrange ments were made, and they were about to ‘take a seat,’ the lady remarked, that she had lost a child about three months previous, and desired me to take them with her child upon her lap,” recalled the photographer, remarking with some understatement that “her husband was startled at her request.”6 The American Journal of Photography recounts an equally peculiar anecdote of a man who supposedly asked the “operator” W. Campbell of Union City, New Jersey, to make a daguerreotype of his wife. When he added that the woman was “dead and buried,” the operator explained that it was impossible to daguerreotype her. The man soon returned with a basket: [Hel proceeded to place the contents on the floor; first came a woman’s bonnet, then a shawl, a gown came next, a pair of stockings and a pair of shoes emptied the basket, no; not quite, a small parcel carefully laid on one side was unrolled, and two oranges, one of them half sucked was laid beside the apparel. Amazed, we looked on in silence; there was nothing there we could not take a picture of that was certain. . . .“Now then,” said he, “ye said ye could take a picture of anything I’d bring; them’s the old woman’s clothes; it’s all I’ve left of her, an’ if ye can give me a pic¬ ture of them I’ll be pleased.” At first we were at a loss to know if he were really serious, but there was no mistaking that when we looked in his face, so we pro¬ ceeded to arrange the clothes in as artistic a fashion as our skill and the subject would permit. We took two pictures, both good, and after colouring them, with an extra touch to the orange at his own request, he took one, and we kept the other. “Thankee Sir,” said he, as he left, “them’s all I’ve got of the ould woman, they’re sure to get scattered about, but when I looks at this, I shall think I see my wife. Thankee Sir.”7

Clearly such tales cater to photographers’ amusement at public foolishness and to their own sense of privileged knowledge associated with the profession, 5 Ibid., 181. 6 Daguerreian Journal 1.5 (1851): 149, quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 218. 7 American Journal of Photography, June 1, 1858, 9, quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 219.

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Framing the Victorians

but the camera’s power to detect the invisible was in fact a topic treated seriously by several reputable photographic journals of the late-nineteenth cen¬ tury. The London periodical Photography sparked a hot debate on the validity of spirit photography when it published an account of “two amateurs” who went to photograph a mill pond and, on developing the plate, were amazed “to discover depicted the figure of a female floating upright in the water. Everything was clearly defined—head, face, and arms, and the photo appeared to be that of a young and comely woman. So much did this incident impress itself upon those who were made acquainted with the fact that the river was dragged at the spot where the photo was taken, but no body was found.”8 One reader, Thomas Furnell, suggested the drowned woman might be a previous sitter not properly scrubbed off the plate. Fie was then challenged by another reader with the news that in fact a woman had been found drowned the pre¬ vious Saturday in that very river. “Spirit photography,” wrote Robert John¬ stone, “is a stupendous fact,” and in a curiously tautological gesture, he sent in photographs to prove it.9 Such accounts served, both despite and because of photography’s progress as a tool of realism, to mystify the act of photography further and to reinforce its symbolic powers as an unblinking eye, a monitor of sanity, a watcher of the criminal—much like the never-sleeping eye of Pinkerton’s detectives. There is, in some ways, a kinship between detectives and spiritualists, in that both seek to make material what is currently invisible and both attempt to prove the existence of something not readily apparent. Both are engaged in the ef¬ fort to encourage the subject to come out into the open and testify. An im¬ portant difference, of course, is that whereas the detective searches for some¬ times soulless bodies, the spiritualist seeks bodiless souls. Yet the camera was to prove as useful to the spiritualist as it was to the detective. Arthur Conan Doyle, the best-known detective author of his day and, coincidentally, an ac¬ quaintance of Allan Pinkerton, was an active and enthusiastic proponent of writings about and from the “other world.” Doyle himself was responsible for several publications testifying to the veracity of proof available on pho¬ tographs. In 1922 he defended the “scientific value as evidence” of psychic photography made by one William Hope, a “working-man” who “discovered, some seventeen years ago, quite by chance, that this remarkable power of pro¬ ducing extra faces, figures or objects upon photographic plates had been giv¬ en to him. In the first instance he was taking a fellow workman, and the plate, when developed, was found to contain an extra figure which was recognised as being a likeness of his comrade’s sister, who had recently passed away.”10 In 8 Photography 1.26 (1889): 314. 9 Robert Johnstone, “Spirit Photographs,” Photography 1.36 (1889): 426. 10 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography (London: Hutchinson, 1922), 12.

231

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a rather more peculiar case, and one that obviously strained his credibility somewhat, Doyle investigated and subsequently championed two girls in a small village called Cottingley, near Bradford. In the years 1917 and 1920, Elsie X and her cousin Frances had apparently taken photographs of fairies in the nearby glen (fig. 48). Hearing of these pictures, Doyle went to meet the cousins and studied the photographs; he concluded them to be genuine. He then published a number of accounts describing and supporting the girls’ claims which consisted largely of a series of testimonials to the existence of fairies generally. In his preface to one such publication, Doyle stressed the testimonial quality of the statements made by observing, “This narrative is not a special plea for . . . authenticity, but is simply a collection of facts the inferences from which may be accepted or rejected as the reader may think fit.”11 Bizarre though such an example of photography’s evidentiary importance may seem, spirit photographs were really the logical culmination of the sepa¬ ration of the photograph from its making. Dissociated from the human source of its production, the photograph was made powerful through its apprehen¬ sion as a self-generating, natural product of the supernatural world. If ideal tes¬ timony was that description of relevant events which introduced the least amount of subjective interpretation, then photographs appeared to reach that ideal. Spirit photographs should, theoretically, have made perfect legal testi¬ mony, since, like Lacock Abbey, Fox Talbot’s house, the spirits took their own photographs as if they were leaving their fingerprints on the paper. Photography, by the time of its service to spiritualism, had progressed to a standard, rather than a medium, of truth. To recall once again the words of William Ivins, “The nineteenth century began by believing that what was rea¬ sonable was true and it wound up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true.”12 Logically, if Ivins is right, by the close of the century a photo¬ graph was regarded not just as a substitute for but as superior to unaided hu¬ man vision. Moreover, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, because of the very nature of photography, which is self-denying (a photograph does not assert itself; it almost always subordinates itself to its subject matter), the fact that what one perceived was representation and not the thing itself was largely obscured. As late as 1890, Henry Peach Robinson claimed that the public’s interest in photography had little to do with artistry but was largely the consequence of an urge to gather signs of resorts, scenes, objects, and per¬ sons in the name of ownership and in the spirit of possession: The ordinary buyer [of photographs] does not want the best pictures, he wants a tepresentation (as I think I remember a well-known photographer saying) of his ox, 11 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (1921; New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), v. 12 Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, 94.

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Framing the Victorians

Fig. 48. Cottingley fairy photograph. The photograph shows Frances Griffiths, and it

was taken by her cousin Elsie Wright in 1917. Brotherton Collection, Leeds Univer¬ sity Library.

or his ass, or anything that is his,’ with the exception, perhaps, if it can be called an exception, of the cheapest views he can get of places he has seen in his summer holidays.”13 Frequently accompanying a preference for the real thing, or its likeness, is a refusal to acknowledge the perspective that informs it. But as Michael Shapiro writes, “What we accept as the real amounts to our use of various in¬ terpretive codes, which we use so unreflectingly, we tend to regard them as simple acts of perception. Traditionally those styles of writing in disciplines regarded as primarily knowledge related are thus not seen as styles at all.”14 13 Henry Peach Robinson, Photography as a Business (Bradford, England, 1890), 79. 14 Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 8.

233

*

Coda

Shapiro here speaks of writing, but his words are appropriate to photography’s progress in the culture of realism. Spirit photography, like documentary photography—having no photographer—had no style, cast no shadows, chose no perspectives, offered no incomplete truths. Perhaps most problematical for re¬ cent critical studies of photography—if just as unproblematical for the coffeetable books with which I began my discussion—photography was and is hailed by vast numbers of readers as a history unclouded by subjectivism; as testimo¬ ny liberated from language, rather than consumed and mediated by it; as an index of past events with no allegiance of its own; as, in short, and to borrow a phrase of Henry James, “a bloody little chunk of life.”15 Murat Halstead, writing in 1894, celebrates the camera’s mission with overstuffed prose whose various metaphorical accumulations we have repeatedly seen pile up at the nexus that is photography: There is a new historian whose chapters are pictures perfect and infallible—a magician that cheats not—a story-teller never contradicted, it is the camera. The growth of photography has become a wonder and the performance is phe¬ nomenal. Its miraculous work invades fields of new ground while its incessant achievements accumulate in and enrich our libraries. With increase of evidence in accomplishment the product is lowered in price, while its value rises, and the riches of the earth in beauty, the rare and curious things of all countries, are be¬ fore us in absolute verity; for the camera refuses to lie, is no respecter of persons or dispenser of flatteries. The merit of the truth of the sunlight is always self-ev¬ ident. . .. The sun is the fountain of truth and of heat and energy, and its inter¬ preter, the camera, receives the reflection on the paper plate, and repeats it, fair as the white light that gives sanctity to uncolored history.16 From the camera’s mystification as “magician” narrator, to its voracious ap¬ petite for the riches of the world (its “invasion” charted by proofs of conquest which bolster the shelves of libraries at home); from the photographs sliding value as artifact in a culture increasingly obsessed with the real (the way of seeing worth more as the individual picture matters less), to the cameras objectivist refusal to lie; from photography’s naturalized role as, first,

inter¬

preter,” then merely repeater of information, to its final incarnation as the his¬ torian of an age and of a world—Halstead reinscribes, as he slides from image to practice, from narrations to objects and then back again, the strange histo15 Henry James and H. G. Wells, Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958), 67. 16 Murat Halstead, Introduction, Camera Mosaics: A Portfolio of National Photography, ed. Harry C. Jones (New York, 1894).

•

234

Framing the Victorians

ry of photography itself as it has been charted by those for whom photography’s accounts are ontologically sufficient. Halstead’s words should impress upon us the danger of photography precisely in that perception of its promise to relay “uncolored history.” Used in the service of any realism and in the building of any institution—a police force, a science, an empire—which writes out human agency in order to promote its own colored history as natural fact, the photograph signifies social power and marks the site where what is real comes to be defined and determined. Although that site, as I have suggested, was never successfully contested, the disingenuousness of an uncolored, monolithic history was at least resisted by certain writers. Their efforts to reinstate the photographer-artist in the text in the form of a human being or a perspective (but always a view that is con¬

tingent) reveal serious misgivings about realism and urge a consideration of the objectification upon which its culture depended and for which photography was both agent and symbol. Nineteenth-century photography as a subject of discourse offers a site for the study of that resistance, as well as a rich archive of specific instances that operate within that resistance; but most important, it confirms and enacts an opposition between philosophies at a period in history when that opposition most mattered. As I imply in Chapters 5 and 6 by my choice of subject area, the distinction between romance and realism was premised on a distinction between ways of seeing articulated with particular force in discourse of the human sciences, in which the privileging of positivism effectively validated imperialist practices. As I have suggested, the distinction is also based on the assumption that the culture of realism permitted an opposition that could in fact be defined independently of itself. But metaphysi¬ cal romance, at least as it disrupts those photographs and texts I have consid¬ ered here, is as much the product of realism as a counter to it; its ruminations and defiances are shaped and defined by its relationship with the larger cul¬ ture. Reading Victorian photography—the act, its consequences, its con¬ texts—is a never-ending and complex process of tracing the relationship of image to culture in all its infinite permutations. One thing, however, is cer¬ tain: reading photographs in history and through history never reveals a his¬ tory uncolored. Nor can it ever reveal as much about an Other world as it does about our own.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena. 1850. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Scott, Charles C. Photographic Evidence. 3 vols. St. Paul: West, 1969. Seiberling, Grace, with Carolyn Bloore. Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1987): 3-64_. Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983- Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984. _. “The Traffic in Photographs.” Art Journal 41 (Spring 1981): 15-25Sellers, Coleman. “Photography at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, Philadeh phia.” British Journal of Photography 12 (1865): 317-18. Seymour, William. Seymour’s Key to Character, or Everybody Their Own Detective. Philadelphia, 1894. Shapiro, Michael. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photogra¬ phy, and Policy Analysis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Sharpe, William. “Ariel or Caliban? Photography as Unruly Servant in Nineteenth-Century England.” MLA Conference. Chicago, 1990. Shaw, James. “Facial Expression as One of the Means of Diagnosis and Prognosis in Mem tal Diseases.” Medical Annual, 344-75- London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1894. _. The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases and Degeneracy. Bristol: John Wright; and London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1903. Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sizer, Nelson. Hands and Faces. New York, 1885. Skultans, Vieda, ed. Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century. Lorn don: Routledge, 1975. Smith, F. B. Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982. Smith, Karen W. Constantin Guys: Crimean War Drawings, 1854-1856. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Smith, Phillip Thurmond. Policing Victorian London. London: Greenwood, 1985Snyder, Joel. “Documentary without Ontology.” Studies in Visual Communication (1984): _. “Picturing Vision.” The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 219-46. Chica¬ go: University of Chicago Press, 1980. _. “Territorial Photography.” Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 175-201. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994Snyder, Joel, and Doug Munson. The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876. Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery, Univers.ty of Chicago Press, 1976. .. Q Sommer, Robert. Lehrbuch der psychopathologischen Untersuchungs-Methoden. Berlin, 1899. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977, Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976.

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State v. Clark, 196 Pa. 360 (Or. 1921). Steiner, Wendy. Pictures of Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Stenger, Erich. The History of Photography: Its Relation to Civilization and Practice. Trans. Edward Epstean. Easton, Pa.: Mack, 1939. Stevens, LaVergne Belden. Faciology. Chicago, 1893. Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Tagg, John. “Power and Photography, Part 1: A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law.” Screen Education 36 (1980): 17-56. Talbot, William H. Fox. The Pencil of Nature. Vol. 1. London, 1844. Rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1969. -. “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing.” London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 14 (March 1839). Extracted in Goldberg, 36-48. Taylor, John. “Landscape and Leisure.” Life and Landscape: P. H. Emerson: Art and Pho¬ tography in East Anglia, 1885-1900, ed. Neil McWilliam and Veronica Sekules, 73-82. Norwich, England: University of East Anglia, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1986. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The Oxford Library of English Poetry, ed. John Wain, 103-4. London: Guild, 1986. Thomas, Brook. "The House of the Seven Gables: Reading the Romance of America.” PMLA 97 (1982): 195-211. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs.” Representa¬ tions 9 (1985): 1-32. -. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Turnley, Joseph. The Language of the Eye: The Importance and Dignity of the Eye as Indica¬ tive of General Character, Female Beauty, and Manly Genius. London, 1856. Udderzook v. Commonwealth, 76 Pa. 340 (1874). Vigar, Penelope. The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality. London: Athlone, 1974. Voss, Frederick, and James Barber, "We Never Sleep”: The First Fifty Years of the Pinker¬ tons. Catalog. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery, 1981. Wagner, W. J. “Photography and the Right to Privacy: The French and American Ap¬ proaches.” Catholic Lawyer 25 (1980): 195-227. The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century: Selections from the Gilman Paper Compa¬ ny Collection. Exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Walling, George W. Recollections of a New York Chief of Police. 1888. Montclair, N.J.: Pat¬ terson Smith, 1972. Warren, John H., Jr. Thirty Years’ Battle with Crime, or The Crying Shame of New York, as Seen under the Broad Glare of an Old Detective’s Lantern. 1875. New York: Arno, 1970. Weaver, Mike. “Roger Fenton: Landscape and Still Life.” British Photography in the Nine¬ teenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition, ed. Mike Weaver, 103-20. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Weeks, Caleb S. Human Nature Considered in the Light of Physical Science, Including Phrenology. New York, 1893.

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INDEX

Beer, Gillian, 27, 33

Abbott, James, Handbook of Idiotcy, 164

Bell, Michael Davitt, 91

agency, 58-64

Berger, John, i28n

photography as lacking, 4-5, 94, 103-4,

Berkeley, George, 38, 62

no, 119-20, 147-48, 228 and realism, 20-21, 66-67, 234

Bertillon system, 218, 219, 220

See also photographer: as invisible; police

Black, J. B., 211,215 Boucicault, Dion, The Octoroon, 192

photography: “mug” shot; testimony

Brady, Mathew, 132, 133

Agnew, William, 100

Brady’s Lecture Book. See Civil War

albums, photographic, 113n

photographs

See also meaning, of photographs; exhibi-

Brilliant, Richard, 101, 119

tion, public amateur vs. professional photographer. See

Bronte, Charlotte, 71

photographer; photography: and class

Brushfield, T. N., 170 Buckley, Jerome, 182

anthropology/ethnography. See imperialism,

Bullen, J. B., 88n

and photography; Other, the; physiog¬

Burgin, Victor, 22-24

nomy

Byrnes, Thomas, 225 Professional Criminals of America, 206-10,

authority. See photography: and authority authorship, commodification of, 68, 83-84

209

Autobiography of a Thief, The (Hapgood), 191 Arnheim, Rudolph, 25, 123, 124

camera-subject relationship. See agency; pho¬ tographer: as invisible; photography: doc¬

Bain, George Grantham, 210

umentary; photography: and truth, police

criminal photograph collection, 211,212,

photography; psychiatric photography;

213, 214,215,219, 220

spectator

Baltz, Lewis, 110

Cameron, Julia Margaret, 61, 83, 146

Barnard, George, 132

“Annals of My Glass House,” 64

Barthes, Roland, 10, 19, ii9> t43n> *62, “denotation”/“connotation,” 23—25, no,

canon, 19th-century photographic, 146 caption. See writing: as accompaniment to

112

photograph

on spectatorship, 35n

Carlyle, Thomas, 1

on text and image, 127-29

Carroll, Lewis, 61, 65

Bartlett, John, 58 *

247

*

•

248

Index

Carroll, Lewis (cont.)

exhibition of, 97, 98, 100-101, 104,

“Alice Liddell as a beggar maid,” 15

m-13, 118, 122, 123, 144; see also

“Hiawatha’s Photographing,” 62-63, 68

exhibition, public

catalog, exhibition, 121-22, 127-28

See also exhibition, public; meaning, of photographs

Hardships in the Crimea, 131, 132 iconicity of, 102-3 as inoffensive, 100

Caws, Mary Ann, 92

as landscapes, 100, 121, 139-43

Chapin, John B., A Compendium of Insanity,

Major Hallewell, Day’s Work Over, 131, 133,

166, 183 Civil War photographs A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Va., 135, 139 compared with Crimean, 100, 132, 134-35,

134-35 Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts, 113, 114-17, 118, 121, 123

137-39 A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, 133, 134

popular response to, 97, 98, 101, 103, 108,

as modern, 140

power of, as factual, 101

On the Antietam Battlefield, 133, 135

as propaganda, 98, 100, 103, 107, 108, 131,

as powerful images, 133, 137

109, 137, 138

138, 140, 143

Residence, Quartermaster Third Army Corps, Brandy Station, 134, 137 Ruins in Charleston, S.C., 133, 136

The 68th Regiment, Winter Dress, 107,

servants in, 134-35

titles of, 124-26

What do I want, John Henry? Warrenton, Va.,

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 124-27,

134. 138 Claudet, Antoine, 50-51 colonialism. See imperialism, and photography Comte, August, 159 Conolly, John, 156, 170

servants in, 131, 134-35, 03 108

125

women in, 129-31, 130 cultural determinacy, and photography, 8-10, 24

See also imperialism, and photography;

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 148

Other, the; photography: as cultural

Cottingley, Eng., fairy photographs, 231, 232

practice

Crary, Jonathan, 30-31, 34-35 Crimean War history of, 104-5

daguerreotype, 73n See also photography

nurses’ accounts of, 105-6, 131

Damisch, Hubert, 119

watercolors of, io6n

Darwin, Charles, Expression of Emotion, 159

and women, 129-30

death, in Victorian photography, 45

See also Russell, William Howard Crimean War photographs

See also Robinson, Henry Peach: Fading

as artistic, 103-4, I39-4°

Away; spirit photography Delamotte, Philip H., Sunbeam, 63

as boring/undramatic, 102, 134, 137-39

democracy of photography. See photography:

Camp of the 4th Dragoon Guards near Karyni, 130-31, 130, 134

and class detectives, private, 197-99

catalog of, 127-29

compared with spiritualists, 230

commission of, 100

histories by, 204-6

Cooking House of the 8th Hussars, 127-28,

as romantic figure, 208, 210

128 as depictions of Englishness, 140, 142; see

also Crimean War photographs: as pro¬ paganda described, 113, 123, 130-32 as documentary, 101, 103, 108-9, m, 127

See also police photography diagrams, as documentary, 110-1 in Diamond, Hugh Welch compared with Cesare Lombroso, 186 on curative potential of photography, 168-69, 171

249

*

Index

Nathaniel; James, Henry; novel, the;

Diamond, Hugh Welch (cont.)

writing

on diagnostic use of photography, 167-68 exhibition of photographs by, 145, 175-77

Fisher, John, 124

The Four Stages of Puerperal Mania, 171,172

Flukinger, Roy, 74

on Isaac Newton Kerlin, 162-63

focus debate, 55-59

“language of nature,” 168

Foucault, Michel, 34, i8on, 191, 197, 221

“Patient [in Greek dress],” 173, 174

Fox, Daniel, 179

“Patient [with crucifix],” 173, 175

framing, 122-23 “to frame,” 124

and psychiatric photography, 146, 154-56,

Fry, Samuel, 34

170, 179 reasons for photographing patients, 171

Furlong, Thomas, Fifty Years a Detective, 205-6

scientific failure of photographs by, 183 theatricality of photographs by, 162, 173

Gardner, Alexander, 132

Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War.

See also portraiture

See Civil War photographs

Dickens, Charles

Gaskell, Elizabeth, 53

Bleak House, 34, 71 Great Expectations, 73

Geertz, Clifford, 129 Gemsheim, Helmut and Alison, 98m 113,

differance, 123

13m

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 230-31 Dubois, Philippe, ioin

Gikandi, Simon, 140

Duchene, Dr. G. B., 149

Gilman, Sander,

Self'Portrait Using His Electrical Stimulator,

156, 164

Gombrich, Ernst, 21-23, 62, 123 duck-rabbit image,

150 Duncan, P Martin, A Manual for the Classifi-

cation ... of the .. . Idiotic, 164

113

on Lavater’s Physiognomy, 151 Goodman, Nelson, 27-28

Grannan’s Pocket Gallery of Noted Criminals, 204 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 146 “Photography,” 3,

43-49.

54. 56-57. 60

Eigner, Edwin, 29, 32, 67, 71

Green, Friese, poem,

Greenwald, Elissa, 90-92 Griesinger, Wilhelm, Die Pathologie und Thera-

pie,

Emerson, P. H., 58, 61 Ermarth, Elizabeth, 26, 227

44-45

164

Guys, Constantin, “The Valley of Death, 1260

evidence. See photography: and authority; photography: and facts; photography: and truth; police photography; testi¬ mony

Halstead, Murat,

Hamilton, Allan McLane, Types of Insanity, 165, 166

exhibition, public, 7, 100, 113-22, 129, 144, 146, 173, 176, 223

233-34

Hardy, Thomas, 2, 6, 94 ambivalence of, toward photography, 82, 85

Fenton, Roger, 7, 37, 98, 103, 104, 140-41, 146 and authorial intrusion, 224-25 relationship with royal family, 99-100 written accounts of Crimean War, 106-7, 1290 in Zouave uniform, 225 See also Crimean War photographs Ferrero, William, The Female Offender, 184 fiction, and realism/romanticism opposition,

.

and appearance/reality disparity, 80-81, 85, 87-88 on being “kodaked,” 68

Desperate Remedies, 80-82 “An Imaginative Woman,” 77—78. 82, 83,

86 Jude the Obscure, 85-88 A Laodicean, 84-85, 87n optical detachment of characters, 79, 84 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 8711 photography as middle-class aspiration, 79.

7°. 79-8° See also Hardy, Thomas; Hawthorne, 67.

86

• 250 Index Hardy, Thomas (cont.) photography as omnipresent eye, 79, 80, 82 and realism/romanticism opposition, 78-80,

85 Two on a Tower, 8yn

The Bostonians, 89 characters as potential photographic subjects, 89 filmic technique of, 90 and photographic realism, 5-6, 233

Harker, Margaret, 54

photography as metaphor in, 68, 69, 91

Harrison, Gabriel (the “Poet Daguerrean”),

The Portrait of a Lady, 89-92

228—29 Hawarden, Lady Clementina, 16, 61, 146

Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude, 18 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 68, 75, 94

and realism/romanticism opposition, 67, 91 Jauss, Hans Robert, 221 Jennings, Thomas, murder case, 187 journals, photographic

“The Artist of the Beautiful,” 77

on focus debate, 55-56, 58

“The Birthmark,” 77

on nature as photographer, 60-64

House of the Seven Gables, preface to, 69-73

on photography as art, 39-44, 47-51

The Marble Faun, 169

on psychiatric photography, 176-77

Herve, C. S., 41, 42, 46, 55

titles of, changes in, 39

Heyert, Elizabeth, 52-53

on truth in photography, 54-55

Hill, Robert Gardiner, 179-80

See also Crimean War photographs: popular

historical reconstruction, 7m See also photog¬

response to; spirit photography

raphy: and history Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 37, 60

Keens, H. L., 62

Hoover, J. Edgar, 2170

Kerlin, Isaac Newton, 168

“horizon of expectations,” 221. See also pho¬ tography: as “shared social experience”; realism Humphreys, Kathryn, 9

The Mind Unveil’d, 160-64 Kieser, Dietrich Georg, Elemente der Psychia-

trik, 156, 157, 158 Kozloff, Max, 100 Krasner, James, 29-30

idealism, metaphysical (antirealism). See ro¬

Krauss, Rosalind, 120-21

mance ideal photograph, 189. See also testimony

Lacan, Ernest, 145-47

identification photograph, 194, 200, 207, 212,

Lalumia, Matthew, 107

213, 214 See also police photography imagination, 24, 58-61, 70, 72, 81 imperialism, and photography, 147-48, 193, 216, 224, 234

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 37 landscape, and ideology, 141 language and photography, 7, 17, 19, 20-24, 26, 30, 101-2, 112, 129, 147, 162, 233 and commercialism, 68

See also Crimean War photographs

“frame,” 124

“Inconstant Daguerreotype, The,” 76

“Kodak,” 68

insanity, visualizing, 163-65

“operator,” 40-41

See also physiognomy; psychiatric photogra¬ phy

“photograph” as noun/verb, 64 photography as superior describes 166-68

“instrumental realism,” 166, 168, 191, 226

“taken” vs. “made,” 5, 64, 147

International Exhibition of 1862, Great, 39,

See also meaning, of photographs

40, 50 “ir-reality,” 33 Ivins, William, 38

Lartigue, Jacques-Henri, Grand Prix of the

Automobile Club, 13, 14 Lavater, Johannes, 159 and distancing of subject, 151

Jackson, Arlene, 6, 86n

Essays on Physiognomy, 149

James, Henry

popularity/influence of, 151-52

“The Art of Fiction,” 90-91

Levine, George, 26-28, 30, 32, 34

251

•

Index

Liddell, Alice, 13, 15, 61

norm, the, 156, 165, 166, 168, 222-23, 227;

Lodge, David, 6

see also Other, the; physiognomy: and

Lombroso, Cesare

normality

compared with Hugh Diamond, 186

novel, the

Criminal Man, 184-85

as realism, 69-70

The Female Offender, 184

vs. the romance, 69-72

See also Hardy, Thomas; Hawthorne, Mach, Ernst, 4

Nathaniel; James, Henry; photogra¬

“Magnetic Daguerreotypes, The,” 76

phy: and truth; realism; romanticism;

Margolis, Eric, 127-28

writing

Marks, Harry, 198, 201, 210 Martin, Isma, 211,214

The Octoroon (Boucicault), 192

Mason, O. G., 182

Orvell, Miles, 29

Maudsley, Henry, 180

O’Sullivan, T. H., A Harvest of Death, Gettys-

Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the Lorn

don Poor, 52-53 McCarthy, Edward, 211, 212, 213 McNutt, George W., My Twenty'three Years

Experience as a Detective, 205

burg, 134 Other, the, 140, 142, 148, 161, 166, 186, 191, 194,216 See also norm, the; physiognomy: and nor¬ mality

McWatters, George, Detectives of Europe and

America, 205 meaning, of photographs, 2, 6, 19, 22-23, 119,129 and captions, 127-29

panorama, as narrative, 118, 124 Parrish, Joseph, 168, 178

Photographs of Inmates of the Imbecile Asylum, 163-64

and cultural context, 13-14) m-12, 234

Paulin, Tom, 80

in exhibition, 113-21

Peirce, Charles Sanders, ioin

and sequence, 113, 120, 121, 123

“pencil of fire,” 60, no

and titles, 122, 124-27, 131

“pencil of rays,” 60

medical textbooks, 163-66

See also norm, the; psychiatric photography mesmerism, 74, 75, 178

Pennell, Joseph, 52 photogenic drawing, 62-63 photographer

metaphysical novel. See romance

amateur vs. professional, 48-52

Michaels, Walter Benn, 5

as Art’s handmaid, 43, 46

Miller, J. Hillis, 25m 79, 80, 82n, 91

as counterfeit, 52-55

Mitchell, W. J. T., 21, 22-23, 27-28, 31-33

as culturally marginalized or strangely

modernity/modemism, 35, 45, 47, 74 in Henry James, 93 and the novel, 71-72 and origins, 68, 78

empowered, 66, 73, 74, 84, 93, 88, 178 as doctor, 177—78, 181; see also psychiatric photography

Morel, B. A., 165

as eccentric/pioneer, 68

Morison, Alexander, Physiognomy of Mental

as having specialized knowledge, 48

Diseases, 155-56 “mug” shot. See police photography: “mug”

as iconoclast, 7, 46-47, 52, 93

shot

as invisible, 58—64, 97, 102, 103, 109-10, 119-20, 147, 189, 194, 223, 228 as magician, 44-45, 4d> 69, 73, 75, 76, 88,

narrative, visual, 101, 119-20, 122—24, 141 nature, as photographer, 60-64. See also agency Newton, Sir William J., 43, 48, 56—57, 59 Niepce, Joseph Nicephore, 44n

233 medical, 181-82; see also photographer: as doctor as metaphor for social instability, 93 as “operator,” 40-42, 46

•

252

Index photographer (cont.) war, 9811 Photographic Society of London founding of, 99, 146

See also Crimean War photographs: popular response to; journals, photographic photography as artifice, 52-55, 58-59, 61 artistic merit of, 3, 6, 39-42, 44, 46-47, 50—52, 58, 104, 222

as magic, 44-45. 67, 75-77.

83, 88, 94

and medicine, 180-82; see also psychiatric photography as metaphor/analogy, 24, 25, 29, 39, 66-68, 79, 87, 94, 162; see also realism; romance and objectification, 180, 182, 185, 191, 193-94, 208, 216-18, 221 and past-present relationship, 169-70 as “policing the horizon,” 221

and art-life relations, 76-77, 224

popularity of, 24, 52-53, 68, 88, 182

as art-science, 39, 49, 58-59, 146, 173, 177,

and possession, 93, 153, 193

195-96 and authorial intrusion, 224-25, 225; see

practical use of, 99 realist, 97, 224, 227-28; see also photogra¬

also agency; photographer: as invisible;

phy: documentary; photography: and

photography: as automatic writing; po¬

medicine; police photography: “mug”

lice photography; psychiatric photog¬

shot

raphy; realism and authority, 8, 38-39, 79-81, 97, 100, 122-23, 147-48, 159-60, 181, 184, 187, 189, 207, 208, 218, 224 as autobiographical, no, 224 as automatic writing, 61-63, no, 223, 228, 231 and British vs. American culture, 8-9, 13-14, 16, 67-68, 71, 93-94 and class, 40-42, 45-46, 49-53, 73-74. 79. 81-85, 93-94> 2I6 and collecting, 2, 37, 102, 103, 147-48, 216, 224, 231-32 as craft, 40-42, 47, 50-52 and criminal identity, 7-8; see also physiog¬ nomy; police photography as cultural practice, 19, 31, 45, in—12, 120, 147-48, 222-23, 228, 234 documentary, 101-2, 104, 109-10, 119, 227, 233 and empiricism, 2, 20, 38-39, 52, 80, 82, 84-85, 154, 167; see also romance as facts, 37-38, ioo-ioi, 103-4, io9> x47>

234

and history, 13-14, 16-17, 19, 73, 100, 101, 110-12, 135-37, 234; see also Civil War photographs; Crimean War pho¬ tographs and identity, 188, 194-95, 209, 224; see also identification photograph; police pho¬ tography; physiognomy

Ruskin on, 82—83 as “shared social experience,” 182, 221-23, 227 and storytelling, 4-5, 8, 20-21, 102, 113, 119-20 as superior intelligence, 4, 7, 44 and surveillance, 198-200, 228; see also police photography and truth, 2-4, 5, 20, 25-26, 38, 54-59, 61, 62, 65-66, 75-76, 78, 85, 97, 101, 104, 109-10, 119, 122, 189, 192, 199, 224 and visualizing the body, 146, 159, 187 war as subject for, 97-99; see also war, and photography “window-effect,” 102, 109, 120, i6i;see

also photographer: as invisible as woman, 43, 46

See also agency; language and photography; photographer; physiognomy; pictorial photography; police photography; portraiture; psychiatric photography; spectator; spirit photography; testimony photojournalism, 67

See also photography: documentary phrenology, 3, 183, 216 physiognomy, 3 as anti-intellectual, 183 and case histories, 160—61 credibility of, from photography, 154-55, 159,223

as indexical, 25-26, 37, 100, 101, 216

cultural endorsement of, 153

and loss, 17, 45

as diagnostic tool, 149, 166

253

*

Index

physiognomy (cont.)

impact of, on medical sciences, 164-68, 179-80

as fatalism, 216 and J. Edgar Hoover, 217n

as imperialism metaphor, 148

and inner/outer selves, 151-56, 159, 161,

patient response to, 169-70; see also pho¬ tography: and objectification

209 and literature, 153

and policing, 186

and normality, 155-56, 161, 165-66,

as romantic, 148, 168—69

184-85,217

as scientific record, 147, 163, 164

popular works of, listed, 183-84

theatricality of, 173n

popularity of, 151-52, 183

See also Diamond, Hugh Welch; Kerlin, Isaac Newton; norm, the; Other, the;

as protection from the unknown, 183-84,

physiognomy; portraiture

203-4 texts, 149, 151-53. 155-56, 166

See also Other, the; police photography;

Putnam, George, 135-37 Quine, W. V., 188-89

psychiatric photography pictorial photography, 4, 41, 54-55, 59, 61

See also focus debate

realism absolute, 26

Pinkerton, Allan, 198-99, 230

culture of, 31-33. 79. 88, 234

Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 197

gaze of, 156

Poignant, Roslyn, 159

Goodman on, 27-28

police photography, 194, 206

“instrumental,” 166, 168, 191, 226 u

as assault, 200—201, 208, 211, 218

naive, 23

The Bashful Model, 202

in novel writing, 70-72, 78

beginning of, in England, 196

and the past, 72, 234

as crime deterrant, 207

photography as locus for discussion of,

criminal collections, 196, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 210-n, 213, 215, 218

19-20, 234 and physiognomy, 155-56, 183-86

and cultural tensions, 231

“psychological,” 36

and growth of crime, 218

and representation, 26-29, 66, 225-26,

The Inspector’s Model, 209 “mug” shot, 199-201, 204, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 223-24

232, 234 vs. romanticism, 2, 20, 23-25, 28, 31-36, 67, 69, 72, 161, 221, 234

and privacy, 200, 221

“soft,” 67

“The Rogues’ Gallery,” 193, 209

and surveillance, 197

See also Bain, George Grantham; Bertillon

term defined, 6, 24-25

system; photography: and surveillance;

Victorian, 28-32, 223

physiognomy

and vision, 29, 35, 79-80

Pollock, Griselda, 118—19 portraiture, 146, 159, 160, 163, 173, 176-77 positivism, logical. See realism Pre-Raphaelites, 4, 61, 83 Price, William Lake, 146 Pringle, Andrew, 45, 180 psychiatric medicine changes in, 179-80 psychiatric photography authorial presence of doctor in, 148-49, 165 and control of mental instability, 177, 191 and “culture of medicine,” 179 curative power of, 169-71, 173

See also focus debate; Hardy, Thomas; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; James, Henry; imperialism, and photography; norm, the; photography: documentary; pho¬ tography: and empiricism; photogra¬ phy: and truth; romance Redfield, James, Comparative Physiognomy, 152 Rejlander, O. G., 54, 57-58, 60, 61, 146, 159 representation, and power. See Other, the; photography: and normality; photogra¬ phy: and objectification; photography: and possession; physiognomy; police photography: as assault

•

254

Index

Ricoeur, Paul, 92

Sharpe, William, 9

Riis, Jacob, The Inspector’s Model, 208, 209

Shloss, Carol, 94, 121, 217

Robinson, Henry Peach, 4, 39, 47, 54, 58, 61

Skultans, Vieda, 147, 179

Fading A way, 54, 55

Smith, Phillip Thurmond, 196

on photographing models, 147, 173

Snelling, H. H., 39

on photography as collecting, 231-32

Snyder, Joel, 5, 7, 111, 122, 138-39

Pictorial Effect in Photography, 146

Soiree of Photographers, 96

romance

Sommer, Robert, 167, 168

and British vs. American writers, 71

Sontag, Susan, On Photography, 2n

and detective histories, 208, 210

spectator

and early photography, 61

as differentiated from subject, 223

and imagination, 70

in Hardy, 82

instability of, 73

in James, 90, 92

“metaphysical,” 67, 234

photographer as, 73, 79, 88, 94

and modernism, 33, 45, 72

role of, 31, 34-35, 122, 138-40

and the past, 71, 169-70

See also photography: and objectification; police photography: “mug” shot; psy¬

vs. realism, 31-36, 67-72, 79-81, 85, 89,

chiatric photography

90, 94, 161, 227, 234 and subjectivity, 34-35, 234

Spiegel, Alan, 5-6

and symbolic insight, 90

spirit photography, 228-33

term defined, 6, 20, 24-25

Steiner, Wendy, 33-34, 169

See also focus debate; Hardy, Thomas;

Stieglitz, Alfred, The Horse-Car Terminal, 13,

Hawthorne, Nathaniel; James, Henry;

16

photography: and empiricism; pictorial

Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, 145, 146

photography; psychiatric photography

surveillance, 76, 79, 80-82, 217

Root, Marcus Aurelius, 73n

The Camera and the Pencil, 63 Rush, Benjamin, 149, 151, 160, 178 Ruskin, 2-4, 60, 82

The Stones of Venice, 83 Russell, William Howard, 98, 99, 103, 104

tableaux, 33

See also Robinson, Henry Peach: Fading Away Tagg, John, 26-27, 118-19, 196-97. 227 Talbot, W. H. Fox, 5, 146

The British Expedition to the Crimea, 143-44

Friese Green on, 44

The War, 102, 106, 142, 143

Lace, 56

Ryder, James R, 3

Lacock Abbey, 63, 231 The Open Door, 15, 16

Schenk, Carl, 156

The Pencil of Nature, 46-47, 60, 63, 145

Schnauss, Dr. J.

on photographs as self-created, 59-60,

Christophe S., 156, 157 Eva H., 156, 158 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 153-54 “On Physiognomy,” 166 Schudson, Michael, 224

62-63 A Scene in a Library, 57 and sitters as “patients,” 177-78 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 125-26

Scott, Charles, 200

Terry, James, 179

Seiberling, Grace, 49-50

testimony, 3-4, 7-8, 81, 100, no, 224, 227

Sekula, Allan, hi, 159, 180, 2i7n on “instrumental realism,” 166, 191

Seymour’s Key to Character, 203-4

and autobiography, 191 criteria for admitting photograph as, 190-9in, 196

Shadbolt, George, 43, 60

and cultural sophistication, 193

shared vision. See photography: as “shared so¬

first use of photograph as, 187-88

cial experience”; realism

ideal, 188-89

255

*

Index

testimony (cont.) photograph as true vision, 199 photograph as unambiguous, 192 pictorial-testimony theory, i9on silent-witness theory, i9on

war, and photography, 97-99, hi, 131, 133

See also Civil War photographs; Crimean War photographs Warren John H., Jr., Thirty Years’ Battle with

Crime, 205

Thackeray, William, 6, 71

Weaver, Mike, 141

Thomas, Brook, 70, 75-76

Weeks, Caleb, 216

titles, 122, 124-27, 131

Wells, Samuel R., 152, 183

See also meaning, of photographs

New Physiognomy, 166, 184

touched photographs, 59

Woolnoth, Thomas, 167

Trachtenberg, Alan, 19, 100, hi, 134, i35n

writing

Turnley, Joseph, The Language of the Eye, 153 “type” photography, 2170

as accompaniment to photograph, 22, 100, 113, 121, 127-29 as analogous to daguerreotypy, 69

Ullian, J. S., 188

as evidence, i89n and photographic realism, 5-6, 19-20, 23,

Victoria, Queen, 1-2, 4, 50-51, 98, 99

29, 101-2

Victorian world, in photographs, 13-14. 16

photography as, 5, 23, 189

viewer/viewed differentiation, 223

and realism, 28-29, 32, 66-69

See also norm, the; photography: and objec¬ tification; spectator visual theory, 19th-century, 91-92 Vitella, 185

See also language and photography; Hardy, Thomas; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; James, Henry; novel, the; photogra¬ phy: and storytelling; realism; romance

Wallace, Ellerslie, 181-82 Walling, George, 206, 210

Recollections of a New York Chief of Police, 205

Zender, Joachim, Anthroponomy, 153, 165-66 Zola, Emile, 30, 31