Mediating American Autobiography : Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman [1 ed.] 9780826266408, 9780826217929

Citation preview

Mediating American Autobiog raphy

Mediating American Autobiog raphy

Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman

Photography in

- Sean Ross Meehan -

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

Copyright © 2008 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meehan, Sean Ross, 1969– Mediating American autobiography : photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman / Sean Ross Meehan. p. cm. Summary: “Examines works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman to explore how the emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed their ideas, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1792-9 (alk. paper) 1. American prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and photography—United States—History—19th century. 3. Authors, American—Biography—History and criticism. 4. Photography— United States--History—19th century. 5. Visual perception in literature. 6. Photography in literature. 7. Autobiography. 8. Self-realization in literature. I. Title. PS374.P43M44 2008 810.9'492—dc22 2007047083 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: BookComp Inc. Printer and binder: Integrated Book Technology, Inc. Typefaces: Palatino and Golden Cockerel Frontispiece images courtesy of the Library of Congress

- For Mary and Margaret and Hugh -

Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Prologue: The Reproduction of the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Strange Developments: Photography’s Autobiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2. Like Iodine to Light: Emerson’s Photographic Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 3. Pencil of Nature: Thoreau’s Photographic Register . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 4. Pictures in Progress: The Claims of Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered . . . . . . . . . . 130 5. Specimen Daze: Whitman’s Photobiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Epilogue: Future Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

vii

Acknowledgments

This study in the resonances of development has seen a great deal of its own. For guidance and support in the process of bringing this work to light, I wish to thank the teachers and scholars who worked with me, including Bluford Adams, Eduardo Cadava, Ken Cmiel, Kathleen Diffley, Laura Rigal, Garrett Stewart, and most especially Ed Folsom, who has thoughtfully labored in the darkroom with me and inspired me with his own majestic productions. I also wish to thank my family for their support in other forms and at other stages, including my grandmother, Jane E. O’Neill, and grandfather, J. Ross Meehan; my mother, Jane F. O’Neill, and father, James Meehan; my siblings, Jackie, Courtney, and Jamie; my friend and mentor John Turnbull; and my wife, Mary, and children, Margaret and Hugh, to whom I dedicate the book. There are, of course, others I could name in a longer list; as Whitman would put it, let these but suggest them. Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 3, and 5 appeared, respectively, in the following journals: Arizona Quarterly (Summer 2006), Criticism (Winter 2006), and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Fall 1999). I thank the editors for their permission to reprint that work here. I am also grateful for the financial support given to me by a fellowship from the Graduate College at the University of Iowa, the Frederick Seeley award given to me by the English department at the University of Iowa, and two Ver Steeg faculty-development grants awarded to me by Morningside College. I am also grateful for the professional expertise I benefited from while researching at the libraries at the George Eastman House, Harvard University, the

ix

x

Acknowledgments

Library of Congress, Morningside College, and the University of Iowa. Finally, I would like to thank the editors, readers, and staff of the University of Missouri Press for their fine work in helping me bring to print this reproduction of an author.

Abbreviations

A

Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Library of America, 1994. CWE Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 6 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971–. FDP Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers. Ed. John W. Blassingame et al. 7 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–. JMN Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. JT Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. PW Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1963–1964. WT Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and F. B. Sanborn. 20 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

xi

Mediating American Autobiog raphy

- Prologue The Reproduction of the Author

Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Walt Whitman, Preface to 1855 Leaves of Grass

Celebrating himself, Walt Whitman emerges on the American literary scene in 1855 in a staggering display of autobiographical expression. So he tells us, his potential readers, in a review of Leaves of Grass that he wrote himself, published anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on September 15th of that year: Here we have a book which fairly staggers us. It sets all the ordinary rules of criticism at defiance. It is one of the strangest compounds of transcendentalism, bombast, philosophy, folly, wisdom, wit and dullness which it ever catered into the heart of man to conceive. Its author is Walter Whitman, and the book is a reproduction of the author. His name is not on the frontispiece, but his portrait, half length, is. The contents of the book form a daguerreotype of his inner being, and the title page bears a representation of its physical tabernacle. It is a poem; but it conforms to none of the rules by which poetry has ever been judged.1

Whitman appeals to the newly emerging technology of photography, which was introduced in America in 1839, as a means to provide some measure of the significant, yet strange, autobiographical character of the book that his readers, so he suggests, will find in its leaves. It matters to this author that the book has a frontispiece image, 1. Whitman, “Leaves of Grass—An Extraordinary Book.” 1

2

Mediating American Autobiography

an engraving reproduced from a daguerreotype made by Gabriel Harrison, of Whitman, as many readers now know him, standing provocatively, shirt open, hat tipped to the side, a most unconventional pose for a poet (see fig. 1). It also matters to Whitman that the words of the book provide an analogue for what the photographically informed frontispiece image offers: a reproduction of the author. Whitman’s other photographic figure (the metaphor, not the frontispiece) reiterates the autobiographical claim of the writing. The author stands in relation to his book just as the frontispiece image stands in relation to the author—literally standing up at the opening of the book and standing in for the name missing from the title page. Though dressed in an older form of image reproduction, an engraving from daguerrean portraiture, the early form of photography most prominent in the 1840s and 1850s in America, Whitman’s use of the photographic process in his invocation of autobiographical memory remains familiar to our eyes and the image-culture we share with him. Composing our own versions of Leaves of Grass in the form of photographic albums, be they print or digital, we create an ongoing visual record of our past that shapes and reflects our conception of identity and personal history; we know what Whitman means. We offer versions of Whitman’s self-review every time we point to a picture of ourselves and say of the paper (or now the screen), of this reproduction of ourselves, “That’s me.” Apple Computer’s popular digital imaging and archiving program borrows Whitman’s pronoun, reminding us what this descendant of the photographic medium is still about: iPhoto. Our images give authority and currency to our I’s, our autobiographical being. A recent advertisement slogan from Eastman Kodak, “Share Moments. Share Life,” brings Whitman’s “daguerreotype of inner being” into the light of present-day uses. Kodak suggests that the autographic capacity of the picture (the moment shared in the exposure) yields a larger biographical potential, the reproduction of life itself. Whitman’s words remind us that from the medium’s beginning, well before Kodak and Apple, photographic imaging has figured complexly in the representation of personal and public identity. Photography has been implicated thoroughly in the words and working of autobiographical memory. Beginning with its earliest conceptions by a host of natural philosophers, chemists, and experimenters, photography has figured as a curious form of autobiography: a method in which nature reflects and reproduces and—so the metaphor of the name suggests—writes

Prologue

3

Figure 1. Frontispiece portrait of Walt Whitman from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Engraved by Samuel Hollyer from a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, 1854. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

itself in light. William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the English discoverers of the photographic process in the late 1830s, refers to the experimental impressions left on the photosensitive paper, later to be called photographs, as “curious self-representations.” Louis J. M. Daguerre, the French inventor of the photographic process to which he gave his name, similarly characterizes the unique representational status of his images by claiming them to be natural autobiographies, impressions in which nature is able to “reproduce herself.” Where Talbot and Daguerre and other early photographic inventors and reporters remarked often upon the autobiographical implications of the new

4

Mediating American Autobiography

medium, literary critics have more recently begun to take note of the photographic implications of autobiography. In Light Writing and Life Writing, a study of the complex role photography plays in a variety of contemporary autobiographical texts, Timothy Dow Adams notes, after referring to Talbot and other nineteenth-century discoverers, that more recent theories of photography reveal “a history remarkably similar to that of autobiography.” For Linda Haverty Rugg, the crucial similarity lies in the “deeper layer of complexity in the act of selfrepresentation” that the “presence of photography” in autobiography reveals. As Rugg argues in her engaging study Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography, the photographic medium frames a critical question of autobiographical representation: “How does the introduction of photographs and/or the photographic metaphor into autobiographical texts complicate autobiographical reference?”2 This complication of photography and autobiographical memory, this literary condition of photographic memory, forms the horizon for my study. Whitman’s composite of verbal and visual authoring, a complex photographic figure employed in his writing when the medium is barely fifteen years old, provokes the central question of this book: how does photography and its emergence in America matter in American autobiography, a related technology of self-presentation that develops (with Whitman being one of its prominent emanations) in the same period? In focusing on the correspondence between the photographic medium in its first fifty years and American autobiographical expression, I share Rugg’s interest in the representational light that photography sheds on autobiography; however, I offer a further perspective on a specific time (photography’s emergence, 1839–1889) and situation (American autobiography of the midnineteenth century, or, more familiarly, the American Renaissance) of such photographic memory that has not been pursued before.3 There 2. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 96; Louis J. M. Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” 13; Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, 3; Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography, 2–3, 9. 3. Some other locations for this interest in the representational critique that photography mediates for autobiography (and the reverse) include Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, and Miles Orvell’s chapter in his American Photography titled “Versions of the Self: Memory, Identity, Autobiography.” Adams and Hirsch both focus on contemporary writers. Rugg focuses on four writers, the earliest (and only American) being Mark Twain. I will return to Rugg and the recent interest by autobiography theorists in photography in Chapter 1.

Prologue

5

has been a great deal of thoughtful study on the cultural significance of photography in nineteenth-century America, led by the work of Alan Trachtenberg and his perceptive “reading” of American photographic representation, particularly his understanding of early photography’s function as both medium and metaphor; his critical impressions of photography’s status as a “keyword” will be visible throughout this study. I have already echoed Trachtenberg, to be sure, in understanding that Whitman’s 1855 frontispiece image, more than a simple photographic reflection of the author, “declares the method as well as the author of the book.”4 In the last thirty years, there have also been important and influential studies claiming autobiography’s place in American literary history and its significance for American Studies. “Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression,” Robert Sayre argued at the beginning of that period: “America and autobiography have been peculiarly linked.” Citing Sayre, Lawrence Buell further notes the link between autobiographical expression and the major texts and authors of what we call the American Renaissance: from Emerson to Thoreau to Douglass to Whitman, Buell reads a “strong autobiographical dimension” in the literary work, making “the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century . . . pivotal for the history of American autobiography.”5 Located at the heart of that pivotal history, Whitman’s stunning juxtaposition of the autobiographical and the photographic suggests that there is a further, peculiar link to consider; there is a need to bring the two subjects (and technologies), American autobiography and early photography, together in one study, as has not been done before with regard to the genre and the medium in this period. Reading between these two preeminent media of self-expression, I hypothesize that photography, in its early developments as a medium (and a process) of communication, declares a method for American autobiography. Like the unconventional book Whitman previews for the reader in his review, I read the juxtaposition of photographic and autobiographical mediation as “one of the strangest compounds,” whose literary significance demands our further analysis. I pursue that analysis, and specifically the photographic traces of that compound, in 4. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, 65. 5. Robert F. Sayre, “Autobiography and the Making of America,” 147; Lawrence Buell, “Autobiography in the American Renaissance,” 47.

6

Mediating American Autobiography

the prose of Whitman and three writers who share with him, by critical consensus, the mantle of representative men of nineteenthcentury American autobiography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass. In light of the significant engagement of photography that we will read in the works of these authors—Whitman is only the most public of this group, at least in terms of photographic posing—I would also suggest that these four autobiographical figures can be considered among the group of American writers whom Trachtenberg views as playing a representative (and critically neglected) role in the emergence of photography as a “keyword” in America: they give us a “record of speculation and imagining . . . a history of picturing photography in the medium of language.”6 In Chapter 1, in addition to looking further into such picturing of photography in the medium of language, I will cast a colder eye on the critical conceptions of autobiography and its privileged place in American literary history. I am interested in what photography reveals regarding the (received) representativeness of these authors; the very word representative and its visual connotations figure in the discourses of both photography and autobiography. Let it be known, here, that in my focus on autobiographical expression and photographic mediation from Emerson to Whitman, I mean to evoke F. O. Matthiessen’s still influential conception of an American Renaissance (“the age of Emerson and Whitman”). However, this is a conception I recognize as far from transparent in its claims and choices and exclusions; I seek to explore and unfold the ways that photographic memory can be thought to question and revise the canonical and (in Emerson’s sense of the word) conservative implications of the category. As I will argue, even from Matthiessen’s own perspective, the picturing of autobiographical expression through the medium of photography suggests a more complicated picture that still awaits our careful reading: photography introduces something more to the conventional metaphor of autobiography as an author’s mirrored self-image. And as we will see in our exploration of Emerson’s photographic thinking (Chapter 2), one place to start this revisioning of photographic memory would be with the very notion of what, or how, a representative means—and how that meaning can be compared to the photographic analogues Emerson invokes. What would happen, for example, if the notion of a representative, autobiographical 6. Trachtenberg, “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword,” 22.

Prologue

7

expression is conveyed not through the presumed uniqueness of a photograph (one in a million) but by way of the multiplicity of photographic reproduction (a million from one)? Emerson offers that complication, in fact, in the heart of his Representative Men. Representative Men informs Matthiessen’s key word expression and its implication as a form of self-expression. Expression connotes a reflection of the age and the writer that informs the language and constitutes the representativeness of the art. Matthiessen’s location of this representative expression in the work of Emerson and Whitman, and in the age Emerson would identify as that of “the first person singular,” is surely not surprising (JMN, 3:70). This is not the passage from Representative Men that Matthiessen selects for the epigraph to American Renaissance, though it could be: “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds” (CWE, 4:4). In effect, Matthiessen’s thesis is that, much as with the photograph of a dearly departed, we can read and recall the mind and character of American literature through the individual figures of these now-distant men: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. In the case of the authors of this study, the textual form of those “lenses” and figures are noticeably autobiographical, if not conventionally so: Emerson’s journals and essays, even his “biography” Representative Men; Thoreau’s journals and Walden; Douglass’s slave narratives and abolitionist speeches; Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and his later prose autobiography, Specimen Days. “This historical movement,” Lawrence Buell concludes regarding mid-nineteenth-century America and its “autobiographical impetus,” “which achieved its most ambitious culmination in Emersonian Transcendentalism, led directly to the I-centered masterpieces of Thoreau and Whitman.”7 What is surprising and more strange, I will argue, are the implications of photography within these representative types of American autobiographical expression. Photography inflects the language of Emerson’s “lenses” and informs a neglected conception of otherness that is important to Emerson’s understanding of a mediational representativeness; this recognition of mediation and the potential othering or estrangement of self and identity that attends any communication remains equally significant in the autobiographical expression of Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. Consider this other moment from Whitman’s archive of photographic memory. At the end of his long 7. Buell, “Autobiography,” 51.

8

Mediating American Autobiography

career, some thirty years after his emergence in 1855, Whitman would face one measure of the self-estrangement that attends the proliferation of photographic images—and prolific autobiographical writing, for that matter. Sorting through the clutter of prints and reproductions from his life, Whitman looks upon four different photographic portraits of himself and proclaims to his interlocutor, Horace Traubel: “Is the difference evolutional or episodical? Taking them in their periods is there a visible bridge from one to the other or is there a break?” This provocative question remains answered, at least as far as Traubel records it, only in Whitman’s apparent inability to answer it. “Why don’t you answer your own question?” Traubel suggests. To which Whitman responds: “I can’t. . . . Though there is almost a dissonance in the pictures.”8 This is a dissonance that can accompany even the most familiar of photographic representations—given enough time and distance from the moment of the photograph’s making, given the difference of photographic mediation. This is the negative, as it were, of the familiar “That’s me” recognition I referred to above, a misrecognition we might also share with Whitman as we age and the subjects in our photographic portraits do not: “That’s me?” Though we might consider this phenomenon of identity’s image-saturation to be of recent origin, amplified by digital mediation, it is only the forms that have changed, not the underlying issue or implication of technological reproduction. In fact, our current mediation of the self and the electronic dispersals of its singular image have their counterparts in the nineteenth-century emergence of photographic memory, the very technology that digital imaging does not replace (think “iPhoto”) so much as remediate.9 Despite the fact that we can now access Whitman’s textual and visual reproductions through a digital archive, or in my view because of that fact (a point I take up in the Epilogue), our image of “Whitman” remains disseminated under our boot soles.

Half-Formed Pictures Be it celebrated or confused, Whitman’s experience of photographic identity links up with our own continuing experience of this phenom8. Whitman and Horace Traubel, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 4:424. 9. I use the term remediate much as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin do in their work Remediation: Understanding New Media; I return to their concept in Chapter 1.

Prologue

9

enon through mediation, a word and concept I focus on as key to understanding the matter of early photography and American autobiography from Emerson to Whitman. Whitman’s autobiographical writing, like all writing, shares with photography the estrangement of a medium. Both writing and photography (whose nomenclature links it to writing) are communication media; both technologies seek to record and transmit a subject through the distances of space and time, specifically by means of a graphic impression. Here, I use communication and mediation somewhat interchangeably, much as John Durham Peters does in his Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. For Peters, all communication, be it written text or photographic image or phonographic recording, mediates some sort of contact through difference. The dream for communication has long been what Peters terms dialogue, an exact and authentic, transparent replication of the self in the eyes and ears of the other, the receiver; the reality is closer to what Peters terms dissemination and argues perpetually haunts this dream of perfect communication, “a more uncanny fact that all communication via media of transmission or recording . . . is ultimately indistinguishable from communication with the dead.” As he concludes, “Mediation increases the specters haunting transmission and reception, the potential touch of alien hands or inspection by alien eyes.”10 The ultimate estrangement of death is not the condition for communication; it is the most telling sign of how communication works, in a world of signs, to mediate distance and how it must fail to achieve (thankfully, Peters emphasizes) the perfect collapsing of sender and receiver, how it must fail to do more than convey between the two. Communication is possible, we understand, only in that transit. Whitman, poet of the ferry crossing, knows of which we speak. He concludes the poem he would title “Mediums” with this understanding for what and how his writing would broadcast to his reader to come: “Characters, events, retrospections, shall be convey’d . . . / Death, the future, invisible faith, shall all be convey’d.”11 Whitman’s convey is the verb that our current use of mediate (what representational media do) has nearly replaced. I am informed by Peters and his compelling history of the problem of communication in several ways in this study. Though Peters does not focus extensively on photography, he offers context for how I want 10. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, 176. 11. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, 481.

10

Mediating American Autobiography

to begin to reframe, by way of photography, the literary issue of midnineteenth-century autobiographical expression as a matter of mediation, as a problem and potential of dissemination. Peters historicizes the “more uncanny” character of communication by exploring the emergence in the nineteenth century of several mediating technologies that enable contact with the distant and departed. Peters locates in spirit photography, telegraphy, phonography, and other nineteenthcentury variations on this theme (and dream) of direct contact with the distant and dead, not the origin of mediation so much as the most vivid evocation of its potential and problem. To evoke that problem in its nineteenth-century resonance, Peters turns significantly to Emerson and his understanding, expressed in “Friendship,” of our “condition of infinite remoteness.” For Peters, by way of Emerson, this is the necessarily hermeneutic condition of communication, the constitutive gap between sender and receiver that makes all mediation “fundamentally interpretive rather than dialogic.” He points out that “hermeneutics and media face a common problem: the production and reception of texts within unforeseen horizons.” There is much to commend in Peters’s reading of Emerson, a matter I will return to in my chapter on Emerson, where I argue that the conditions of photographic reproducibility evoke this broader context of remoteness, one that informs both the problem of our communication with others and the characteristics for what Emerson will call thinking. Here, I follow Peters in his evocation of Emerson (he also refers, more briefly, to Whitman and Thoreau) as a critical reader of the strangeness of mediation and its attendant power to reach a reader. To use the language of Whitman’s preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, these are writers interested in the productive relation between correspondence, a concept certainly familiar to American Romanticism, and broadcasting, a word more familiar, seemingly, to our technological age. I am thus further compelled by Peters’s conclusion that such an understanding of mediation and its fundamentally interpretive contingencies marks a creative potential for communication, not merely some sort of deconstructive failure nor a post-structural ghost read back into nineteenthcentury forms of communication. “That we are destined to interpret . . . is a description of the very possibility of interaction. There are no sure signs in communication, only hints and guesses. Our interaction will never be a meeting of cogitos but at its best may be a dance in which we sometimes touch.” Where Peters turns, ultimately, toward an ethics of dissemination for communication theory, building upon

Prologue

11

what he calls “the friends of dissemination, from Emerson through Derrida,” I will emphasize an aesthetics of dissemination that I locate in the composite texts and technologies of photographic memory explored in this study.12 Whitman, surely, knows a step or two of this interpretive dance. And though we might tend to view Whitman’s writing as a desire for dialogue and immediate contact, perfect communication with his reader, we would do so only by forgetting the emphasis Whitman gives to the role of interpretation as a basis for his reading; we would neglect the very dissemination he desires and is in the process of realizing with us, whoever we are, now holding him in hand. As early as his review of his own work in 1855, where he observes, “We are afforded glimpses of half-formed pictures to tease and tantalize with their indistinctness . . . mocking us for a moment, but vanishing before we can reach them.” And again in the conclusion of the review: “We have said that the work defies criticism; we pronounce no judgment upon it; it is a work that will satisfy few upon a first perusal; it must be read again and again, and then it will be to many unaccountable. All who read it will agree that it is an extraordinary book, full of beauties and blemishes, such as nature is to those who have only a half formed acquaintance with her mysteries.”13 Here are Peters’s “hints and guesses,” language of great interest to Whitman and (as we will see) his conception of the specimen, the piece that represents presence largely through absence. There is touch, here, contact between a reader and the writer’s subject; but it is the touch of mediation and of communication in process, of the need to read and of the inability (by necessity) to read or receive completely. Peters addresses the “unforeseen horizons” and the problematic that all communication, as broadcast dissemination, opens up: “Media mean the multiplication of singular beings for the use of strangers.”14 I can not think of a sentence that better captures what Whitman is after in his writing. How Whitman begins his journey into the unforeseen horizons of communication, in the case of the 1855 review, also captures the strangeness of the matter. He evokes a specific resonance of photographic mediation: the language and logic of the photographic process, the implications of photochemical reproduction. Whitman’s vanishing “half-formed 12. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 150, 151, 268. 13. Whitman, “Leaves of Grass—An Extraordinary Book.” 14. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 134.

12

Mediating American Autobiography

pictures” suggest the language of the photographic process of developing a picture; we are in the darkroom of photography and its mediational process, not in the more conventional “light” of the precision and presumed immediacy of the product, the finished picture, the photograph as an exact and transparent representation of its subject. Whitman’s poetic daguerreotype is not “Rembrandt perfected,” as Samuel Morse famously claims for Daguerre’s earliest images.15 And yet, Whitman’s “reproduction of the author,” this strange multiplication of the very singularity he declares for his subject, reiterates the creative potential (and tension) of his writing. Whitman wants the future touch of alien eyes and hands, writes for the future and broadcast use of strangers. The contingencies conveyed in the writing (all that the poetry tallies and indicates, all that Whitman’s favored metonymy seeks to represent) are reproduced, and celebrated, in the contingencies of the book and its photographic preface: the two graphic media that stand near each other in print and stand in for the communication of the author. Whitman’s photographic memory figures something beyond the image of the author, therefore, to the extent that he conveys to his readers, so he says, the very conditions of photographic and writerly mediation he himself draws upon. The photographic figure highlights a contingency he is after. The process remains unfinished, will require future readings and rereadings. As marked in the language of Whitman’s review, we move from a familiar sense of the precision of authorial representation to an other, dynamic type of autobiographical reproduction; we are given not exactly a mirror of the author, as the popular conventions of both autobiography and photography would have it, as much as a mirroring of his authoring. At stake in the more dynamic, present-participle version of autobiographical memory is an important shift that is of great interest to this study. In Whitman’s hands we shift from an image that represents an author or his book (“a representation of its physical tabernacle”) to an image that reproduces the internal composition (the “inner being”) of the representation, the chemistry, as it were, that informs the author and by extension the contents of his book. Whitman is after a figure that can stand in (or pose) not merely for his book (as the frontispiece will do), but more significantly, for a process of composing that the book, in its depictions and “half-formed pictures,” reproduces. Whitman’s 15. Samuel F. B. Morse, “The Daguerreotipe.”

Prologue

13

daguerreotype informs the half-length portrait we can see but also a stranger compounding of poetry and personality that is present and that can not be fully seen, that alternately appears and vanishes, like a photographic impression in the process of its development. The portrait is half-length and the book is half-formed, awaiting its readers and (so he tells us in the review) their rereadings. Whitman’s picturing of autobiography through the medium of photography poses the process of the author’s composition. Ed Folsom indicates the subtlety and reflexivity of the relationship at issue, here, when he argues that Whitman “would not write about photography so much as he would write with and from photography.”16 With the partial exception of Whitman studies, most notably in Folsom’s perceptive readings of the poet’s ongoing photographic project, little critical attention has been given to the literary, and specifically autobiographical, implications of the considerable interest and engagement of photography by the writers of this study. A forgotten but important note in the opening of Matthiessen’s American Renaissance helps to frame this surprise and neglect of photography. Matthiessen explains, in his “Note on the Illustrations,” that “the developing art of photography” is a key to Emerson’s understanding of the age, and thus, implicitly, a key to Matthiessen’s own understanding of the age and its artistic expression. “Concerned as he was with every possibility of seeing, Emerson was fascinated with the developing art of photography from the time of the invention of the daguerreotype in the late eighteen-thirties. He conceived of the camera as a powerful symbol for his age’s scrutiny of character.” Matthiessen also locates Whitman in this photographic culture that surrounds his writers, but suggests that such images are “already well-known.” Despite the claim of familiarity, we must still ask the questions today: What is known about the role this “powerful symbol” plays in the technology of autobiography, another “developing art” in which Emerson and Whitman have a hand? In terms of the development of autobiographical expression that we trace back to these authors and this age, how does photography matter in the work of these writers and in their reproductions of themselves? The surprise is that Matthiessen, despite how strongly he associates Emerson with the symbolic potential of photography, fails to read or analyze any implications of photography in his work, even when he quotes Emerson prominently using a photographic analogy 16. Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 176.

14

Mediating American Autobiography

(from his “Lecture on the Times”) as a figure for Emerson’s writing. In the case of Matthiessen’s neglect of the “powerful symbol” he alerts our attention to, it is hard to know whether the matter of photographic technology and writing is avoided because it is too obvious and familiar or—and perhaps at the very same time—too strange and unsettling to consider, this notion of mediation in art. Photography matters in the (autobiographical) expression and art of American literature in this period of its (re)birth, we are to understand, but also left, still, to ask how.17 The answer I explore in this book as to how photography matters in the writing of Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman and in their development of an American autobiographical expression is that photography mediates a crucially metonymic conception of that writing. In addition to evoking my underlying focus on mediation, I use the verb mediate to suggest a conceptual link between the two technologies of self-presentation. Photography is conceived as a crucially metonymic medium. Photography is a communication medium because it is a means for representing an image (the photographic product or photograph) and a technology, by way of photochemical exposure and development, for reproducing that image (the photographic process). This dynamic relation between representation and reproduction marks the complex character of the medium; the dynamic is also a key fault line in the history and theory of photography’s emergence that I will explore, vis-à-vis various photographic writings and practices from the 1830s through the 1880s. In terms more familiar to literary study, this dynamic between representation and reproduction, or (for Peters) between dialogue and dissemination, can be read as a tension between metaphor and metonymy. As it turns out, such a linguistic perspective is not unfamiliar to more recent theories of photography and its representational status, theories that understand photography to be a technological process of reproduction unsettling more traditional, auratic forms of representation such as painting (Walter Benjamin); that emphasize photography’s complex metonymic logic (Allan Sekula); that read the semiotic status of the photograph as a metonymic index as well as a metaphorical icon and symbol (Rosalind 17. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, n.p., 71. Matthiessen cites Whitman’s statement that in Leaves of Grass his life and times are “literally photographed,” 601; however, Matthiessen’s analysis goes no further in terms of what reproducibility could thus mean for his “art,” giving his attention exclusively to painting.

Prologue

15

Krauss, drawing on C. S. Peirce); that understand photographic presence to be, as Roland Barthes puts it, “literally an emanation of the referent” and therefore “never metaphoric.” Judith Roof places great emphasis on photography’s “metonymical process of reproduction,” which she keenly locates not in the camera lens, but in the operations of photographic chemistry, as I will do throughout this study, and follow the writers of this study in so doing: “While lenses, developed through the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, continue a more substitutive (and often literally condensing) metaphorical focusing process, the photographic product of the lens’s intercession is subject to a series of contiguous chemical and mechanical operations.” As Barthes frames the matter, it was not the painters who invented photography, it was the chemists.18 The significance of such photographic metonymy, whose theory and criticism I will elaborate upon in Chapter 1 and to which I give the name photonymy, remains multifaceted. Foremost, metonymy, signification through contexture and contiguity, is a mark of photography’s historical purchase and emergence in the culture: as claimed by its inventors and practitioners, from its beginnings in early nineteenth-century natural philosophy and chemistry, photography’s difference from other forms of visual representation is its special, automatic, and seemingly transparent connection to its subject. Secondly, such dependence on contiguity over metaphorical substitution, the photograph as a physical trace or impression of its subject, equally marks the site of the contingencies of photographic communication—and as Peters suggests, the contingencies of all communication. In the case of photographic communication, this metonymic logic of contiguity obtains in multiple forms: it is not just that an image is contingent on its subject (and celebrated for being so), it is that an image is reproduced through a series of chemical and mechanical contingencies—in a word, developments. For the coinventor Talbot, such contingencies make the photographic image a curious self-representation. This condition of photographic mediation leads to a third register of photographic metonymy: the early 18. Judith Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change, 35, 37; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 80, 78. Talbot makes clear that his discoveries are a matter of chemistry in the opening lines of his 1839 “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” referring to his initial experiments upon a “very curious property which has been long known to chemists to be possessed by the nitrate of silver; namely, its discoloration when exposed to the violet rays of light,” 36–37.

16

Mediating American Autobiography

and ongoing and almost systematic attempt, in the writings about photography, to hide the contingencies, the “metonymical process of reproduction” that yields but also unsettles the photograph and its celebrated sense of immediacy. I agree with Roof’s assertion that such occlusions are symptomatic throughout discussions and representations of the photograph’s unique identity, and that such discussions attempt to “remetaphorize” the “errant metonymy” of photographic reproducibility.19 Throughout this study, we will witness this flickering, dialectical image of metonymy and metaphor in significant writings from photography’s first fifty years: in the thoughts of Daguerre and other early developers and inventors of the medium; in the descriptions and depictions of the American photographic writers Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root; in the text of Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans or Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, the first photographically illustrated book; in the racialized uses of photography by American ethnological science; in the Civil War “sketching” by photographer Alexander Gardner. Throughout these and other instances of photography’s picturing in print, readers find a consistent tension between the claims for the photograph’s unique and singular expression of identity and the photochemical impressions that render and reproduce that identity into existence. Finally, I will argue that there is a fourth register of photographic metonymy, of the kind we have begun to examine in Whitman’s self-review, a photonymy whose use provokes, rather than occludes, a recognition of the mediation and contingencies such representations depend upon and, indeed, reproduce. Ultimately, I suggest that this remetonymizing of photographic representation, in the hands of Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman, provokes a further recognition and mediation: a shift from the conventional image of autobiography as a singular and immediate authorial identity, the metaphor of a self, to a stranger, more disseminational model of autobiographical metonymy. In this more provocative and, to echo W. J. T. Mitchell, more iconological use of the photographic image-text, the autobiographical self-image is inseparable from its ongoing mediation. Autobiography, thus figured, is an authentic, autographic image, like a photograph; but the authenticity of this image reflects more a photograph in the dynamic process of emergence, an image unfinished. 19. Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 37, 41.

Prologue

17

The Negative of the Book In Chapter 1, I explore various critical contexts for these resonances of photographic reproduction in the history and theory of the medium’s emergence. I argue that these implications of photographic metonymy inform a more complex identity of photography, an autobiography of the medium, that alternately informs and unsettles received notions of photographic immediacy, particularly in one of the key cultural emanations of photographic portrayal in nineteenthcentury America, the image of the self. In American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith elucidates this mutually reflexive link between the burgeoning practice of photographic portrayal in the nineteenth century and conceptions of American selfhood, arguing that “the advent of the reproducible photographic portrait inaugurated new modes of visual self-perception and self-production.” Following Smith and other critics of this visual archive of self-presentation, I construe autobiographical and self-representation (be it in reference to text or photograph) in a broader sense of the construction and representation of a self’s image, not exclusively as an image or representation made by the subject himself—as in the case of a self-portrait. With this multistable identity in mind, the self made and unmade in relation to its own (photographic) image, Alan Trachtenberg refers to writers such as Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman as “exceptional sitters” vis-àvis early photography: “In the case of these exceptional sitters (exceptional, at least, in that they left articulate records of their doubts), the daguerreotype even as a portrait likeness seemed to destabilise the idea of self and character which underlay American liberal individualism in the nineteenth century.”20 Furthermore, I link the dialectical (and symptomatic) tension between aesthetic metaphors of selfmaking and the unsettling metonymy of technology, evident in early photographic writings, to more recent efforts in the criticism of 20. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture, 9; Alan Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique,” 191. Smith uses the word self-representation to mean the representation and construction of self in photographic portrayal, most of which would be, technically speaking, biographical rather than autobiographical. In a similar vein, anticipating the objection that the photographic portrait (made by the photographer, not the subject) does not align with the autobiography made by the author, Rugg in Picturing Ourselves construes self-image, both in terms of photography and autobiographical writing, more broadly to include the representation and circulation of a self’s image, whether made by that self or not.

18

Mediating American Autobiography

autobiography to elucidate the mediational character of what theorist Leigh Gilmore calls “autobiographics.” In providing a theoretical grounding for a mutually reflexive and multi-stable relation between photography and autobiography, which I mark in my notion of photography’s autobiography, Chapter 1 unfolds the double stake of this project, to be developed further in the readings of the writers that follow. As Trachtenberg has argued and demonstrates so well in his work, the representational estrangement of photography invites the necessity for reading and interpretation, which is to say, rereading. At stake in my study is a reading of photography’s metonymic technology of reproduction, especially as it emerges in its first fifty years in America, that extends to a rereading of nineteenth-century American autobiographical expression as a process of mediation. As is the case with Gilmore’s Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, recent readings of autobiographical mediacy and metonymy have interrogated conventions of autobiographical self-representation with questions of gender and race. I conclude the chapter, and set up the readings to follow, by arguing that this critical remediation of autobiographical self-evidence has an antecedent in the photographic memory of the writers of this study. In Chapter 2, I turn to the author who, by many accounts, originates the nineteenth-century legacy of America’s autobiographical “representativeness,” giving it the considerable philosophical attention of his thought and even, in the title of his 1850 text Representative Men, the enduring coinage of a name. Emerson’s reflections on photography throughout his journal and other writings suggest a parallel with another peculiarity of his age: photography, specifically in the form of photographic portraiture, is part of the age’s interest in personal singularity, the same interest displayed throughout Emerson’s work. But there is a more complex speculation at issue, I argue, when Emerson implicates not just the photograph or the camera, but the dynamics of photographic reproducibility as a foundation for his own most lasting (and perhaps least understood) invention: the “representativeness” or “genius” that makes each of us potentially as original as a Shakespeare, which is to say (as Emerson does say in Representative Men) as reproducible as a daguerrean image. This visionary conception of history’s biographical (which is also to say, by extension for Emerson, autobiographical) genius, so familiar and crucial to Emerson’s work and thought, needs to be reread in terms of the material conditions of photography that Emerson identifies as the “strangeness” of the

Prologue

19

discovery. As a point of comparison and contrast with Emerson’s representation of genius as, and in terms of, the metonymic figure of photographic reproducibility, this chapter considers contemporaneous representations of photographic genius found in Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850) and Marcus Root’s The Camera and the Pencil (1864), both influential sites in which the strangeness of photography’s technological potential is evoked but, unlike in Emerson’s version, routinely effaced. From the universal circulations of Emerson’s photographic philosophy of history and thinking, we turn in Chapter 3 to the particularity of what I call Thoreau’s “photographic register.” In the same year as Emerson’s first reflections on photography (1841), Thoreau offers both an early observation of the daguerreotype’s historical emergence and an example of photography’s (already) figurative potential, referring to the medium as nature’s “amanuensis” and “something analogous” to writing. That particular journal passage has received some critical attention, but not the Thoreau who will later (in the 1850s) refer to the daguerreotype as an analogy for composing thought or who will, further still, employ the fundamental contingencies of photochemistry as a figure for the impossibility of accurately representing or “fixing” the true identity of nature. These contradictory views of the photographic trace, its simultaneous ability and failure to represent what it records, are pertinent to Thoreau’s equally contradictory interest in recording, always from the first-person point of view (as he tells us in Walden), nature’s autobiography even at the expense of his own individuality. In arguing that Thoreau conceives autobiographical recording at key locations in terms of photography and its developmental dynamics, this chapter brings out the neglected implications of photographic figures in his work and argues that the logic of photochemical reproducibility remains a key to Thoreau’s project of reproducing nature’s traces in his writing. Throughout the chapter, I juxtapose Thoreau’s conception of a photographic register of nature with Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), the first photographically illustrated book and an influential, discursive illustration of the “nature” of photography. Both Talbot and Thoreau evoke a complexity of photography’s metonymic power in the potential of the photographic trace, a trace of reproducibility that Talbot seeks consistently to contain and that Thoreau, interested in articulating those very traces, seeks to develop at every turn. Frederick Douglass’s engagements with photography may be the most neglected of any American writer’s of the period. To refer to a

20

Mediating American Autobiography

key occasion for such critical engagement to which I will give considerable attention in Chapter 4, Douglass not only observes extensively the significance of photography and its popular uses in a lecture first given in 1861, “Pictures and Progress,” he proposes a critical praxis for understanding the “process” of this medium and its relations to the complex issues of racial progress and representation that we— like Douglass’s audience in 1861—more familiarly, and perhaps too easily, associate with America’s most famous representative of slavery. Since he is lecturing from the abolitionist platform, the expectation is that Douglass will provide photographic “pictures of slavery,” to evoke the dead metaphor of immediacy and objectivity employed by abolitionist editors; Douglass argues, instead, quite to the surprise of his audience, that to understand slavery and the problem of America’s racial identity, we need to understand the process of photography itself. Applying that understanding to Douglass’s best-known representations of slavery and self, the autobiographical work of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and its revision, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), I argue that Douglass deploys a critical, visual literacy of slavery and race, one that he connects to the power and processes of photographic representation both in word and, quite literally, in the frontispiece images of the author prefacing the texts. The chapter situates Douglass’s recognition of this power of photographic literacy, by comparison, with the visual practices and polygenist theories of the American school of ethnology, most spectacularly in the example of the so-called slave daguerreotypes taken in 1850 in support of Louis Agassiz’s research. With this revisionary critique of ethnology’s representational practices in hand, I argue that Douglass develops in his autobiographical expression a textual form of what he will later name and celebrate as the “composite” character of American nationality. This revisionary composite of verbal and visual identity, I show, is at play in a particularly strange moment in My Bondage and My Freedom, one that has troubled critics in recent years: Douglass imagining his departed mother’s image in terms of the portrait of an ancient (and white male) Egyptian from an ethnological text. A photographic reconsideration of this and other passages in Douglass’s text, I assert, reveals the writer’s complex challenge to the representational injustice that underwrites the science of American ethnology and the slavery it supports.

Prologue

21

With Whitman’s declaration that in Leaves of Grass everything is “literally photographed,” and his extensive use of literal photographic portraits and reproductions of himself in the texts of his work, it would seem difficult to read too much into the significance of his speculative engagement with the medium. Chapter 5 plumbs what we can call, after Whitman himself, the photographic being of Whitman’s “book,” casting a more critical eye on the seemingly transparent, self-evident relation between an autobiographical text and a photograph of its author. Whitman’s use of photography throughout his career, both the verbal images we have already seen and the numerous visual images he had taken and incorporated into his texts, plays a crucial role in the conception of his work’s ongoing autobiographical nature. Focusing on and around his prose autobiography Specimen Days (1882), I argue that Whitman incorporates photography in his work toward a double end: to produce a faithful version of his history, but also, writing with an understanding of the capacious relation between the image and its potential reproducibility, to question the self-evident and singular identity conventionally claimed for the photograph. In this regard, Whitman’s scattered and fragmentary war memoranda reproduced in Specimen Days will be juxtaposed with Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866), by Alexander Gardner, a text that claims to offer, through the lens of photographic truth, what Whitman claims neither book nor photograph can offer, the real war. This chapter thus reiterates Whitman’s photographic confusion discussed above, but also delves into the way that the underlying source of that confusion, the contingencies of photographic reproduction, serves Whitman in his thoroughgoing metonymic approach to writing and in his desire to disseminate that writing and its contextural “tally-stamp” of its times to future, unknown readers. Whitman, we will see, refers to Specimen Days as “an immensely negative book.” The photographic memory he bequeaths to his readers, the more intensely metonymic sign of photography’s process of image reproduction, thus shifts those future readers into the role of future developers. In my Epilogue, I turn to the future developments of photographic memory now readable through the digital technology of the World Wide Web: specifically, the Whitman that is now available through the text and manuscript and image reproductions of the Library of Congress American Memory project and the digital

22

Mediating American Autobiography

Walt Whitman Archive. Though many have argued that digital imaging marks the death of photography, in its replacement of photochemistry with binary code, I conclude that the photographic (and metonymic) implications of a mediating American autobiography live on in the logic and contingent links of hypertext.

1

- Strange Developments Photography’s Autobiography

I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

As it happens, the first photographic portrait taken in America is a remarkable failure. Made by the Philadelphia manufacturer-turneddaguerreotypist Robert Cornelius in the fall of 1839, within months of the announcement in America of Daguerre’s discovery, the image reveals a creative tension between the new visual medium and, as I explain in this chapter, its autobiographical conception. The first portrait is remarkable, on the one hand, for its autobiographical subject matter: Cornelius himself appears in the image; America’s first portrait is a self-portrait—made, appropriately, in Philadelphia, the birthplace of America’s self-making. But the daguerreotype is equally remarkable, on the other hand, for two representational defects associated with the technical conditions of such photographic portrayal, noted by the photographer and still plain today: the image is evocatively blurred and the subject is off-center (see fig. 2). “You will notice the figure is not in the centre of the plate,” Cornelius remarked about his resulting image. “The reason for it is, I was alone, and ran in front of the camera after preparing it for the picture, and I could not know until the picture was taken that I was not in the centre. It required some

23

24

Mediating American Autobiography

Figure 2. Daguerreotype self-portrait made by Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia, 1839. (Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

minutes with iodine to produce the effect.”1 Cornelius’s “failure” to achieve a perfect or unblemished portrayal of himself results from the delay required for the exposure and development of the latent image; this problem of time in the making of the image informs his need both to jump in front of the camera and to capture his own image without being able to see the outcome. The portrait that results, a Cornelius still moving into the frame of the picture, staring into the camera as if wondering what is about to happen, fails only to hide the traces of the 1. Cornelius, quoted in William F. Stapp, Robert Cornelius: Portraits from the Dawn of Photography, 34. On the back of the daguerreotype, Cornelius has written that it is the “first light Picture ever taken.” Stapp argues that, although it is not the first photographic image, the “self-portrait represents the first true photographic portrait produced in America, and perhaps in the world,” 35.

Photography’s Autobiography

25

mediation that the image required; the temporal conditions of exposure and development are conditions for every photographic impression, but were particularly problematic in early daguerrean portraiture because of the lengthy exposure times required for it. In his experiment with early photography, Cornelius seizes upon the medium as a way to express character and identity, beginning (where else) with himself “alone.” Indeed, this is a beginning for the use of photography for portrayals of self that would take hold in America in the 1840s. But the expression of personal identity and character that we see in the Cornelius self-portrait is complicated by the characteristics of the medium—the mediating characteristics of time exposure and photochemical development. A photographer, whether working alone or not, can never see the final image he is in the process of making until after it is exposed and developed; this is the way the medium works. If the blur and off-center posing of the Cornelius self-portrait fails to imitate or represent the likeness as in a painted portrait, with an immediacy claimed by Samuel Morse (“Rembrandt perfected”) and others, it fails by accurately recording in the image the traces of the process of its making. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, in this invention of the first photographic portrait in America, Cornelius fails as a painter but succeeds as a chemist; the image is a faithful rendering of photography conceived as mediated immediacy. The traces of the reproduction in the image reveal an additional layer of meaning in the conventions of self-portrayal and self-imaging: photography itself, like the actual photographer in this case, is part of the representation. As Alan Trachtenberg concludes, the mystique of the Cornelius image serves as an object lesson for the early art of photographic mediation: “To our taste the image seems wonderfully expressive—not of a ‘character’, but of the medium itself, and of its ability to stop an action in its track, yet show it continuing as a blur, or trace of an event. . . . The image preserves all the original strangeness and difference of daguerreotypy. Such images defined exactly what had to be overcome.”2 In the terms I emphasize in this study, the notable strangeness of Cornelius’s image reveals the potential of photography as an autobiographical medium. In effect, Cornelius ends up with more autobiographical exposure in the resulting impression than he bargained for: the focus of the portrait is both the person represented and the technological means of its representation. Following William Crawford, a 2. Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 187, 188–89.

26

Mediating American Autobiography

historian of early photographic processes, we can refer to these traces of the medium as the “photographic syntax” of the image, indications of the technological conditions and limitations that inform the resulting image.3 In this chapter, I elaborate the conception and theory of photographic metonymy, or photonymy, as I have named it, by reframing such photographic syntax as a version of the medium’s autobiography. First, I pay attention to the way early discussions of photography turn crucially upon the language and logic of selfreflection and theorize such autobiographical implications for the photographic medium. Then I reverse the picture by exploring more recent interest in photography within the theory and criticism of autobiography. I suggest that the autobiographical implications within photography, strangely evident from the medium’s birth, have only begun to be recognized by literary critics. Beginning with Emerson in the next chapter, I contend that the writers of this study take up the position of Cornelius the photographer; going beyond merely observing the appearance of photography, they also experiment with the syntax and strangeness of this new medium in their writing. Two years after Cornelius experiments with his daguerrean portrait, Emerson highlights in his journal the same problem and potential of image latency and development that is crucial to photography: “The strangeness of the discovery is that Daguerre should have known that a picture was there when he could not see any” (JMN, 8:139–40). The strangeness and difference of photographic mediation, the autobiographical—and as Emerson reminds us, latent—traces of the medium’s own reproduction process, remain abiding concerns for photographic practitioners, certainly for those such as Marcus Root invested in reframing the technology as a matter of art and not chemistry. Those same differences of mediation and contingency reveal a creative potential when viewed in the context of autobiography, another self-representational medium gaining prominence in Emerson’s age.

Mass of Contradictions Any reading of early photography’s autobiography in America must reckon with Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most significant 3. William Crawford, The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes, 7.

Photography’s Autobiography

27

American writers on photography in the period of its emergence— Cornelius’s counterpart with a pen. In his first of three Atlantic Monthly articles reflecting on and speculating upon the social and imaginative currencies of the new medium of photography, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” published in 1859, Holmes coins the memorable phrase mirror with a memory. In one sense, perhaps its most familiar connotation, the phrase is a suggestive metaphor for what distinguishes the new method of photographic representation, announced just two decades earlier, from all other, previous types of representational media. Photography, like painting or writing, might well be viewed as a mirror of nature to the extent that it is what would have been called a representative art: like a mirror, it represents an image of its subject matter, seemingly giving us the subject in the image. But photography does something else, Holmes suggests, that even a mirror—let alone figurative mirrors like a painting or a sketch—can only fail to accomplish. Whereas every previous mirror, by nature, forgets its subject the moment it is removed from view, the photographic mirror remembers. “The man beholdeth himself in the glass and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget what manner of man he was.” Photographic technology, however, provides a memory for the mirror and its fleeting emanations, or, as Holmes cites the ancient notion of the philosopher Democritus, the “films” spontaneously shed by our bodies: “It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.”4 The “triumph,” on this view, regards the precision and accuracy of what we still think of as photographic truth. The photograph’s celebrated reality (its displacement of other representational types of “instability and unreality”) lies not merely in the existence of the realistic image; an image in a mirror is also “realistic,” and images formed by cameras existed long before photography. Rather, the photograph’s ability to hold the image “as a picture”—to translate reality directly into the spatial logic of a picture—constitutes the “triumph” Holmes has in mind. As I have suggested, this translation and fixing of the fleeting points up the most familiar connotation of the phrase mirror with a memory, since updated and transferred into the coinage of photographic 4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 738.

28

Mediating American Autobiography

memory: the emphasis, in both cases, is on the remarkable ability of photographic representation, be it a sheet of paper or the storage capacity of the mind, to fix and hold and provide future access to the images it reflects or conjures. Holmes’s “memory” further evokes and returns us to the conception of the medium as autobiographical: the fleeting illusions that are recorded by photography are not just any images, but the authentic, self-representative “forms, effigies, membranes, or films” shed by the “body” of the subject imaged. Photography’s invention reproduces a filmic autobiography that is already basic to the nature of things. Though the reference is to Democritus, Holmes also evokes the language of natural, unmediated self-representation that framed the discussions of early photography. Coinventor William Henry Fox Talbot conceived of his “curious self-representations” as a kind of sketching without the (human) mediation of the artist’s pencil, “pictures of nature’s painting.” This conception of immediacy reiterates the popular metaphor for the new medium that Talbot used in 1844 as the title of photography’s first book, The Pencil of Nature. Writing from France in 1839, Daguerre similarly framed this new method of photogenic representation in self-representative terms: “The DAGUERREOTYPE is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.”5 The new medium, it is asserted, reproduces nature’s autobiography. There is a further connotation that Holmes broaches in his discussion of this filmic and self-representative “triumph” of the new mirrormedium, a meaning decidedly less familiar to these conventions of photographic immediacy and precision. In fact, Holmes suggests, photography, with its representational perfection and precision of fixed images, has become so familiar already, “become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art.” Ironically, the “miraculous nature” of the “memory” within the photographic “mirror,” the inventive conditions that allow finally for the fixation of the images, stands already in danger of being forgotten a mere two decades after its invention. Photography is something new under the sun, but somehow equally as forgettable as the nature of the sun. What Holmes is getting at here is an other, more shadowy identity 5. Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 738 (Holmes’s emphasis); Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 77; Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” 13.

Photography’s Autobiography

29

of photography, its subtext; this other identity of the medium exists not only despite its popular reception and (by 1859) near ubiquity, but in fact as a paradoxical source of it. Thus Holmes introduces the phrase at hand: “But this other invention of the mirror with a memory, and especially that application of it which has given us the wonders of the stereoscope, is not so easily, completely, universally recognized in all the immensity of its applications and suggestions.” Other invention refers, most immediately, to the distinction Holmes makes of photography from three other significant inventions of the age, “the railroad-car, the telegraph, and the apple-flavored chloroform.”6 But other further suggests the significance of the distinction Holmes has in mind; the identity and character of this equally familiar invention is, at the same time, still unfamiliar to us in the matter of its “applications and suggestions.” Photography is, Holmes implies, not just another invention, but an invention characterized by otherness and the suggestion of the unforeseen. The invention and inventiveness of photography, despite all appearances and talk of precision (led by Holmes himself, following upon earlier observations of the medium), remains in what it suggests and has not yet fully conveyed. Holmes goes on to identify and elaborate upon this elusive, double character of the invention, what makes the various forms of photographs pervasive and yet, at the same time, what makes the invention somehow easily forgotten. The key reason Holmes observes is the dual character most basic to photography and, in my reading of the history of the medium, the identifying mark of photography symptomatically neglected. Photography is not only (in 1859) an ongoing process, still in a state of unfinished development in terms of its applications and uses. It is the invention of an ongoing process of development. In the pages that follow in his essay, Holmes provides an outline of the various processes used to make the three most popular forms or products of photography at the time, the daguerreotype, the photograph, and the stereograph. In doing so, he does more than introduce those technical aspects of photography most unfamiliar to the reader, all the “darkroom” work that goes on before and, as it were, behind the scenes of the finished photographic image. He evokes a fundamental, dynamic tension of photography enacted and partially effaced in each of its instances: between the photographic product, seemingly fixed and apparently, immediately given in the 6. Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 739 (Holmes’s emphasis).

30

Mediating American Autobiography

singular photograph, daguerreotype, stereograph, or any number of variously named “graphs” and “types” of nineteenth-century photography, and the process of photography, in which an image moves through mediating stages of exposure, development, reproduction, and circulation. This tension between “positive” or familiar (and seemingly immediate) image formed by way of its opposite, its “negative,” the displacement of the image through reproduction and mediation, constitutes the dual character of photography. Holmes’s writing, like that of Daguerre and Talbot before him, enacts the paradox of “unmediated mediation” that Nancy Armstrong argues is at play in the very pronouncements that emphasize the latest technological developments of the medium. “The medium that granted the wish for unmediated mediation would therefore prove a highly mediating one,” Armstrong points out. All this linguistic mediation of photography and its presumed immediacy—Talbot offers a “historical sketch” of a medium that, according to him, replaces the mediacy of artistic sketching—reiterates the very conception of photography as a medium. As Norman Bryson emphasizes, photography’s difference from painting, despite the claims to the contrary, results from the foregrounding, not the erasure, of its own status as a medium.7 Holmes locates this paradoxical identity of photography’s im/ mediacy in the temporal process of image development, where positives are made from negatives, natural pictures from a process of reversals. Holmes attempts to explain to the reader “this mass of contradictions” that informs the seemingly simple and self-evident photographic image: Just as we must have a mould before we can make a cast, we must get a negative or reversed picture on glass before we can get our positive or natural picture. . . . Everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image. This is a negative picture. Extremes meet. Every given point of the picture is as far from truth as a lie can be. But in traveling away from the pattern it has gone round a complete circle, and is at once as remote from Nature and as near it as possible. . . . This negative is now to give birth to a positive,—this mass of contradictions to assert its hidden truth in a 7. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, 14; Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, 89.

Photography’s Autobiography

31

perfect harmonious affirmation of the realities of Nature. Behold the process!8

In this movement between extremes, Holmes beholds the basic “process” of all photography, the photochemical processes of (latent) image formation and development that are crucial to the photographic as such—but largely forgotten in each instance of the photograph and removed from view. The very language of “negative” and “positive” marks and, to use the relevant figure of speech, reproduces the underlying tension. The photographic product, this unique fixture of perfection, as near to nature as possible, is developed through a process that at the same time makes it “remote from Nature” and “as wrong as it can be.” Since Holmes invokes the image of the circle, perhaps Emerson’s take on that favorite figure best applies here with reference to photography and its representational circulations: “The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations, which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand, is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only” (CWE, 2:186). Have we understood this characteristic, paradoxical “means” of the photographic medium and its “mass of contradictions”? We should elaborate the point made by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida: “It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, the Albertian perspective, and the optic of the camera obscura). I say: no, it was the chemists.” Barthes means the discovery of photochemistry (not the camera, which was invented centuries before), “the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light,” the discovery that informs the strange invention of photographic reproduction. “A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” Barthes cites Susan Sontag; both are heavily cited in recent theories of photographic representation and its ontology. Such readers emphasize, with varying degrees of writerly flourish (“umbilical cord,” “skin,” “footprints”), a fundamentally metonymic condition of photography. The identity represented in 8. Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 741.

32

Mediating American Autobiography

(and through) the photochemical grains of an image is quite literally, not just metaphorically, part of the very subject to which the image refers. Rosalind Krauss thus identifies this metonymic and (borrowing a related semiotic term from the logician C. S. Peirce) indexical status as key to the celebrated uniqueness of the photographic image and its “special connection to reality”: it is “an imprint or transfer off the real . . . a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints.”9 Krauss and Barthes and other modern interrogators of photography have joined Holmes in identifying the importance of metonymy and locating it in the workings of photography’s process—the very same “chemical and physical process” of nature’s reproduction to which Daguerre, ironically, gives his (not nature’s) name. I coin the word photonymy to suggest this characteristic of photographic metonymy, and do so for several reasons. Foremost, I understand that the photograph’s metonymy, its special connection and contiguity with its subject, is fundamental to the process and indeed, to the very conception of photography. I mean by this that the metonymic process of imprinting the real is the very “fingerprint” of photography, not just (in the eyes of this or that theorist) one way to describe a photograph. “In short,” explains Barthes of the photograph’s unique representational ontology, “the referent adheres.”10 And so, too, in photographic writings and conceptions of the medium does the understanding of metonymic reference adhere. I would argue that all of the various names that emerged in the nineteenth century to label the variety of photochemical processes being discovered (including photography, the name that sticks) refer to this fundamentally metonymic identity of this representational (reproduction) process. Such names are not merely metaphorical and proprietary labels added to a given photographic discovery: photography, daguerreotypy, talbotypy, and so on. The names also reflect and continuously belie the mediating conditions of the various discoveries, despite the repeated claims for immediacy. Doubly named, light and writing, nature and culture, the very names of the photographic processes become metonyms for an underlying, informing process of 9. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–81; Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 110. 10. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.

Photography’s Autobiography

33

mediation. The names locate and belie photography’s popular conception as a form of mediated immediacy. Consider this telling moment from the emergence of photography that speaks to the significant character of the medium’s naming and the naming’s reflection of the medium. Talbot, writing in 1839 to the scientist and fellow photographic inventor Sir John Herschel, the man who would in fact go on to coin the term photography as well as negative and positive, suggests a name for the as-yet-unnamed process of picture making that Herschel is developing. This process is comparable to the process Talbot is himself experimenting with and names calotypy. “As your new process involves a very remarkable peculiarity, viz. the change from negative to positive of the same photograph, I should wish the name given to it to be one allusive to that fact, and if you are not yet decided upon your nomenclature I would suggest that the above peculiarity might be concisely and clearly expressed by the name of Amphitype.” The now-forgotten nomenclature that Talbot suggests, amphitype, only more literally—and more metonymically, I would say—reminds us of the “mass of contradictions” that Holmes also beholds in the process. Recalling Judith Roof’s assertion that photographic discourse repeatedly “remetaphorizes” the various revelations of photography’s “errant metonymy,” its contingencies as a process of reproduction, we can see that Talbot’s suggested name for this new process accurately identifies the process and its contingencies, its dualities. In doing so, Talbot’s name is faithful to the medium’s metonymic syntax, but fails as metaphor.11 Thus amphitype does not last as a name for photography, but the “remarkable peculiarity” of the photographic process Talbot identifies through that name does remain. With photonymy I mean also to reinvoke this recognition of strangeness that attends the emergence of photographic development and its peculiar movement “from negative to positive of the same photograph.” I do so to emphasize that, however much we might associate such versions of photographic uncanniness largely with post-structural emanations of textual experience, such as the kind found in Barthes (“the Photograph is the advent of myself as other,” he declares), the origins of such peculiarities are more fundamental to the very conception of the medium in the nineteenth century.12 Holmes, like Talbot before him and Barthes after 11. Talbot, quoted in Larry Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography, 133; Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 41. 12. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12.

34

Mediating American Autobiography

him, refers his readers to the strangeness of photographic development and the uneasy metaphysics that results from photography’s contiguous relation to the real. In 1861, in “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” Holmes considers the curious precision in the “instantaneous” photograph of a Broadway street scene. The reflection on the photograph’s miraculous metonymy (“every foot is caught in its movement with such suddenness”) yields to a recognition of its source (the development of a negative impression) and a larger, stranger implication: What a fearfully suggestive picture! It is a leaf torn from the book of God’s recording angel. What if the sky is one great concave mirror, which reflects the picture of all our doings, and photographs every act on which it looks upon dead and living surfaces, so that to celestial eyes the stones on which we tread are written with our deed, and the leaves of the forest are but undeveloped negatives where our summers stand self-recorded for transfer into the imperishable record? And what a metaphysical puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! Is motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this picture of universal movement.13

Holmes’s uncanny anticipation of film’s paradox—movement through the succession of stills—emerges from the implication of “undeveloped negatives.” What if, instead of taking photographs of subjects, we are reproducing a photography that is already there in the subject, in nature? This deeper implication of photographic metonymy suggests a memory (of mediation, of process, of development) that remains in the mirroring, adhering to the photograph like light to the photochemical grains. If we have forgotten this memory, it is because we have been invited to consider photography almost exclusively in terms of the finished photograph and to neglect the process that reproduces the composition of light and grains. Beginning in 1888, George Eastman’s marketing of the Kodak camera did more than introduce a camera small enough for snapshots and handheld photography, the kind of image reproduction still with us today. In its creation of the photofinishing industry, Eastman-Kodak invented the amateur photographer by separating the taking of photographs from the photographic process, by removing the messy and technical and 13. Holmes, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture: With a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic,” 18.

Photography’s Autobiography

35

fairly dangerous darkroom work of photochemical development from the amateur’s view. Just push the button, the advertising slogan would assert to this new photographer, we do all the rest.14 Before Kodak and its removal of “all the rest,” the experience of photography depended more thoroughly on the processes of photographic reproduction. Photography in the first fifty years of its existence, whatever the name that attaches to the process, meant, primarily, the recording and development of images by means of photochemistry. As John Towler declares in his 1864 history and field guide to the medium, The Silver Sunbeam, “The art of Photography comprehends all the operations of taking a picture on a sensitive surface by means of light and chemical reagents.” For Towler, the essence of photography is the chemistry and the materials’ responses to light, a point the book reinforces in its overwhelming focus (for the pre-Kodak photographer) on the various chemical ingredients and developers required for the variety of photographic processes then current.15 Holmes reveals, perhaps uneasily, that this chemistry, this mechanical and natural means of recording and reproducing an image, is the source of its celebrated metonymy. We also see through this metonymy the condition for the photograph’s contradictions and uncanniness. I agree with Carol Armstrong, who reads the “fundamental indexicality” of the photographic image as “peculiarly paradoxical monuments” and “traces in eroding sand.” Suggesting alternately presence and absence (and presence in absence), the doubleness of the word trace conveys the paradox Armstrong has in mind and locates in the origins of the medium. The celebrated permanence of any photographic image, by its very nature, is purchased through the very means of its contingency and impermanence. “There was, I believe, a certain nineteenth-century sensitivity to that fact,” Armstrong argues, “not only to the alchemical arising of the photographic image . . . but also to its fundamental instability, its fragility, its fading and disappearance, and the potentiality of its ghostly return to invisibility—and to the chemical fact that the photograph was (and is) more impermanent by nature than other images, no matter the efforts 14. On the significance of Kodak, see Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, and Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, 31–32. On the dangers of photochemistry and the darkroom, see Bill Jay, Cyanide and Spirits: An Inside-Out View of Early Photography. 15. John Towler, The Silver Sunbeam: A Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing, 23.

36

Mediating American Autobiography

to make it otherwise.”16 The conditions of photochemistry, in essence, the decomposition of chemical agents and material by means of exposure to light, inform the composition of the photograph. The same light and chemistry needed to record and then develop a photographic impression can also destroy it; by the same logic and process, the very photochemistry that makes the photographic image seem unique and singular also yields its multiplicity. Holmes’s “metaphysical puzzle” brings us to the verge of this recognition. I read in his imaginative discussions and explorations of the medium an understanding of the implications of photographic metonymy that invokes and exceeds the more popular accounts of photography and its immediacy, its Rembrandtian perfection. Holmes takes us into the darkroom, as it were, the darkroom of photographic reproduction that Kodak would later remove from our view. “Such a ghost we hold imprisoned in the shield we have just brought from the camera,” Holmes remarks in the third of his articles, “Doings of the Sunbeam”: “No eye, no microscope, can detect a trace of change in the white film that is spread over it. And yet there is a potential image in it,—a latent soul, which will presently appear before its judge.” Alan Trachtenberg is correct to consider Holmes among the important American writers who take up the idea of photography and offer, through their imaginative reflections on the new medium, occasion for doubt and speculation as much as celebration. Addressing the “uncanny presence” and potential of early photography to produce “images that were strange and estranging,” Trachtenberg reminds us that photography’s emergence as a medium of representation serves both to reinforce and to unsettle conventions of individuality and identity, conceptions of autobiographical expression, through its proliferation of images. “Soon after its appearance photography became a potent source in modern culture for making the conventional idea of the continuous, coherent ‘self’ plausible, but in its most primitive moments, when Daguerre and others doubted that the medium would ever be suited to portraiture, it displayed dangerous tendencies to subvert that same idea.”17 This danger, Trachtenberg argues, emerges when the photographic expression of a given subject flickers 16. Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875, 16. 17. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 5; Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 188.

Photography’s Autobiography

37

from the metaphorical notion of character (as in the “expression of character” familiar to portraiture) to the representational character “of the medium itself,” the metonymical characteristics of the impression. In the version of the primitive moment put forth by Holmes, the danger is latent in the natural and autobiographical potential of the photographic, the very source of its impressions: undeveloped negatives. I should clarify at this point that Daguerre’s process of image reproduction is different from the negative–positive process of photography that Talbot and Herschel developed, the photographic process that would largely replace the daguerreotype in America by the 1860s. Holmes clearly marks this difference in “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” distinguishing the older chemical process of using iodine to develop a photosensitive, daguerreotype plate (a “silverplated sheet of copper”) from the process of producing a photograph by first making a photographic negative (on glass, in the newer collodion process) from which the positive is then printed. With the daguerreotype, the same photosensitive plate that receives the impressions from the light exposure becomes, after development, framed as the picture. There is no separate negative; the negative adjoins the positive in the technically “one-of-a-kind” image. To my mind, this very collapsing of negative and positive, this technical difference from other kinds of photography, further highlights the conditions of photographic metonymy and its potential revelation. The negative adheres visibly to the positive, the positive remains physically contingent upon its negative. Viewing a daguerreotype, one holds both the product and the traces of the process through which the image emerged. I agree with Trachtenberg, who thus locates the uncanny characteristic of the daguerrean form of photography not only in the precision of its images but also in the mediation it reveals, potentially, in every viewing. Describing the tendency for the daguerrean image to flicker between positive likeness and negative reversal, the “image’s capacity to negate itself when viewed in another light at another angle,” Trachtenberg thus adds the material instability of the daguerreotype to the larger “metaphysical puzzle” that Holmes observes.18 Though not reproduced from a negative in the way a photograph is made, the unique 18. Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 740; Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 176. In my understanding of the daguerreotype process, both its differences from and connections to what we call photography, I am also informed by Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America.

38

Mediating American Autobiography

daguerrean image reveals photochemical characteristics it shares with every other photographic image. In his verbal depictions of the new medium, Holmes also reveals this potential of the process and its metonymies, adhering to and blurring, if not haunting, the conventions of photographic precision and singularity. We might say that Holmes reveals these “dangerous tendencies” of daguerrean portraiture and other “negative” effects of photographic development much as the daguerrean image does: they are always partially visible in the views. Consider this telling moment from “Doings of the Sunbeam.” Holmes takes his readers on a tour of one of the leading photographic establishments in the country, the E. & H. T. Anthony factory and studio on Broadway. Holmes offers an extensive description of the processing of photographic film and prints that goes on behind the scenes of the photographic studio. In this view of the subdivision of photographic labor, Holmes anticipates how the later photofinishing industry would separate the photograph from its process. “The workmen in large establishments, where labor is greatly subdivided, become wonderfully adroit in doing a fraction of something,” he points out. “A young person who mounts photographs on cards all day long confessed to having never, or almost never, seen a negative developed, though standing at the time within a few feet of the dark closet where the process was going on all day long.”19 While Holmes does much in these essays to reveal this “process” to his readers, this observation reflects a tendency to distance the photographic product from its informing process, a tendency Holmes himself shares in the various metaphors he uses to guide us through this dark realm of latent souls and Stygian streams. In the fifty years before Kodak, the most vigorous and successful effort made to hide the process going on behind photographic representation must surely have been that of Marcus Root, the highly regarded Philadelphia photographer and author of the influential handbook for photographers, The Camera and the Pencil (1864). Unlike The Silver Sunbeam, published by Towler in the same year, Root’s “theoretical and practical treatise” provides minimal emphasis on the workings of photography as a photochemical process. Root wants 19. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 2. Stuart Ewen cites this same passage in All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, where he remarks, “Everything about the look of the product was at odds with the material process of its production” (40).

Photography’s Autobiography

39

photography—he prefers the name heliography—to be accepted as a fine art, to be an invention of the painters and not the chemists. All that Root writes goes toward measuring the new medium’s capability as an art (comparable to painting) and showing the potential heliographic artist (the name suggesting better than photography a lineage from Apollo) how he must conduct himself as an artist. Motivated by this desire for an artistic photographic product, Root makes throughout his text every attempt to occlude the metonymy of photographic representation, to hide the process and its “mechanical” (that is, nonartistic) mediations. These efforts include the explicit and practical advice Root gives for setting up a portrait studio. To make the studio experience pleasant for the sitter, Root advises the artist to, quite literally, disguise all signs and smells of the photographic process. Thus, “special care should be taken that the sitting-room be appropriately and neatly fitted up . . . that all things may be pleasant to the eye of the next sitter, and calculated to awaken agreeable feelings.” Root continues: “The same good order should prevail throughout the chemical room, which should be so arranged, as to prevent all fumes of chemicals from reaching and annoying visitors to the apartments.”20 For Root, the mark of photographic artistry is for the sitter never to have seen (or smelled) a negative developed, though standing within a few feet of where the process goes on all the time. Root’s greatest calculation for the awakening of photography’s artistic feelings comes in the metaphorics of his language. Most prominently with his use of the word expression, Root seeks to distinguish, sometimes uneasily, the artistic potential of photography from the “mere mechanics” of making prints. The problem is that such mechanics, such contingencies of process, are inherent to photography: “In the preparing of the impressible surfaces, and other processes chemical or manual, the dexterous-handed mechanic may transcend the artist.” To counter this danger of metonymy, this concern for the hand of the artist revealing itself in the medium, Root invokes the aesthetic metaphor of a portrait’s expression. “But when we come to the expression—that something which reveals the soul of the sitter, the individuality which differences him from all beings else—we find an antagonism between the two classes [artists and mechanics]. . . . As the mechanic can but put together dead materials, his work must needs be lifeless. The artist, on the contrary, creates, and into his work he 20. Marcus Root, The Camera and the Pencil; or, The Heliographic Art, 101.

40

Mediating American Autobiography

‘breathes the breath of life,’ and it ‘becomes a living soul.’” The metaphors are also Romantic; in the next chapter, we will return to Root to consider how Emerson’s notion of genius, informed by photography, might compare to Root’s conception here of the photographer’s artistic genius. For now, let me suggest that Root’s language of “expression,” informed by Romanticism and nineteenth-century discourses on painting and portraiture, is a classic case of the remetaphorizing of photographic metonymy. The matter of photographic impressions, the characteristics of the process and its mediations, is shifted onto a focus on the expression of the character in the photograph. “In fine,” Root argues in his introduction, “the true heliographer, like the true artist in whatever sphere, should be an intermedium, through which the light of the Divine should pass unmodified and pure, producing imprints as distinctly and delicately limned, as are the images of natural objects on the surface of a crystal pool.”21 Notice the strange and contradictory connotations of Root’s word intermedium. In order to be an art, photography must offer unmediated mediation. In these verbal reflections on early photography, Root and Holmes reveal the crucial power (and problem) that photographic metonymy represents for the new medium. Root quite rigorously and Holmes more ambivalently display in their work the conventionalizing of photographic memory. The key to these conventions, I have argued, is the shift from the metonymies of photographic process to the metaphors of photographic product, metaphors that serve broadly in a “popular ideology of individualism,” be they individual Romantic artist or illustrious American.22 Root suggests that the artistry of the photographer is alive, while the mechanics and chemistry of the process are dead. In fact, in order to make that very assertion, Root turns the material metonymies of photographic mediation, photography’s autobiographical implications, into the dead metaphor of “character” and “expression.” Root’s language would erase the metonymy of photography much as the photographer should hide the chemistry of his process. I understand that in the engagement of photography we find in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman, a more concerted interest in these autobiographical characteristics of the medium emerges and informs the composition of autobiography.

21. Ibid., 32 (Root’s emphasis), xvi. 22. Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 191.

Photography’s Autobiography

41

Autobiography’s Nation To understand how the autobiographical implications of photography matter to literary writers, we need to consider the conditions of photographic metonymy from its reverse angle: the photographic implications of autobiography. What are the conditions of autobiography in America, using this term in its more familiar, generic sense, as in the cultural or literary history of self-representation in America? What light does photography shed on the creative potential of this other autobiographical medium? On the cover of Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States (1997), by Vincent Virga, we find perhaps the beginnings of an answer to these questions in the portrait image that is appropriately, but also provocatively, representative of the subject matter of the book. The image is none other than a reproduction of the daguerreotype self-portrait made by Robert Cornelius in 1839. The appropriateness of this image for Eyes of the Nation may be self-evident to all—to all of its American readers, at any rate. Eyes of the Nation is a collection of “the nation’s memory,” as Librarian of Congress James H. Billington asserts in the preface; the book reproduces the visible records of American history and memory preserved in the Library of Congress, “more than five hundred images of the American past—images created by those who helped build it.”23 The Cornelius self-portrait, then, is not only a representation from the dawn of photography in America, it is representative of the crucial role such images play in the development and the creating, not just the recording, of America’s political and cultural history. It is a reflexive image of “American memory,” to invoke the title of the Library of Congress’s digital archive to which Eyes of the Nation is linked: an image, in part, about the dawning and development of America through such memorial processes of image making, photography most prolifically. In other words, the Cornelius reproduction is representative of two kinds of images at once. It is a photographic image that indicates the significant role that photography would play in “American memory” from its introduction. It would be as difficult, perhaps, to think of an America without its photographic record as it would be to have such 23. James H. Billington, preface to Vincent Virga, Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States, xii. The Cornelius portrait is on the cover of the original hardback edition.

42

Mediating American Autobiography

a visual history or digital archive without the history of photography, both of which still rely (like most texts and archives) on the photographic reproducibility of images, albeit now in digital form. Wright Morris, twentieth-century American photographer and writer, has just this essential link between photography and America in mind when he maintains, “From their inception, photographs have lent themselves to the grain of American experience.” Morris continues in Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory by connecting this “American grain” of photography to the nation’s writing: American writers, in particular, have been challenged and sharpened by them. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane had eyes for detail that we would call photographic. The camera eye came to them as naturally as the new vernacular language. The vernacular, indeed, finds its consummation in photographs. If there is a cunning passage in photographic history, it lies in the fact that an American was not the first to conceive it.

Photography, in this light, is no small piece of the nation’s memory or its “vernacular” history. As with the American writing that (so Morris insists) is crucially informed by photographic detail, it is hard to imagine an American vernacular without America’s photographic memory. If photography had not already been invented in Europe, Morris implies, America—for the sake of its own existence—would have had to invent it. He goes so far as to say, “Photography, indeed, is such an American institution that it is difficult to believe we did not invent it.”24 This belief, of course, is wishful thinking. We have already seen that the photographic self-portrait Cornelius invented in Philadelphia was part of a larger, transatlantic conception and reception of the medium. Cornelius is linked in his discovery (at the very least) to experiments made by Daguerre in France and by Talbot and Herschel in England. Morris’s belief as to why photography should have been invented by an American, however, is instructive. In essence, the reason is that photography, in its very nature, is part and parcel of that other American institution central to the nation’s self-consciousness (the other American legacy of which the Cornelius image is representative): America’s vernacular of self-representation. Though I intend 24. Wright Morris, Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory, 13, 62.

Photography’s Autobiography

43

to distinguish my historical understanding of early photography from Morris’s version of American exceptionalism, I am also intrigued by how tightly he joins the significance of the photograph in American culture to the interest of autobiography in American literature. “Twain’s preference for real life—Life on the Mississippi—is the preference Thoreau felt for facts, the facts of nature, and Whitman’s preference for the human-made artifact. Something real. Something the hand, as well as the mind, could grasp. Carried to its conclusion this preference begins and ends right where we find it—in autobiography.”25 Morris locates in the hand-grasping words of a Thoreau and a Whitman (without any specific reference to their interest in photography, it should be noted) an autobiographical origin and ending for American photography. The view that holds photography to be crucially representative of, and even original to, America’s autobiographical memory may be symptomatic of an exceptionalism it shares with the study of American autobiography. Like the photographic medium, the literary form of self-representation has been viewed as representative in American cultural and literary history, even to the point of being uniquely representative of America. America, some might say, is autobiography’s nation—it is a wonder that, like photography, the genre is not an American invention. A similar notion of America’s autobiographical representativeness informing Morris’s observations on photography can be found in the traditional literary criticism of the genre and more recently in challenges to that tradition. In Robert Sayre’s essay “Autobiography and the Making of America,” an influential text by one of the pioneers of American autobiographical criticism, we find an eloquent expression of that tradition. Autobiography, Sayre understands, is a “characteristic form of American expression” to the extent that the genre represents and expresses the very character of America itself. In other words, America shares a crucial, not just topical or thematic, identity with the autobiographies that represent it. “Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression. Commencing before the Revolution and continuing into our own time, America and autobiography have been peculiarly linked.”26 Sayre recognizes that peculiarity foremost in a telling coincidence in American literary history: many of its classics are either autobiographies (such as Franklin’s 25. Ibid., 49–50 (Morris’s emphases). 26. Robert F. Sayre, “Autobiography and the Making of America,” 146, 147.

44

Mediating American Autobiography

“Memoirs” or Thoreau’s Walden) or autobiographical in nature (such as Emerson’s essays or the poetry of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass). This coincidence might be further defined and located within the critical period named the American Renaissance. As I suggest in the Prologue, Matthiessen’s notion of “art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman” is fundamentally autobiographical; the word expression suggests the consciousness of self-reflection, a representativeness informing the art. “For the full expression of such an age,” Matthiessen understands the significance of Emerson’s theory of expression, “what was needed most was a great reflective poet.”27 It is no mere coincidence, then, that three of Matthiessen’s central writers in American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—are figures to whom readers of American literature and culture turn as representatives of America’s classic literature and its prominent, cultural interest in autobiography. It would seem, rather, quite to the purpose of Matthiessen’s founding claims of an “American Renaissance” that his “one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” (the period 1850–1855, which he names “the age of Emerson and Whitman”) begins with Emerson’s essays in biography, Representative Men. In fact, as Holmes would suggest in his biography of Emerson, invoking another version of his own “mirror with a memory” metaphor, Representative Men is more autobiography than anything else: “Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally, unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize.”28 Emerson’s dynamic notion of the representative genius stands not only as an epigraph to Matthiessen’s book, but as its implicit theme; the authors in Matthiessen’s study assume the position of American literature’s “representative men.” (It is worth noting that, like Matthiessen’s word renaissance, Emerson’s representatives are all borrowed from Europe; as with photography, the invention of a uniquely American expression is complicated by prior discoveries.) This same “moment of expression” concludes with the publication of Thoreau’s Walden in 1854 and Whitman’s “reproduction of the author,” Leaves of Grass, in 1855. We can now add to this complicated re/birth of America’s literary identity, as more critics have done since the 1970s, Frederick Douglass and his My Bondage and My Freedom, also published in 1855. 27. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 6. 28. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 197.

Photography’s Autobiography

45

With a nod back to the iconic version of self-portraiture produced by Robert Cornelius, we might more accurately refer to these representative autobiographers as “metonymic men.” Recall that the uncanny, double presence in Cornelius’s daguerrean portrait offers both an expression of a conventional self-image and, in its lurking impression, the shifting of such character onto the characteristics of the medium. In a similar manner, we can and should consider the representational characteristics informing the received character of representative expression. As with the daguerrean image, we need to think more critically—and more reflexively—about the characteristic conditions of autobiography in which American types are made and mediated. This kind of refocusing on autobiographical mediation began to emerge in the representational critique of the conventions (and metaphors) of autobiography’s self-evidence. As Thomas Couser argues in Altered Egos, tracing out some of the (by now familiar) post-structural challenges to traditional notions of autobiography, at issue for reconsideration is the literary and textual character of the genre and the problem such textuality suggests for the presumption of autobiographical authority. Couser identifies, in particular, two linked, naive assumptions under revision. “The first of these assumptions is that autobiography is nonfictional, since it records the experience of an historical person, not an invented ‘character.’ The second assumption is that the author is present in the text, that a pre-existent unique personality can be conveyed through—or despite—literary mediation.”29 Autobiography’s uniquely referential nature, its ability to offer direct contact with American experience and American character, is conveyed through its reproduction of that experience and character. Couser incisively points us to the key tension at issue: autobiography’s presumed immediacy and presentation of “unique personality” is challenged by the representational work the genre relies on, the fact that it is “conveyed through—or despite—literary mediation.” We should already hear echoes of the critical tradition of photographic identity and its symptomatic metonymy explored above; autobiography offers the same potential and problem of unmediated mediation. The most prominent critical challenges to autobiography, continued to this day, have insistently reconsidered the genre as a form— despite its presumed, referential immediacy—of literary mediation. On this reading, the metaphorical “character” that autobiography is 29. Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography, 15.

46

Mediating American Autobiography

said to express is returned to the characteristics and rhetorical workings of metaphor, metonymy, and other figures of textual representation. Autobiography, in other words, does not present a life so much as represent a “life.” In the extreme of this view, most frequently associated with the deconstructive criticism of Paul de Man, autobiography’s unique form of self-evidence and self-reflection is rethought as uniquely rhetorical, which is to say, vertiginously reflexive (a favored trope of de Man’s), representative of nothing more than its own textual construction and literary mediation. “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” de Man asserts in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” his much-cited essay first published in 1979, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”30 The question, to be sure, is rhetorical; as de Man goes on to argue with a precision that borders on perversion, the only life portrayed or preserved in autobiography is the life of the writing (“whatever the writer does”), a writing, moreover, that ironically serves to deprive the life of the author or the otherwise named subject of the text. The “face” represented in an autobiographical text, de Man argues, is the rhetorical face—the making, the prosopopeia: giving a face to an absent entity—that is the basis of all language and writing. “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament,” de Man pronounces famously in the conclusion of his essay, “and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a de-facement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.” Such “de-facement” directly challenges the familiar metaphorical veils and figures most often applied to autobiography: autobiography as portraying or mirroring the very face and character, the inimitable image of the author; as James Olney puts it in the title of his influential study, autobiography is “metaphors of self.” Holmes’s related metaphor for photography’s complex identity perhaps best suggests the tension operative here, that autobiography’s mimetic mirror is informed and unsettled by the memory of its own figurative and technological makeup. If the various and familiar 30. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 69 (de Man’s emphasis).

Photography’s Autobiography

47

metaphors of autobiographical mirroring (think of Rousseau) suggest one extreme of autobiographical presence, we might think of de Man’s position as its polar opposite: autobiography portrays the presence of a text’s constitutive absence—its “own impossibility of coming into being”; it mirrors nothing but its own reflexivity, memory en abyme.31 More recently, there has been considerable work pursued in autobiographical criticism and theory that has sought, if nothing else, a middle ground for those polarities. That middle ground emphasizes the characteristic of autobiography’s textual mediation, reading it not simply as the problem of the genre, its point of deconstruction to be avoided or asserted at all costs, but the problematic that goes hand in hand with its representational potential. Paul John Eakin, perhaps first among these critics, has argued consistently against the reading that autobiography must be viewed in mutually exclusive terms—either as self-presence or representational absence, either referential or rhetorical, mirror representation or mere representation. Instead, Eakin understands that autobiography’s paradoxical combination of self and text can re-present authentically a self that is already mediated. “When it comes to self, then,” Eakin argues in Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, “autobiography is doubly structured, doubly mediated, a textual metaphor for what is already a metaphor for the subjective reality of consciousness.” For Eakin, the textual construction and “technical demands of self-portraiture,” as de Man puts it, can represent the self in the very process of mediating it, because the “self” is already “relational,” as Eakin argues in his most recent work, already a composite of something material and discursive, describing the “‘self’ less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process, a process I have sought to capture in the phrase making selves.” Following Eakin and this understanding of mediation, Susanna Egan similarly asserts that autobiography’s potential for selfreflection lies between the extremes of total (mimetic) consciousness and total (deconstructive) failure. Instead, Egan proposes something of a refracted-mirror metaphor of autobiography in Mirror Talk, an understanding in which the text is both reflective and constructive of the self: “Autobiographies, in other words, do not reflect 31. De Man, “Autobiography,” 81, 71; James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography.

48

Mediating American Autobiography

life so much as they reflect (upon) their own processes of making meaning out of life.”32 Both Eakin’s and Egan’s foregrounding of “process” suggests the crucial shift their readings of the genre represent. We shift from thinking of autobiography as a product of representation to reading autobiography as a process of mediation. The tones of photographic metonymy and its implications of mediation, as it turns out, are no mere echoes here. More recent post-structural challenges to the claims of autobiographical reflection have given some attention to visual analogues for autobiographical composition, most notably, photography. Eakin begins Touching the World with a reading of how Roland Barthes mediates his late-in-life conversion to autobiographical referentiality by way of his understanding of photography’s nonmetaphorical representational status, which informs the theorist’s final book, Camera Lucida. Thus a theory that highlights, as I have shown, photographic metonymy can also be a justification for autobiography’s complex status as an emanation of its referent. In a critical study that builds upon such reflections of photography in the criticism of autobiography, Linda Haverty Rugg suggests that Barthes’s version of the photographic hedge against the full deconstruction of autobiographical presence may well be implied in a curious assertion made in de Man’s essay “Autobiography as De-Facement.” “Both Roland Barthes and Paul de Man, who profess disbelief in the referential power of language, seem to become remarkably gullible when it comes to photographs,” Rugg asserts. “It is, interestingly enough, at the moment when he is most suspicious of narrative that de Man lets photography in through the back door: ‘Are we so certain,’ he protests, ‘that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends upon its subject?’”33 Focusing primarily on the implications that arise when an autobiographer inserts photographs into his or her text, Rugg uses photography to open further the back door of autobiography’s representational identity and its apparent return from the dead. My reading follows Rugg— and those she relies upon, such as Eakin and Barthes—through that door. I join Rugg in understanding that autobiography shares with 32. Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, 102; Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, x; Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography, 8. 33. Rugg, Picturing Ourselves, 11.

Photography’s Autobiography

49

photography a referential “double consciousness,” a paradox of identity wrapped up in otherness. “Photographs in autobiographies produce visibly the ‘otheredness’ always implicit in autobiographical discourse,” Rugg notes. Both photography and autobiography, in other words, are “media for constructing selfhood.” Photography thus reveals a paradox of autobiographical mediation that it (already) shares with the genre: autobiography’s seemingly transparent self-evidence is thoroughly mediated. We are reminded that autobiography is also generated from the “syntax” of its informing, technological conditions. Focusing as I do on a more defined period and picture of photographic mediation that emerges in the first fifty years of photography in American culture, I place more emphasis on the concept of mediation than does Rugg. Specifically, in the emphasis I give to the contingencies of photographic mediation that I have named photonymy, I would argue that Rugg’s insightful analysis of how photography becomes a complex “metaphor” for autobiographical memory for “authors living during the photographic era” must be further developed in terms of autobiographical metonymy.34 In Autobiographics, Leigh Gilmore elaborates upon this understanding of autobiography as a process of mediation and highlights the implications of metonymy that other revisions of autobiographical representation have drawn upon, though by other names. I should be clear that Gilmore, unlike Rugg, does not bring photography into her theory of autobiographical technology, what she calls a “feminist theory of autobiographical production”; but perhaps it is also clear by now that, given the autobiographical (read: metonymic) identity of photography, she does not need to. “The identity an autobiography inscribes is something more like a process,” Gilmore argues; “its representation is its construction”—“a discursive process rather than an essential mirroring.” Gilmore thus wants to focus on reading what she suggestively calls “autobiographics” rather than, as is the case with traditional criticism of the genre, “autobiographies”—not fixed representations of authors, but “those changing elements of the contradictory discourses and practices of truth and identity which represent the subject of autobiography.”35 At issue in Gilmore’s focus is an attention to the representational processes and practices of autobiography, 34. Ibid., 17, 13, 23. 35. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation, x, 84–85, 13.

50

Mediating American Autobiography

which are generally occluded in readings of the genre’s peculiar reflection of American character. What is significant, Gilmore reminds us, is what autobiographical discourse does in shaping the very notions of autobiography and identity that its texts represent. Like Eakin’s focus on the “doubly mediated” self of autobiography, or Egan’s meditation on the “mirror talk” that both reflects and constructs its subject, Gilmore’s “autobiographics” indicates a prevalent way in which autobiography has come to be reread in criticism and theory. This greater attention given to autobiography as a thoroughgoing medium and process of representation, despite its apparent referential immediacy and “direct contact with experience,” suggests a shift in the critical focus of the genre from what to how an autobiography pictures its subject. For Gilmore, a version of the “errant metonymy” that Judith Roof identifies in photographic technology is also symptomatic in the discourse of autobiography and its criticism. The various metaphors of self-invention and self-reflection, she argues, prevalent as they may be within autobiography, serve to erase the metonymic traces of mediation that autobiographical practice and production rely upon. To focus on metonymy, in other words, is to return to view an underlying process of autobiographical reproduction, obscured by the metaphors of mirroring and “simple mimesis.” Though metaphor has been “an underlying organizational logic for understanding the self and its relation to autobiographical representation,” Gilmore asserts that the “ways in which autobiography patterns a recognizable autobiographical subject may well have more to do with metonymy.”36 At issue is the contingency of the autobiographical subject on the process of the portrayal, the writing. To this end of rethinking autobiography’s process, Gilmore underwrites her analysis of autobiographics with what we might think of as a metonymy of autobiographical representation: what she names “technologies of autobiography.” “We can use the notion of technology to focus on the discursivity of ‘identity,’ that is, on identity as a network of representational practices.”37 Gilmore’s “technology” thus remediates the figurative techniques of autobiographical discourse and its various metaphors of self-representation, from paintings to mirrors to houses to inventions. We need to take notions of autobio36. Ibid., 84. 37. Ibid., 19.

Photography’s Autobiography

51

graphical invention and portrayal as figures not merely for what an autobiography is, but for what it does. The meaning of autobiography, Gilmore suggests, rests largely in its process: a metonymic, graphic technology by which the subject represented—the content of a life—is contingent upon the mediating conditions of its representation and portrayal. Here, then, are the conditions for the paradox of autobiography as a unique expression in American literary history. The most representative aspects of American autobiography are those characteristics basic to every graphic medium. We can become like Benjamin Franklin, American autobiography’s archetype, not by emulating the life, but by imitating the process of its reproduction in writing, following the lessons and—just as the younger Franklin did—the letters of the writing. Observing Franklin’s notorious “metonymic conflation of life and text” in his autobiography, Klaus Benesch insightfully reads Franklin and his reliance, as an autobiographer, on the technology of print. On Benesch’s view, Franklin becomes a proto-Romantic cyborg and the autobiography a composite of man and mediation: “The writer, if we follow Franklin’s logic, becomes the author of at once an original work of art and the evolving identity that is embedded in the process of writing and editing.”38 I would argue that autobiography’s nation has long been imitating Franklin’s logic and lesson of autobiographical remediation; it is only more recently, in autobiography’s criticism, that the technological aspects of that lesson have been brought to view. Let me explain what I mean by remediation in this context of autobiography and technological reproducibility, be it printing or photography. In their work Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use the term to define a “double logic” that is characteristic of, and crucial to, every medium. Remediation is a paradoxical conjunction of mediated immediacy that is in the nature of all media: the desire (whatever the medium) to achieve a transparent representation through—and despite—the presence and the resources of the very mediation upon which such representations rely. As Bolter and Grusin argue, “Culture,” by which they mean both contemporary and older forms of verbal and visual representation in the West, “wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying 38. Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance, 37–38.

52

Mediating American Autobiography

them.” Significantly, Bolter and Grusin locate in the practice of photography a prominent example of this cultural desire for immediacy based upon, and beset by, mediation: “We can hardly look on any photograph without taking note of our desire for immediacy. Every photograph becomes not only a failed attempt to satisfy that desire, but also to some extent a representation of that failure.”39 To return to the terms employed in early photographic descriptions, the unique, autobiographical immediacy that the image is said to convey despite photographic mediation—a process for reproducing nature itself—fails to represent what is claimed for it precisely in representing the conditions of that failure. Applied to autobiography, this recognition of the contingencies of all mediation returns to view the technological demands of selfportraiture and the resources of the autobiographical medium. The conception of a “technology of autobiography” serves as a guiding metonymy of the genre’s practice when autobiography is reconsidered as a process rather than just a product of discourse. “When autobiography studies focus on metonymy,” Gilmore asserts, in contrast to James Olney, “they recognize the continual production of identity as a kind of patterning sustained through time by the modes of production that create it.” At issue, here, is our attention to the representational processes and practices of autobiography, what Gilmore aptly calls “the pressures of writing,” that are generally occluded in readings of the genre’s “unmediated” making, which is to say, metaphorical reflection of self and character; “for all its variations, the autobiographical self emerges in these interpretations as a creation somehow independent of the pressures of writing in a way that implicitly privileges history and sameness over language and difference.” Much as with Marcus Root’s heliography, the conventions of autobiography remove traces of the difference and strangeness of the composition process from the portrait room. Every autobiographical text, in this regard, much like a photograph, represents, to some extent, its own failure to be “somehow independent of the pressures of writing.” And to add to this John Durham Peters’s view of the necessity of communication failure, this dependence on mediation represents the “very possibility of interaction.”40 39. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5, 109. 40. Gilmore, Autobiographics, 69, 35; Peters, Speaking into the Air, 268.

Photography’s Autobiography

53

In his study of the importance of metonymy in Whitman’s poetic practice, C. Carroll Hollis offers an extensive overview of the multiple distinctions between metaphor and metonymy, the most basic of which, following Roman Jakobson’s linguistic studies, is the distinction between metaphoric similarity and metonymic contiguity. If metaphoric substitution is direct and complete, a figure of equivalence and “static posture,” metonymic substitution is, as Hollis emphasizes, by way of temporal or spatial adjacency, a figure of contexture and “dynamic action.”41 In the late poem “My Picture-Gallery,” Whitman offers us a telling view onto this contiguity at work in his writing, and a picture of metonymy as the dynamic basis for the autobiographical identity and memory the writing would represent: In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house, It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other; Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories! Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death; Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself, With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.42

What I am calling autobiographical metonymy has much in common with Whitman’s depiction of the contingent and dynamic relation between the self and the various contexts in which it is housed and kept suspended like a picture: “not a fix’d house.” Photographic pictures, which Whitman may well be thinking of here, recalling his frequent visits to photography studios and galleries along Broadway in the 1840s, help us to recognize the metonymic force of his suspended. The meaning of any photograph is necessarily and repeatedly suspended between a variety of contexts; it depends upon the various contexts in which the image is reproduced, circulated, and received—no less than the image itself, whatever likeness the photograph appears to represent directly and immediately, depends upon the context and conditions of its making. Allan Sekula refers to this 41. C. Carroll Hollis, Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass,” 158–59. I agree with Hollis that the metaphor/metonymy distinctions are not mutually exclusive, that both figures are basic features of expression, one at times more predominant than the other. 42. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive, 401–2.

54

Mediating American Autobiography

crucial dependence and “tendentiousness” of photographic meaning as its “complex metonymic power”: “The meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context-determined. . . . A photograph communicates by means of its association with some hidden, or implicit text.”43 In the case of Whitman’s poem, this type of communication by way of association and context informs not just the operative figure of memory (the pictures that represent the “shows” of “all memories”), and not just the “I” that contains or keeps them, but the printed poem itself, offered here as another “picture-gallery,” another “little house” that is “only a few inches from one side to the other,” yet has room for all of Whitman’s “tableaus of life,” including his own “prodigal pictures.” That last line, “With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures,” points us to the implicit text of this and perhaps every Whitman poem: the tendentiousness of the writer’s hand, holding us now, whoever we are—despite the distance and because of the mediation—as much as we are holding him. In fact, this late poem is redacted from the beginning of the lengthy notebook fragment “Pictures,” a preliminary draft from which the 1855 Leaves of Grass emerges. Thirty years later, Whitman is not just picturing the life and memory, the autobiography, that constitutes the book; he is picturing and pointing to the autobiography of the book. Thus autobiography, on Whitman’s view, is not independent of the “pressures of writing” or, extended here, the impressions of picturing. In fact, autobiography communicates through those pressures and, as Whitman suggests elsewhere by way of the related metonymic figure of “type,” through the prodigiousness of impressions. Sekula’s word tendentiousness reads pejorative in tone, written against our own tendency to forget and avoid this basic condition of photographic meaning. Whitman reminds us in this brief example that this contexture of autobiography, or photographic pictures as the case may be, is the very tendency of his work; meaning arrives always through some “dissonance in the pictures.” To refocus our attention on this autobiographical metonymy and its contingent, representational tendencies, then, is to remember what Whitman would never let us forget: that autobiography is a technology of self-presentation and self-dispersion, a reproduction of the author’s identity in the context of his books and pictures. In the scope of this study, Whitman’s example of autobiogra43. Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” 100, 85.

Photography’s Autobiography

55

phy’s metonymic subtext is by no means limited to him. As we will see, Emerson will suggest in his essay “Poetry and the Imagination” that if we are to realize, within our own lives, the poet’s imaginative power for reading and reproducing what he calls the “tenaciousness of an image,” we had better “learn metonymy.”44 In some form, that lesson will be broached throughout this study, in part because it is a tenaciousness shared with the photographic metonymy under survey here, and in part because it is the tendency of autobiography in America, displayed by even its greatest of inventors.

American Amphitypes As I argued earlier, photography’s reproducibility and indexicality— its most primitive potential as a medium—informs and potentially unsettles the self-evidence of the photographic icon. Despite popular conventions of photography’s perfection for emulation, the medium offers something more than a metaphorical reflection in its recording of traces. As Alan Trachtenberg puts it succinctly, “The process itself does not imitate; it reproduces.” This technological reproduction of photography, this recognition of its process and its developments, contradicts the assertion of photographic singularity—that same contradiction evoked by Talbot’s term amphitype and long since repressed in discourses of photographic ontology. Leigh Gilmore proposes a similar point with regard to autobiography and the conventional assertions of its self-evidence and singularity, arguing that “this assertion of a singular voice and subject, of a unique and unified self, contravenes the very dynamic that enables the autobiographical act and its characteristic play of identity in language.”45 The autobiographical process, also, does not imitate; it reproduces. Reading these two processes together, each implied within the other—a composite I mark with the word photonymy—enables us to re-metonymize the dynamic of autobiography’s process: or, as Whitman will do with the metonymy of his “prodigal pictures,” focus the index back onto the writer’s pointing hand. The autobiographical “self-image” is thus inherently a composite image: a combination of portrait and means of portrayal, product and 44. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:424; Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8:15. 45. Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 187; Gilmore, Autobiographics, 87.

56

Mediating American Autobiography

process, image and text. In this regard, the locations of photographic memory we have already seen and will continue to explore in this study are perhaps only more provocative versions of the kind of image-text composite that W. J. T. Mitchell argues is not just a particular kind of representation (as in the tradition of interartistic comparison), but at the very foundation of representation as such, verbal or visual. As Mitchell emphasizes in Iconology, the very notion of an idea, let alone something we refer to as a mental or verbal image, is bound up with connotations of visual imagery. Representation as such—for example, autobiographical self-representation—moves and fluctuates among multiple senses of the word graphic. Mitchell identifies composite or “mediating images,” what he also terms “hypericons,” as markers of this unstable and highly provocative borderline between image and text: images and ideas that “depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration.” In my focus on the figures of photographic memory as mediating images in, and of, American autobiographical figuration, I answer Mitchell’s call for critics to pursue a literary iconology beyond the more familiar iconographic study of motifs and symbols. For Mitchell, an iconological approach recognizes that these mediating images or “provocatives” (another name for the hypericon, borrowed from Plato’s mediating image of the cave) tend “to lose their dialectical character; their very status as canonical examples changes them from ‘provocatives’ or objects of dialogue and totemic play into reified signs, objects that (like idols) always say the same thing.” This tendency for reification, I have argued, is symptomatic in the erasure of the play and process of photography from discussions of photographic immediacy. The same might be said, it seems to me, for the canonical images from America’s other technology of self-representation, its autobiographical expression. “One of the principal goals of iconology, then,” Mitchell concludes, “is to restore the provocative, dialogic power of these dead images, to breathe new life into dead metaphors, particularly the metaphors that inform its own discourse.”46 Whitman was also a literary iconologist. Writing in “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads” about the curious and dynamic nature of his autobiographical composition, its embodiment and unfolding of “mostly unconscious intentions,” Whitman offers his work as his pho46. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 5, 155, 158–59.

Photography’s Autobiography

57

tographic “carte visite to the coming generations of the New World” with the following understanding: “These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations, with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments” (PW, 2:712). Whitman thus understands the metonymic character of his autobiographical technology and builds upon its tendency for errancy. He predicates the very existence of his book and his identity on its ongoing displacement onto future readings and developments, the creative errancy of prodigal pictures. For Whitman, this errancy of composition, here named and figured as “development,” is not a source of regret, but the condition of the very reading—and thus the very autobiography—he is imagining and composing. Whitman, too, recognizes that his process does not imitate, it reproduces. We can begin to recognize the strange and speculative force of Whitman’s “developments,” and other conceptions of autobiographical metonymy we find in Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglass, by returning to the speculative, photographic implications of, and within, those same conceptions; we can “breathe new life into dead metaphors,” as Mitchell puts it. I want to be clear in asserting that these four authors, however “representative” they may be in current conceptions of American literary history and autobiography, are nonetheless partial, incomplete pictures (as Emerson admits in “Experience”). They are extensive and provocative examples of photographic memory and its implications for American autobiography, perhaps, but they are nevertheless parts toward a larger whole that this study might suggest, but cannot contain. “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code” (CWE, 3:47). The picturing of autobiography that I read in terms of photography and its process of development should not be viewed as an attempt to restore these figures to a fixed house of wholeness; rather, as Emerson suggests in the same passage from “Experience,” the picture’s power remains in its fragmentariness and in the ongoing and partially unforeseeable links between the “I” and the decidedly equivocal, indexical “this”: the picture, the writing, the future ages into which the fragment is sent, awaiting its reading. In view of the necessary incompleteness of my picture of this dynamic relation between autobiography’s reproduction and its future readings, I want to foreground two partial absences that will be encountered in the subsequent readings of each author. The first

58

Mediating American Autobiography

concerns chronology and history. At the same time that I limit my focus to a particular time and period in the histories of photography and autobiography in America, roughly the 1830s through the 1880s, I do not offer a cultural survey of either technology in this period; rather, I seek to unfold in this study how each technology of representation, in various historical and textual locations, some prominent and others forgotten or unknown, cultivates and implicates the other— making the conventional linearity of a historical survey at once relevant (thus I move from Emerson to Whitman, and from the earliest photographic processes to later developments) and difficult to sustain. (My opening pages should suggest that it makes as much sense to start with Whitman at the end of this period as it does to begin with Emerson writing at the beginning.) In attending to the implications of photography’s development, and in juxtaposing these with a more conventional sense of a literary historical development (American autobiography and its nineteenth-century “renaissance”), I recognize the need to focus on the particular identity of the medium at hand, autobiographical or photographic—what remains unique to each of its manifestations: a daguerreotype as opposed to a photograph as opposed to a lithographic engraving, for example; or, an essay in biography as opposed to a journal passage as opposed to a slave narrative. And I recognize, following the peculiar, temporal logic of development precisely at issue, here, that such particularity and uniqueness remain in play, if not always in question. Better to think of the convergence of the various discourses (both autobiographical and photographic) and the history in which they emerge as more emulsive than determined; photography’s autobiography is another amphitype in which temporal and formal differences (“the change from negative to positive”) underwrite the appearance of similitude (the “same photograph”). Matthiessen’s “concentrated moment of expression” might well be framed, in a relevant historical and cultural analogy, as a decisive, photographic moment in time. But I emphasize that we must also return the equivocal nature of the photographic process and its difference to that same photograph: the mediation in every moment of photography. The re-visioning of American autobiography pursued here through a refocusing on photographic mediation can serve the ongoing work of rethinking the cultural identity of American literature, and American autobiography specifically, in terms of its repressed, representational “others.” This is to recognize that the peculiar, constitutive relations

Photography’s Autobiography

59

between sameness and difference, representation and process, have been routinely avoided in literary history, much as in the history of photography. I want to emphasize that I intend my partial recollection of Matthiessen’s American Renaissance and its influential “representative men” model of literary history to be, or at least to begin, a critical reproduction of the model. It seems to me it would be foolish to discount these authors simply because of their canonical effects just as it would be foolish to consider those received effects, or their iconicity, as simple or transparent. I mean by critical reproduction, then, reproducing the model with a difference, a reading that proceeds and develops, as I intend these readings to proceed, by giving attention to the neglected implications of difference, reproduction, process. I pursue that reading with regard to race, in terms of Frederick Douglass’s significant, photographic re-visioning of American slavery and its representational claims. In another study, this same type of photographic re-visioning of difference could extend to gender. Though I do not pursue that reading in this book, I agree with Nancy Miller, who argues in “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography” that the established reading of female (canonically marginalized) autobiography in terms of difference and alterity can be insightfully applied back to the more canonical male texts, as a way “to revise the canonical views of male autobiographical identity altogether.”47 Miller suggests that such revisions would not reject the representative status of those canonical texts and figures so much as return us to a recognition of “the vicissitudes of representativity” that have been elided in traditional, critical readings of those texts. Paul John Eakin makes a similar point, arguing for a revised understanding of all autobiography (not just women’s autobiography) as inherently relational or, as I have framed it, as a representational process, rather than a product, of identity: “It is not my intent in the discussion that follows to destabilize the criteria for defining women’s lives—‘autogynography’—but rather to suggest that the criterion of relationality applies equally if not identically to male experience. All selfhood, I argue, is relational despite differences that fall out along gender lines.”48 Like the autobiography that would represent it, identity is itself an amphitype. 47. Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” 5. 48. Miller, “Representing Others,” 16; Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 50.

60

Mediating American Autobiography

I do not suggest, finally, that photography’s autobiography or the critical implications of photonymy are limited to the representative men of the American Renaissance. Indeed, such lessons in metonymy are insights that recent critical readings of Emily Dickinson and her interest in the photographic medium have emphasized and applied, provocatively, to questions of the authority and identity of her writing. Focusing on the implications of the variants in Dickinson’s manuscripts, Melanie Hubbard argues that “Dickinson found in the daguerreotype’s unstable medium, its non-self-sameness, a potent analogue for her own work.”49 For Hubbard and others, this “potent analogue” indexes the link between Dickinson’s understanding of the photographic medium and the metonymic practices and processes of her writing medium. To this point in time, there would seem to be more interest in Dickinson’s photography than Emerson’s; I leave it for others to argue whether Emerson’s similar interest in this analogue for the processes of his writing medium render a feminized Emerson or a masculinized Dickinson.50 My sense is that it may be either, or may well be both, not only because all identity is relational (as Eakin emphasizes), but also because the photographic lens through which we read the representations of “other men” (as Emerson puts it) in relation to the identity of “our own minds” is, like the photograph, more complicated than it would appear. Consider the four authors under study here, then, as representative metonyms: not just parts of a larger, heterogeneous context (subject to readings beyond the scope of this project, as any critical study must be), but figures who, by means of photographic memory and its metonymies, foreground and 49. Melanie Hubbard, “‘Turn it, a little’: The Influence of the Daguerreotype and the Stereograph on Emily Dickinson’s Use of Manuscript Variants,” 120. See also Adam Frank’s “Emily Dickinson and Photography” and Marta Werner’s hypertext essay “‘The Soul’s Distinct Connection—’: Emily Dickinson, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century American Culture.” 50. There is a line in feminist thought that claims metonymy (and its emphasis on partiality) as a trope of resistance to a totalizing and masculine conception of metaphor. In “‘Question of Monuments’: Emerson, Dickinson, and American Renaissance Portraiture,” Mary Loeffelholz applies this critical thought to the construct of the American Renaissance, exploring the role of visual representation in the monumentalizing of cultural representatives, Emerson being her primary example. She locates a questioning of this monumentalizing in Dickinson and an alternative, critical attention to the metonymic, to the accidents and contingencies of writing. My point is that we can learn from a similar metonymics of portraiture at work in Emerson and the “representative men” that follow him in this study, a metonymics that complicates the conventions (monumental metaphors) we associate with them.

Photography’s Autobiography

61

reflect upon the representational conditions of their own representativeness. As American amphitypes, versions of multi-stable images that, like the Cornelius self-portrait, reveal the traces of representation, these authors problematize conceptions of reading they are in the process of producing. As Emerson proposes in his “American Scholar,” an insight we will carry into the next chapter: “One must be an inventor to read well” (CWE, 1:58).

2

- Like Iodine to Light Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

The fate of my books is like the impression of my face. My acquaintances as long back as I can remember, have always said, “Seems to me you look a little thinner than when I saw you last.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

By many accounts, including his own, Ralph Waldo Emerson was not a photogenic man. There is a curious and telling exchange found within Emerson’s celebrated correspondence with Thomas Carlyle that speaks to his apparent photographic misrepresentativeness. At Emerson’s request, Carlyle had sent him a photographic likeness— “Yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness,” Carlyle promised him in 1846—which Emerson had received with great pleasure: “I have what I have wished,” Emerson wrote back of the photograph’s arrival. “I confirm my recollections & make new observations: it is life to life. Thanks to the Sun.” Emerson, however, had trouble returning the favor. He wrote to Carlyle, explaining the delay as a problem he was experiencing in having his own likeness taken: “I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the housemates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous, I must sit again, or . . . I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre & iodine delight in.” After trying and failing yet again, Emerson nonetheless sent a photographic image, whose per-

62

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

63

Figure 3. Frontispiece portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson from the 1903 Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where the caption reads: “From daguerreotype in 1847, now in the possession of the Carlyle family, England.” (Courtesy Morningside College Library, Sioux City, Iowa.)

sistent misrepresentativeness Carlyle confirmed in receiving it (see fig. 3). “This Image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! First of all, it is a bad Photograph; no eyes discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favourable lights. . . . I could not at first, nor can I yet with perfect decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old Emerson.” Second of all, Carlyle went on to reveal, the bad image had left him with the uncanny feeling of Emerson’s death: “[It] seems smiling on me as if in mockery, ‘Dost know me friend: I am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee;—I belong already to

64

Mediating American Autobiography

the Eternities, and thou recognisest me not!’ On the whole, it is the strangest feeling I have.”1 With an eye to this type of exchange, Oliver Wendell Holmes would go on to imagine such photographic reproduction and circulation of likenesses as “a new form of friendship.” Writing in 1863 in the third of his series of articles on photography, Holmes speculates, “A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other’s faces (that is, in Nature’s original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship.” The photographic friendship with Carlyle provides a rich example of Emerson’s firsthand accounting of that new experience of intimacy through distance and absence that photographic communication would offer Emerson’s “ocular” age (JMN, 5:328). But in the apparent failure of that intimacy—the “illusive” image that fails to represent Emerson to Carlyle familiarly or faithfully—there is the suggestion of a more significant experience of photography that Emerson reflects upon in his thought and work. Emerson’s experience of this transatlantic, photographic relationship evokes the definition of communication that John Durham Peters locates in Emerson’s age—indeed, in Emerson’s own paradoxical concept of friendship as the ongoing mediation of “infinite remoteness.” “Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts,” Peters notes.2 Taking up Emerson’s experiences and engagements with the nineteenth century’s newest representational medium, this chapter demonstrates that his reflections on photography constitute a significant example of early observations on the new medium and its cultural influence. But even more than these cultural reflections, photography in Emerson’s writing marks a crucial figure—a medium, so to say—for the recognition of creative genius and its “negatively electric” mode of communication that, in “Intellect,” Emerson would name “the power of picture or expression” (CWE, 2:193, 199). Emerson’s “power of picture” in this same essay identifies “the grand strokes of the painter,” surely a familiar metaphor in Emerson’s visual rhetoric and in Romanticism more broadly. But as we will see when we return to “Intellect” further on, Emerson precedes that pas1. Emerson and Carlyle, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 398, 464. This exchange of photographic images between Carlyle and Emerson is also recounted in Melissa Banta, A Curious and Ingenious Art: Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard, 97–101. 2. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 15; Peters, Speaking into the Air, 139.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

65

sage with a definition of intellectual power and production that turns to the photographic language of image reproduction. Such language unsettles the familiarity of the artist metaphor and its tenor of originality—much as the new medium was challenged by the older medium of painting in these very terms of original versus mere reproduction. Thus, in his essay on Shakespeare in Representative Men, we will find Emerson turning to the photographic process, in contrast to painting, to celebrate Shakespeare’s genius in terms of its reproducible (and thereby representative) originality. In these and other cases, Emerson’s photographic thinking illuminates this paradox of unique replication that lies at the heart of his conception of art, genius, identity, and intellect. In Emerson’s hands, the emerging idea of photography and its process of imaging sheds light on the fate that these convertible terms share with their author and the impression of his face.

Thinking Photography Emerson’s engagement with the newly emerging medium and idea of photography appears foremost in a journal entry from October 1841. Writing within two years of the announcement of photography’s discovery in Europe and subsequent introduction to America, Emerson reflects upon the peculiarity of the already popular experience of photographic portraiture located in its most prominent form throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the daguerreotype process. This marvelous passage reads in full: Were you ever Daguerreotyped, O immortal man? And did you look with all vigor at the lens of the camera or rather by the direction of the operator at the brass peg a little below it to give the picture the full benefit of your expanded and flashing eye? And in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid: the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed as only they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death; and when at last you are relieved of your dismal duties, did you find the curtain drawn perfectly, and the coat perfectly, and the hands true, clenched for combat, and the shape of the face and the head? But unhappily the total expression had escaped from the face and you held the portrait of a mask instead

66

Mediating American Autobiography

of a man. Could you not by grasping it very tight hold the stream of a river or of a small brook and prevent it from flowing? (JMN, 8:115–16)

Perhaps drawing upon personal experience sitting before the camera, Emerson focuses sharply on the physical discomfort that attends the procedure or “operation” (in the conventional phrase) of daguerreotype portraiture, the “dismal duties” of keeping still—most frequently, being literally fixed into position by a neck brace—that were required by the lengthy exposure time. Francois Gouraud, a pupil of Daguerre’s who offered public lectures on the new process in the early 1840s in America, describes (in the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot in March 1840) the need to “fix the sitter” to a chair and for the sitter or “patient” to “fix his eyes on some well defined object,” all this despite his success in reducing the exposure times from fifteen minutes to approximately two minutes. What is even more exceptional about Emerson’s passage, however, is the manner in which the physical discomfort of the portrait process collapses with his metaphysical discomfort with the portrait product. The individual is fixed in position before the camera, just as his image is photochemically fixed on the plate; but Emerson seems most unsettled by the implications of the “fixing” of identity that apparently results in the portrait, the represented pose, with “the eyes fixed as only they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death.” The daguerrean image, on Emerson’s view, fails to represent the identity of the sitter accurately, and provides, instead of the “total expression” of the man, “the portrait of a mask.” This failure may well be the autobiographical point of departure of this passage. Emerson remarked repeatedly in letters of the difficulties he encountered in attempts to get an accurate portrait of himself taken, a problem reiterated, as we have seen, in his photographic correspondence with Carlyle. “On repeated trials of the daguerre process,” he would note later in the 1840s, “my friends declared that I was a very bad subject for that style, and that every impression was a painful misrepresentation.”3 The journal entry is one of several from 1841 in which Emerson, with varying degrees of ambivalence, meditates upon the character of 3. Francois Gouraud, quoted in “Manner of Making Portraits by the Daguerreotype,” Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, March 26, 1840, 2; Emerson to Daniel Jefferson, June 29, 1846, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8:83.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

67

the daguerrean image and the photographic medium’s rapid circulation as a representative technology of his age. I would argue that this passage is as philosophically reflective as any other passage in Emerson’s thought. What initial image of Emerson’s philosophical engagement with photography, then, does this meditation give? With this passage in mind, Timothy Sweet concludes, “For Emerson the photographic process is outside nature, producing images that are only poor resemblances.”4 This judgment seems correct when we consider Emerson’s understanding of the process and course of nature. The final rhetorical question, which evokes Heraclitus, alludes to that process; the understanding is perhaps most apparent in Emerson’s lecture “The Method of Nature,” also from 1841. Here, Emerson portrays the course of nature as a “rushing stream” whose only permanence is “a perpetual inchoation,” resisting the observation and admiration that it, nevertheless, endlessly invites: The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread. . . . The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.

As in the daguerreotype passage, Emerson associates the attempt to fix the natural facts of such fluctuation and “infinite distribution,” by analogy, with madness: “If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature” (CWE, 1:124). Toward the end of this same essay, Emerson renders explicit the Heraclitean thought that similarly courses through the journal entry on the daguerreotype. “You cannot bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus; and I add, a man never sees the same object twice: with his own enlargement the object acquires new aspects” (CWE, 1:132). I turn to this passage from “The Method of Nature” not to imply that Emerson’s word enlargement is figuratively latent with photography, but rather, to suggest a way that we might, as readers of Emerson’s 4. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union, 87.

68

Mediating American Autobiography

words, enlarge the received view of his engagement with photography. Like the daguerrean image that represents more than one aspect in its view—that is, in fact, unique as a form of photography precisely in the simultaneous doubleness of its image, its flickering juxtaposition of negative and positive representation—Emerson’s journal entry (“Were you ever Daguerreotyped”) “acquires new aspects” when read back into this context of nature’s representative, inchoate identity. Emerson reflects upon what is, from the medium’s conception, thought of as the unique nature of photography, a notion of it that is already thoroughly conventional. In April 1839, for example, N. P. Willis offers his observations of the new photographic discoveries (naming the inventors Daguerre and Talbot) even before he has seen an example. “All nature shall paint herself,” he declares, emphasizing the self-representative facet of the invention; “all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer, and publisher.” The metaphorical title of his article, “The Pencil of Nature,” would be recirculated and more famously asserted by Talbot himself in 1844, in his book The Pencil of Nature. Daguerre, as we have already seen, proposed a similar version of the unique, autobiographical nature of the medium, calling it “a chemical and physical process which gives [Nature] the power to reproduce herself.”5 Nature presents “herself” (already) in emanations of flickering juxtapositions; the process of photography thus re-presents the presentations. The skeptical vision that constitutes Emerson’s passage on being daguerreotyped, and sets it apart from the host of commentaries celebrating the perfection of photography’s “total expression,” indicates that Emerson’s difference from such conventional conceptions and circulations of the medium’s nature lies in his thinking more critically about the character and identity of the medium of nature. The passage is most frequently cited as evidence of the daguerrean process’s rigidity and Emerson’s negative reaction to this new mechanical form of self/portrayal, its aberrant location, as Sweet puts it, “outside nature.” Bringing out the Heraclitean implications of the passage, however, we can see that Emerson represents the new medium—the passage, after all, is a rhetorical representation of photographic por5. Willis’s article from The Corsair (April 13, 1839) is quoted in Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society, 43; Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” 13.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

69

trayal, not merely a historical reflection—as an analogy for nature’s method and “perpetual inchoation.” Emerson’s passage represents an image of the failure to observe or fix identity in any permanent form, a failure that photography thus shares with nature. Emerson provides an image for the necessary and natural failure of any portrayal or observation that would claim to be located outside the changing course of nature. “Who could ever analyze it?” Emerson asks of the method of nature, echoing his argument from “Circles” that “around every circle another can be drawn”: “There are no fixtures in nature. . . . Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial” (CWE, 2:179–80). This recognition of the “medial” nature of “every thing” in nature (which is to say everything, since “there is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us” [CWE, 2:181]) remains implicit in Emerson’s own analysis of the daguerreotype’s failure to capture and render completely and immediately the subject’s identity. The portrait fails to prevent the “total expression” of the face from escaping, streamlike, thus betraying the identity—or what photographic manuals of the age would define as the expressive “character”—of the subject. Here, the impression of Emerson’s face (or at least the type of “face” Emerson imagines in this meditation) shares the fate of nature’s elusive, physiognomic character. Who could ever recognize its dynamic, circulating emanations completely? These betrayals of the “total expression” of character are thus, paradoxically, indicative of the very self-representative nature of the image that photography offers but also, so Emerson emphasizes, fails to fix. In this curious but crucial sense in which, as Michael Lopez shows in Emerson and Power, Emerson values the uses of failure, the failed portrait becomes representative of that description of nature that Emerson gives the name art.6 In the essay titled “Art,” the concluding piece in Essays: First Series (1841), Emerson links the word and larger concept of portrait to a favored, suggestive word marking this use-value of failure, betray. There, the portrayal of original identity is fated to betray the conditions and circumstances that make any representative of nature—by nature—necessarily unoriginal and any portrait “only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within”: 6. Michael Lopez, Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century.

70

Mediating American Autobiography

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so willful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times. . . . Shall I now add, that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate . . . ? (CWE, 2:209, 210)

Emerson’s stroke draws upon the shared etymology of portrait and betray (trahere: to draw out): such are the “traits” and “traces” of nature, the ongoing history of history itself, that the plastic arts represent authentically by representing them partially and self-reflexively. That is to say, these fated portraits of every man’s context (“age and country”) reproduce and draw upon—index—the very partiality and contingency, the circumstantial character of the creation and cultural production (“every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew”), that they also represent. In this locating of art’s significance in the traces of its production and in its faithfulness to how it represents, rather than in its mimetic faithfulness to what it represents, Emerson anticipates here the revisionist argument that twentieth-century art historian Norman Bryson would make regarding the fundamental “deixis,” or material self-reference of painting—“the recognition that painting galvanizes is a production, rather than a perception, of meaning”— that Western art history has tended to dehistoricize and efface. In his Vision and Painting Bryson could well have been citing Emerson in arguing that this very “disavowal of deictic reference” in the conventions of Western painting consistently betrays the usage it avoids.7 Emerson’s version of deictic reference proposes a similar metonymic working of art, a production that is “never fixed, but always flowing” because it must reproduce a similar character of nature that is “alive, moving, reproductive” (CWE, 2:216, 218). At the end of “Art,” Emerson indicates that such plastic arts, “the supplements and continuations of the material creation,” would thus include, not exclude as one might think, newer forms of “mechanical” reproduction. Emerson names there, as one example of such a “mechanical” representation of the 7. Bryson, Vision and Painting, xii, 89.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

71

reproductive art of nature, the railroad. In other places, he adds photography to the list of what he calls “our great mechanical works.”8 The invention that goes unnamed in “Art,” and all but named in that essay’s picturing of art as reproducing and supplementing “material creation,” is the same representative art that Emerson evokes in the journal passage on being daguerreotyped. This mechanical art of supplement and continuation is representative for Emerson, however, in a more foundational and decidedly less conventional sense. Engaging an understanding of all art as contingently and partially representative, and a reproductive art like photography most vividly, Emerson writes less against the medium of daguerrean portraiture in its early days, as much as against its most popular, discursive views. As I have suggested, these portrayals of photography (daguerreotypy specifically) held that the image could provide an unmediated representation of its subject: those positivist claims of photographic transparency that, particularly when translated into America, informed what Alan Trachtenberg calls the “popular republican ideology of the image.” When applied specifically to the case of the portrait, it was asserted that the image could capture the identity of the man. In his 1840 article “The Daguerreotype,” Edgar Allan Poe provides a characteristic example of this view of photography’s natural vision, suggesting that the daguerreotype offers a “positively perfect mirror” and its image presents “a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”9 From Emerson’s point of view, however, such assumptions of natural and “positively perfect” vision, photographic or otherwise, mistake the emanational procession of nature. Nature’s method, as Emerson reads it, is already a series of shifting resemblances, fluctuations that identify the very nature and “natural fact” of identity: “From every emanation is a new emanation.” Nature for Emerson also (and already) reproduces herself, but consequently, a true picture of that nature—or a picture made by that nature, as Daguerre emphasizes—becomes, as an endless emanation, the portrait of a mask instead of a man. The mask betrays the tendency that constitutes the man’s own (and photography’s own) metamorphic nature. 8. In an 1847 journal passage, for example, Emerson addresses “the new arts” and lists “daguerre, telegraph, and railroad” (JMN, 10:173–74). 9. Trachtenberg, “Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables,” 469; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” 38.

72

Mediating American Autobiography

“We can point nowhere to anything final,” Emerson remarks of the “rapid metamorphosis” that characterizes the “genius or method of nature . . . but tendency appears on all hands.” And thus Emerson adds that, with regard to any attempt to draw upon that tendency, and to communicate with those hands, “as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be” (CWE, 1:126, 132). Significantly, Bryson locates in photography a crucial example of this same “tendency” repressed and effaced in the mimetic conventions and representations of art. Contrasting photography with the “disavowal of deictic reference” that he reads in the history of Western painting, Bryson argues, “Here the position of the painting is asymmetrical with that of the photograph, for photography is the product of a chemical process occurring in the same spatial and temporal vicinity as the event it records: the silver crystals react continuously to the luminous field.” For Bryson, this fundamental metonymy and contingency of photography’s “chemical process,” the traces of its own “temporality of process,” as he calls it, resist the mimetic conventions of Western painting and the effacement of its material, historical traces.10 Emerson’s use of the already conventional daguerreotype in his writing foregrounds this asymmetrical character of photography and its potential resistance to such artistic conventions. Indeed, Emerson takes this recognition of photography’s critical difference a step further, applying it back to the medium itself. All things are medial, and the photographic process only more faithfully represents (and fails to hide) the tendencies of mediation that it shares with painting. We need to think of Emerson’s unconventional and contradictory usage of photographic representation, his emphasis (beginning in the 1841 journal passage) on the medium’s representative failure, in this regard, in line with a larger unconventionality that is the foundation of his thinking and writing. I have in mind that provocational characteristic of Emersonian thought that Stanley Cavell calls “aversive thinking.” For Cavell, Emerson’s familiar (and much-celebrated) contradictions are not philosophical problems or weaknesses of the thought and writing, but marks of the very philosophical character of the writing. Cavell explains, “Emerson is I believe commonly felt to play fast and loose with something like contradiction in his writing; but I am speaking of 10. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 89. In emphasizing what he calls the “sovereign Contingency” of the photograph, Barthes similarly speaks of its “pure deictic language,” Camera Lucida, 4–5.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

73

a sense in which contradiction, the countering of diction, is the genesis of his writing of philosophy.” Thus, Emersonian thinking, Cavell argues (and in a sense never ceases to argue with regard to Emerson), enacts its aversion to conformity and performs its crucial “transfiguration” of convention at the reflexive level of its own writing. Such transfiguration returns us to the very conditions of our experience or, as Cavell reminds us, the recognition of our “con-dition,” “stipulations or terms under which we can say anything at all to one another.” I refer to this transfiguration as crucially reflexive to the extent that the conditions to which Emerson returns us, of course, involve the very conditions (or “traces”) of his own production of writing, the history and fate of his own strokes. For Cavell, then, “Emerson’s ‘Experience’ announces and provides the conditions under which an Emerson essay can be experienced—the conditions of its own possibility. Thus to announce and provide conditions for itself is what makes an essay Emersonian.”11 Or, to return to the conditions of Emerson’s “Art,” the essay betrays every trace of the thought from which the portrayal develops. Emerson’s 1841 passage on the experience of being daguerreotyped may be a briefer version of “Art,” but it is similar in kind. It, too, is a reflection on, and provision of, the “conditions of its own possibility,” those conditions of writing and thinking that Emerson provocatively locates in the newer and less familiar representational conditions of the photographic experience. Those photographic conditions are marked in Emerson’s passage by his observation of the marks and traces of the temporal process and “operation” by which the daguerrean image is produced. Most vividly, as Emerson suggests, there are the clenched hands and fixed eyes, the rigid posture of the subject, circumstantial indications of the technological limitations—most notably the lengthy exposure time required by the types of photochemistry used in these early processes—that inform the resulting image. Reading Emerson’s reflections on the daguerreotype “mask,” Karen Sanchez-Eppler similarly focuses on the significance of the hands. By way of Cavell, she links this “image of hands vainly clutching at an ungraspable flow” to the confounding condition of experience that Emerson announces in “Experience,” appealing to a similar image. “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects,” 11. Stanley Cavell, “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” 81, 103.

74

Mediating American Autobiography

Emerson laments, “which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition” (CWE, 3:29). As Sanchez-Eppler suggests, in this light “the daguerreotyped hands clenched in combat or despair gain a new poignancy.” Cavell first calls our attention to the philosophical poignancy of the clutching hands in “Experience,” as Sanchez-Eppler duly notes, and he suggests in his reading of Emerson’s essay a “connection between the hand in unhandsome and the impotently clutching fingers.” But he might just as well have guided us to the photographic poignancy of Emerson’s vainly clenched hands, though to my knowledge he nowhere refers to the 1841 journal passage on the daguerreotype. I am suggesting that Cavell’s readings of such provocative images of skepticism and philosophy in Emerson’s writing have their implicit counterpart in his readings of the provocative and philosophical “images of skepticism” that photography offers the world. In short, I would argue that “what photography calls thinking,” as Cavell puts it in the title of one of these readings, is analogous to the thinking, as we have begun to see, that Emerson gives to—and receives from—photography. The photographic experience achieves its critical significance in revealing, and providing for, the conditions of its own experience as a medium.12 Emerson’s initial photographic passage reads like Robert Cornelius’s failed selfportrait transcribed onto paper.

The Strangeness of the Discovery This skeptical potential of photography, as Emerson reads the medium, appears perhaps nowhere more provocatively than in its first public form. In his “Introductory Lecture on the Times,” given 12. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Then When We Clutch Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image,” 75; Cavell, “Finding as Founding,” 86; Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking.” I recognize that Cavell’s broader interest in cinema does not define his understanding of the “photographic basis” of photography/cinema as explicitly and strictly as I am doing, that is, in terms of the contingencies of the photochemical process of photography informing and unsettling the camera view of the photograph. However, I would argue that Cavell’s “revelation of the medium” and his characterization of the strangeness of photographic reproduction implicitly returns us to the means of photography’s difference located in the temporal processes of exposure and development of the image.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

75

toward the end of 1841, the year in which he first reflects upon the daguerreotype in his journal, Emerson employs the newly introduced process of daguerreotypy to reflect further upon how his age, its “times,” might best be represented within the medium of his words: And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery? Let us paint the painters. Whilst the Daguerreotype professor, with cameraobscura and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also, and let the sun paint the people. . . . Good office it were with delicate finger in the most decisive, yet in the most parliamentary and unquestionable manner, to indicate the indicators, to indicate those who most accurately represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind, in the just order which they take on this canvass of Time; so that all witnesses should recognize a spiritual law, as each well known form flitted for a moment across the wall, we should have a series of sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of ours. (CWE, 1:170)

The opening rhetorical question and the image of the daguerreotypist traversing the land link this passage to the journal entry that asks the rhetorical and reflexive question about being daguerreotyped. Emerson once again reacts with concern to the medium that is, though not yet two years old, already circulating as the invention of the age. Emerson recirculates the language of photography’s (presumed) immediacy, its “positively perfect mirror,” as Poe would call it, but with the difference he locates in the nature of the medium. This is not just another portrait of the times or “theory of the Age” (a discussion, as Emerson remarks later, in “Fate,” that is itself characteristic of the times and his age of “reflection”); rather, he proposes a portrait of the potential portrayal of the times, how the times, its history and its people, might be represented and reported in relation to how those times already assume and reiterate, as history, a form of representation. Emerson’s “Camera,” in this regard, figures another version of that lesson we find traced in “Art,” the lesson that history’s accurate portrayal lies in the traces and strokes of its failure to avoid its own fate as a portrait, its own means of representation. Focusing on that contingent relation between what the times represent and how they are represented, Emerson’s portrayal doubles back on itself, a doubling evident in the phrases paint the painters and indicate the indicators. Such reflexivity is marked as early as the opening rhetorical question: using the conventional metaphors of portraying the times—and

76

Mediating American Autobiography

already, we see, photography is one of them—Emerson proposes a “portrait gallery,” not a portrait of the times per se, but a collection of its portrayals. Emerson’s daguerrean “Camera” mediates this double focus on representing the representative aspects of the times. More than a mere extension of the metaphor of the verbal portrait, this photographic analogy problematizes the very notion that it seems to participate in: the presumption that there can be a representation of the times that stands wholly apart from the conditions of its representation, that can capture its character or “genius” completely. That presumption of the possibility of a representation emancipated from its circumstances is itself characteristic of the times, as Emerson suggests in different guises throughout this lecture. This characteristic presumption fails to recognize the mediated lenses through which we know the times—indeed, the mediation that constitutes the times. Emerson makes this clear in the passage that follows upon his taking up of the “Camera”: “But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant which the times exhibit: we are parties also, and have a responsibility which is not to be declined.” Since the “pageant which the times exhibit” flows like the method of nature, emanation upon emanation, a portrait of those times can capture its characteristics only as partially as the daguerrean portrait can capture the total expression of a face. To suggest that we always stand doubly as spectator and participant to the exhibition of history is to understand, as with the man and his daguerreotyped counterpart, that we can never hold before us a single, fixed, impartial identity, nor stand in the same river twice. In fact, as Emerson suggests earlier in the lecture, the true portrait of the times that we might report to the next ages would be the glimpsed portrait of a mask: “The Times are the masquerade of the eternities” (CWE, 1:171, 167). Emerson uses the figure of photography to portray this masquerade of the times and the character of its tendencies. This metonymic vision of representativeness, the quality of suggesting truth partially and contiguously, precisely by not representing it wholly, seems at odds with the conventional, metaphorical view that we have tended to associate with Emerson’s notion of the representative. But Emerson’s vision runs against the grain of a metaphorical vision of wholeness and closure, of the “representative” as a fixed and singular exemplar, to the extent that it is itself about, and informed by, the recognition of “vision” as thoroughly suggestive, partial, fundamentally metonymic. The essay “Intellect,” which precedes “Art” in the 1841 Essays: First

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

77

Series, addresses this characteristic (but unconventional) vision of genius by declaring in the opening paragraph, “Its vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known” (CWE, 2:193). I would argue that the best way to understand the difference that Emerson has in mind, the difference in this “vision” not of the eye that constitutes genius, is to recognize the implications of Emerson’s photographic vision in the essay that follows. Emerson goes on to characterize the suggestive partiality of this vision of genius or intellect, what he will describe as its “mainly prospective” character, by emphasizing the thoroughly receptive nature of all intellection. “Our thinking is a pious reception,” Emerson declares: “We do not determine what we will think.” Emerson’s reception suggests that our thinking, and by extension “truth” itself, can never be original or wholly present to us; it must remain, as he puts it, always “latent,” not to be presented so much as “reported”: “All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud” (CWE, 2:195). We can associate the process of photography with this reduplicative “unfolding” and development of intellect’s “progress” and “method” in this sense. Emerson links the secondary reporting or “revelation” or “publication” of thinking’s primary reception with what he calls “the power of picture or expression.” “To be communicable, it must become picture or sensible object,” Emerson explains with regard to the unfolding of our receptive thought. “In common hours,” Emerson continues his depiction of this “power of communication” in terms of a picture-making process, we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. (CWE, 2:198–99)

We notice, then, that the pure receptivity that characterizes and even determines “our thinking” is itself further determined by its “conversion” and “production,” by the process of its becoming a picture. Intellect’s singular power of “expression,” also referred to here as “intellect constructive,” is decidedly double: spontaneous reception and willful reproduction.

78

Mediating American Autobiography

It is in this same light that Emerson figures this prospective “power of picture or expression” in the crucial terms of a photographic impression. The passage from “Intellect” I have in mind reads in full: If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within doors, and shut your eyes, and press them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light, with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasseled grass, or the cornflags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted in your memory, though you know it not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought. (CWE, 2:198)

Here, the pious reception of thinking becomes an image reproduction. In this elaborate depiction of afterimages and latent development, Emerson evokes that kind of defamiliarizing “subjective vision” that Jonathan Crary details in Techniques of the Observer. As Crary argues, this subjective and corporealized vision marks the early nineteenthcentury, discursive origins of modernity and its proliferating techniques of observation, origins he locates in “an uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura.” While Crary understands that photographic techniques play a part in this “new valuation of visual experience,” the technique of stereography being his privileged example, he insists that this “uprooting of vision” “occurs in the nineteenth century before the appearance of photography.”13 Emerson’s turn from the phenomenon of the afterimage to a focus on the reproducibility of “natural images” and “impressions”—the power of photochemically developing them in the “dark chamber”—usefully elaborates Crary’s thesis. Photography’s role in this “uprooting of vision” lies not merely in the techniques of the optics and the camera, tools for the immediacy that we have long associated with photographic vision but that predate the invention. Rather, Emerson understands that photography’s “power of communication” lies in the tension between that sense of immediate and transparent vision and the recognition of the latency of that vision that 13. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, 14.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

79

Emerson locates specifically in the process of developing the impression, in the becoming of the picture. In another journal reflection on photography from 1841, Emerson identifies this process and its latent imaging as “the strangeness of the discovery” repeated in each of its pictures: “The strangeness of the discovery is that Daguerre should have known that a picture was there when he could not see any. When the plate is taken from the camera it appears just as when it was put there—spotless silver; it is then laid over steaming mercury and the picture comes out” (JMN, 8:139–40). Whether or not Stanley Cavell has Emerson in mind in The World Viewed when he characterizes the “mysteriousness of the photograph” that is the basis of film, Cavell is thinking of the same strangeness located in the photograph’s temporal process of exposure and development. Cavell understands “that the mysteriousness of the photograph lies not in the machinery which produces it, but in the unfathomable abyss between what it captures (its subject) and what is captured for us (this fixing of the subject), the metaphysical wait between exposure and exhibition.”14 This characteristic tension or doubleness of photography’s “metaphysical wait” is evident in Emerson’s language, particularly in the apparent contradiction asserted between “instantly” and “momentary,” between the spontaneous recording of the natural image and its appearance “five or six hours afterwards.” Emerson reinforces that the power of the “fit image” lies not in the image as such, but in the power and potential of its thinking or wording that yields each of its momentary appearances—or in the photographic terms evoked here, in the potential of the continuing development and reproduction of the impression.

Impressionable Man Emerson describes the poet, perhaps the most representative of his figures of genius, in terms of his ability to receive and to mirror in his thought the symbolic nature of the world about him. To cite the “we are symbols, and inhabit symbols” passage from “The Poet”: He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. 14. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, 185.

80

Mediating American Autobiography

As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. . . . He stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis . . . uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. (CWE, 3:12)

Here, the poet’s very identification with nature, one step nearer to things, constitutes the uncanny character of his representative alterity. The poet stands one step nearer to the symbolic nature of things, and through his mirroring of that nature, his symbolic perception and reporting of it, stands as nature’s representative cipher. “His own body is a fleeing apparition,—his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs,” Emerson asserts in the later essay “Poetry and Imagination”: “In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet.”15 Thus, paradoxically, the autobiographical value of the poet lies in his ability to reproduce, through his own apparent erasure, not his, but nature’s autobiography. Emerson displays this provocative insight remarkably in his portrait of Shakespeare in Representative Men. Midway through this portrayal he addresses the art and expression that locates the nature and “natural history” of Shakespeare’s writing: “This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music or verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics.” Emerson continues: “Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision . . . without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope” (CWE, 4:122). Shakespeare’s ability to mirror nature makes him, as Emerson puts it, “the type of the poet.” Emerson locates the power of the writer’s expression not in the ability to imitate or copy nature into writing accurately, but in the potential to represent what is already imagined as nature’s writing. Shakespeare’s uncanny and inimitable “power of expression” is “like nature’s” to the extent that the “minute details” of his picture-poetry enable us to approach nature’s own picture-making power. Emerson precedes the 1841 jour15. Emerson, Complete Works, 8:21.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

81

nal passage regarding the “strangeness” of Daguerre’s photographic discovery with something of this understanding: “There is this advantage also about the new pictures that whereas in painted miniatures it will not do to hold them near the eye, for then I see the paint and the illusion is at an end, these are like all nature’s works, incapable of being seen too near” (JMN, 8:139). While this “advantage” seems to register the familiar conventions of photographic precision and realism (Morse’s “Rembrandt perfected”), Emerson’s reflection, as I read it, also suggests that the useful vantage point the photographic picture provides lies in its approach to “nature’s works” and in the detailed recognition, the foregrounding, of its own “illusion.” Shakespeare’s expression or registration is, therefore, like all nature’s works of likeness. Shakespeare draws a mountain with the same detail and analogical reporting that a mountain draws and writes itself. To recall the terms from “Art,” Shakespeare reproduces in his beautiful expressions and pictures a nature that is “beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive.” If Shakespeare is “the type of the poet,” it is because he represents in his writing the impressions—the typing and style—that his poetry receives from, and shares with, the method of nature. To register this double meaning in Emerson’s use of the word type is to recognize that the representative man is great precisely because he is, to use another of Emerson’s pliable words, “impressionable.” Emerson expounds in “Fate” on the tendency of life’s fundamental “double consciousness,” linking it specifically to the character of an impression: “Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them. . . . So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man” (CWE, 6:24). Shakespeare is one such impressionable man because the figurative type of his poetry registers the latent character and personality of the poet himself: as fugitive as the trope he employs. The other meaning of type operative here, as in generic example, reiterates the paradox of the representative’s original reproducibility. The impressionability that sets Shakespeare apart and that makes his expression unique as a poet also represents the very thing that makes his identity as typical and transferable as an impression, that relates him to all of us. Emerson gestures toward Shakespeare’s representative “double consciousness,” as with the other figures in Representative Men, as early as the title, which announces the essay’s dual focus: “Shakspeare; or, The Poet.”

82

Mediating American Autobiography

We should be careful, then, reading Emerson’s depiction of Shakespeare’s “power of expression,” to recognize that what the poet mirrors “without loss or blur” is precisely the loss and blur that constitute his representative identity as a poet. In other words, Shakespeare represents in and through his “pictures” the very nature of representation. His images are mediating images, reflecting back on the means of their picturing and the power of expression they exemplify. With regard to this crucial reflexivity that Shakespeare would seem to share with Emerson, we might say that Emerson reads Shakespeare’s “power of expression” much as Cavell reads the experience of Emerson’s essays: announcing and providing for its own conditions. Emerson provokes this recognition of Shakespeare’s exemplary impressionability by turning to the mediating image of photography.16 Emerson continues his portrait: In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation, at last, and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated. (CWE, 4:122)

What possibility of translation, we might also ask, is demonstrated in this—in Emerson’s—picture of Shakespeare’s example? Emerson’s troping of the conventional mirror-of-nature metaphor, offered in the previous passage, throws that potential into relief. That troping reminds us of the kind of shift from classical to Romantic analogues of art and mind that M. H. Abrams outlines in The Mirror and the 16. I use the term mediating image in the sense W. J. T. Mitchell proposes for an image (verbal or visual) that reflects on its own representational conditions, Iconology, 5–6. In Picture Theory, Mitchell defines the self-referential nature of such images (also called “metapictures”) in terms that link his concept both to photography and to the philosophical self-reflexivity of Emerson’s writing: “They may be primitive in a rather different sense, however, in their function as reflections on the basic nature of pictures, places where pictorial representation displays itself for inspection rather than effacing itself in the service of transparent representation of something else. Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the ‘self-knowledge’ of pictures” (48).

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

83

Lamp: from imitation to expression, from reflection to projection.17 Perhaps in line with that analogical shift, Emerson’s photographic analogy revises the very painting/mirror metaphor he had offered earlier: Shakespeare’s writing perfects nature just as photography (in this case, daguerrean portraiture) perfects painting. But Emerson’s analogical “Daguerre” in this passage just as surely unsettles the conventional status of the Romantic figures of expression and projection that Abrams identifies with the lamp. Shakespeare’s daguerrean perfection analogizes the poet’s location, as Emerson views it, in natural history; but the emphasis on what Emerson calls “perfect representation” is no Wordsworthian overflow of powerful feelings, one of Abrams’s models. Instead, the representative nature that Emerson’s “Daguerre” imagines is thoroughly visual, of course, and natural, but no less mechanical. The key to Daguerre’s photographic representation, as Emerson proposes here, is the power of its reproducibility, a potential suggested specifically by the implication of the image’s photochemical recording and development that Daguerre (and photography) discovers: “to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine.” This “plate of iodine” reminds us that Emerson’s “Daguerre” is a figure not for the image formed by the camera, but for the “strangeness of the discovery” that Daguerre locates in the process of (latent) image development and reproduction. It is not the picture, but the process of picture making that Emerson figures. In this analogy, Shakespeare is Daguerre to the extent that the inventor represents, and reproduces in his self-registered representations, the reproducibility that is (already) nature’s work. Emerson’s conflated example of Daguerre’s natural/chemical etching—a conflation marked by the ambivalent syntax, let the flower reproduce itself—vividly situates his language in the context of early photographic discourse. To that extent, the language implies a circularity that, if it is basic to photography, is just as crucial to Emerson’s conception of greatness. Daguerre discovers (and reproduces) a photography already latent in nature, and thus we might just as well call Daguerre “Shakespeare perfected” since the potential of pictorial representation that Daguerre reveals is—as with Shakespeare—like nature’s. Emerson’s “Daguerre” tropes upon the conventional mirror figure, a metaphor, as Abrams shows, most frequently applied to 17. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, 47–69.

84

Mediating American Autobiography

Shakespeare; but Emerson’s “Shakespeare,” whose expression already reproduces that potential to become as fugitive as a trope, is already a “Daguerre.” Shakespeare is an equally important figure in Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. But Carlyle’s use of the mirror metaphor to express Shakespeare’s “power of vision”—“No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror”—further suggests the difference at issue in Emerson’s photographic re-visioning of Shakespeare’s mirror of nature. Pamela Schirmeister asserts a crucial difference between Carlyle’s heroes and Emerson’s representatives, arguing that “even as Emerson evades Carlyle and the entire tradition behind him, his use for the representative moves well beyond the usual notions of imitation or mimesis that attach to representation in an aesthetic or moral sense.”18 Significantly, Schirmeister offers as a suggestive example of Emerson’s revision of Carlyle’s mimetic conventions the “unlikely comparison” of Shakespeare to Daguerre, of originality to photography. To read this unlikely and anachronistic reflexivity in Emerson’s analogy—Shakespeare is like Daguerre—is to recognize Emerson’s underlying conception of the impressionability that links the genius of a Shakespeare with a Daguerre and underwrites the similar “inventions” of a poet and a photographer. This returns us to Emerson’s “Fate” and its crucial reading of any “expression” (of character, of the times, of genius) in terms of an impression: Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them. This explains the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man,— of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. (CWE, 6:24)19 18. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 146, 148; Pamela Schirmeister, Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson, 152. 19. Regarding Emerson’s reference to women as the “best index,” Stanley Cavell “associate[s] Emerson’s invocation of the feminine with a striking remark of Helene Cixous’s . . . that while men must rid themselves of pain by mourning their losses, women do not mourn, but bear their pain” (“Emerson’s Constitu-

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

85

If inventions like photography are curiously contemporaneous and multiple—many histories list at least three different inventors: Daguerre, Talbot, Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce—the contemporaneity replicates the fate that makes such inventions, like women and great men, strangely iterable: “‘Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times” (CWE, 6:9). In the Shakespeare passage, the “curious contemporaneousness” of Emerson’s language further marks this impressionability. “Here is perfect representation”: it remains suggestively unclear whether this here refers to Shakespeare or Daguerre. Once again, for whom is the analogy? Similarly, the referent of the statement that follows, “now let the world of figures sit for their portraits,” could apply to either representative man. And, of course, it could just as well be the here of Emerson’s portrayal and the doubleimaged “figures” of his own representation: as though Emerson, reading Shakespeare by the (analogical) “mechanical means” of Daguerre, reproduces the “power of picture or expression” of both artists over again. I use the verb reproduce decidedly, since the simile from “Fate,” like iodine to light, returns us to the traits of photochemical development and reproducibility that characterize the true inventiveness of the photographic image. Photographic images are impressionable indexes: their representativeness lies in what they receive and reproduce. Emerson’s simile for any invention implies, in fact, that Daguerre and other inventors of the medium discovered photography by way of a reproductive potential already latent in nature. Shakespeare’s greatness, like any other inventor’s, and no less Emerson’s tracing of it, proceeds along similar, curious lines. Thus the “strangeness” of Daguerre’s discovery is also implicated in Emerson’s daguerrean analogy. Daguerre attends to his discovery as Shakespeare (or Emerson) attends to his writing: he lets photography,

tional Amending: Reading ‘Fate,’” 30). Cavell might just as well have turned to photography to elucidate the feminine in Emerson’s mediumistic character of impressionability. As Tom Gunning shows, nineteenth-century spirit photography reiterates the spiritualist principle of feminine receptivity and negative power: “All mediums, men or women, had to be, in Spiritualist parlance, feminine or negative (borrowing again from electricity and magnetism, a technical term which also has implications for photography), in order to let the spirit world manifest itself,” “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” 52.

86

Mediating American Autobiography

or poetry, or biography sit for its portrait and, as Emerson puts it in “Intellect,” converts or translates its nature into thought, “without which no production is possible.” Emphasizing the process of photography over the apparently fixed form of its product, Emerson’s photographic thinking reiterates his interest in Shakespeare’s demonstration of his medium. If the syntactical ambiguity of Emerson’s here unsettles the clarity of his own analogy of “perfect representation” as a photographic/daguerrean image, so too does it reproduce the very nature of the representation at issue. Emerson’s analogy provokes a different or at least a double reading of what “perfect representation” means. The daguerrean metaphor, suggesting the kind of detail and accuracy that make the image seem uncannily real, certainly figures the kind of precision that Emerson locates in the physiognomics (“finishes an eyelash”) of Shakespeare’s expression. But the daguerrean image’s perfection of detail is uncanny in a further, more implicit manner. The very power of that accurate and complete picture lies in its potential, as an image, to be reproduced. The precision of the image is unfixed in the process that enables Daguerre “at leisure to etch a million.” This reading goes against the grain of the auratic individuality that is generally associated with the daguerreotype—unlike the photograph, each daguerrean image is unique since there is no separate negative—but it is a conflation that Emerson reads in the analogical potential of Daguerre’s plate of iodine. In the lecture “Memory,” to consider another example of this conflation of (photographic) recording and reproduction, Emerson adduces the indexical nature of memory’s “perfect apparatus”— “there is no book like the memory, none with such a good index”—by observing and extending one of its primary figurations: The memory collects and re-collects. We figure it as if the mind were a kind of looking-glass, which being carried through the street of time receives on its clear plate every image that passes; only with this difference, that our plate is iodized so that every image sinks into it, and is held there. But in addition to this property it has one more, this, namely, that of all the million images that are imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate in the moment when we want it.20 20. Emerson, Complete Works, 12:93.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

87

Once again, Emerson appeals to photography’s complication of the mirror metaphor, the difference in which images are not merely reflected but imprinted, fixed by the iodized plate. But even more explicitly here, Emerson adds a further “difference” to the analogy, an apparently contradictory one: memory’s photographic “recollection” means that every unique, imprinted image can exist and appear as such, recollected, precisely in its ability to be reproduced, to reappear in one moment and alternately, in other moments, to disappear. The one-in-a-million image, Emerson suggests here, as in the Shakespeare passage, receives its representative power from the potential to etch a million images from one—or at least to continue the process at later points in time. Thus Emerson’s analogical use of Daguerre complicates not only the mirror metaphor, but also the very analogical understanding of daguerrean portraiture that he tropes. Emerson’s conflation of these different, yet related types of image reproduction draws out the characteristic that makes both similarly representative. Both types of photographic representation, the daguerrean and the still existing negative–positive process, offer a double image: a picture that implicates its own process of development, a trace of its own constitutive negation. In other words, the conditions of representation are latent in every represented image, a difference that photography reproduces and demonstrates in its impression. As I argued in the previous chapter, this same impressionability of photography reiterates the difference that the most prominent discourses of photographic art in this early period seek to efface and overcome with the convention of the photograph’s “expression.” We observed an influential example of this convention of photographic expression in Marcus Root’s 1864 treatise on the theory and practice of photography, or “the heliographic art,” The Camera and the Pencil. It is worth returning to Root, here, to elaborate how Emerson’s photographic memory invokes and resists such conventions. Root focuses more directly on the new medium than does Emerson in any of his figurative engagements with photography. However, even the quickest of glances through Root’s “text-book” reveals that his photographic discourse is no less figurative. Quoting the physiognomist Lavater, “Faces are as legible as books,” Root understands that photography analogically represents a “language of the face” that is “immutable and universal”: “The face is to a man what the dial is to a clock, or a table of contents to a book, viz., the

88

Mediating American Autobiography

index of the soul.”21 Root’s language of photography, circulating as it does around the nineteenth-century physiognomics of character and expression, locates this treatise within the same age of “ocular” personality that makes Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans as much a text of representative men as Emerson’s contemporaneous text is a gallery of biographical portraiture. Juxtaposing verbal portraits of nineteenth-century American leaders such as Calhoun and Webster with elegant engravings made from Brady’s daguerreotypes, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans was published on the same day (January 1, 1850) as Emerson’s Representative Men. As photographic authors, Brady and Root also had their eyes trained on the impressionable man. We can take this reflexivity further, since Root’s discussion of the “uses of the heliographic art” and the “genius” with which the true photographer reveals the “individuality” and “expression” of his subject seems to echo the familiar Emersonian language of the representative as much as Emerson’s words might be said to echo the familiar terms of photographic portrayal. Consider Root’s intonations in the following passages: The pure, the high, the noble traits beaming from these faces and forms,—who shall measure the greatness of their effect on the impressionable minds of those who catch sight of them at every turn? . . . . . . The sitter, before a transcript of him is taken, should be put into a mood, which shall make his face diaphanous with the expression of his highest and best, i.e. his genuine, essential self.

In the series of chapters that follow upon these passages, Root’s various descriptions of photographic practice constitute the double focus of the book, the face in and the face of photography: “The Human Face—The Mirror of the Soul and the Chief Subject of Art” (chapter 7); “Expression—Through the Face and Figure” (chapter 19). Throughout, Root’s own metaphorical figures for the performance of photographic expression—which is to say, the art of representing the genuine and essential expression of the sitter—duplicate the kind of ambiguous language that Emerson uses to mark his paradoxical conception of impressionable selves, original reproductions. The terms of 21. Root, The Camera and the Pencil, 85.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

89

Root’s photographic “transcript”—or, elsewhere, “stamp” or “index” or “mask” or “mirror”—of genuine identity reflect a mechanics of selfexpression that his process claims merely, and immediately, to portray. Root’s photographer makes the sitter’s essential nature reproduce itself. “But after seeing the expression to be represented,” he explains of this transcription, “the next step is to represent it by some means.” Or, better yet, as he will go on to phrase the ambivalent mechanics of this Franklinesque, artful presentation of the natural self, in order for the picture to “express the true character of the individual,” the subject must be naturally posed and disposed toward his genuine expression: “While the artist is disposing his sitter for taking, he should keep up a cheerful, genial, appropriate conversation . . . in order to summon, if possible, a genuinely characteristic expression into the face.”22 Root, however, has no such paradox of this photographic self-making or, to use our earlier phrase, no such portrait betrayal of the medium in mind. Herein lies the value of comparing Root’s thoroughly conventional view of photography to Emerson’s. Root’s advisory language of photographic expression relies upon and (in the linguistic sense of his discourse) transcribes the representational means—the essential characteristic of any photographic image—that his notion of a “genuine, essential self” effaces. The reading of photographic transparency or immediacy by way of photography’s very mediation is nowhere more alive than in Root’s slippery discourse of expressive faces. Photography materially transcribes or indexes the genuine identity readable in the human face. Following Root’s own physiognomic logic, this is to say that the photographic medium reveals the mediated nature of any such facial expression. Root himself characterizes the human face as “the most perfect of all mediums of expression,” a characterization that the photographic portrait, at least rendered artistically, expresses and indexes.23 In fact, Root at times would seem to anticipate Cavell’s later reading of the significance of photography and film, that the fundamental event of the (photographic or cinematic) medium is the revelation of the medium itself—except that Root’s medium of expression, the photographed face, seeks to remove all traces of the photographic medium that conveys its expression. For Root, the true photographic art, to be rigidly distinguished from the practices of its “mere mechanics,” fixes the metaphorical 22. Ibid., 27, 34, 164, 91. Root’s emphases. 23. Ibid., 144, 84.

90

Mediating American Autobiography

forms of character and identity and genuine expression by naturalizing and occluding the very mediation and (photochemical) reproducibility the photographic medium relies upon. Photography is not merely mechanical or merely imitative, Root argues repeatedly, but as artistic and natural as painting. “Now the true artist, of whatever class, is substantially an imitator of the Supreme Proto-Artist,” Root argues concerning the process of successful portraiture, in which “every successive performance” represents the originality and individuality of the sitter: “His leading aim is to reproduce, as exactly as possible, the creations of the Divine Original. Therefore he must detect and ‘fix’ the expression marking the personality of his subject, or he shows himself, virtually, an incapable and a sham.” Root’s “performance,” so conceived, thus attempts to obscure, indeed, erase, the very technology of photographic reproducibility that his own theory relies upon and names. The fixed and exact expression of every (positive) photograph, its apparent uniqueness and immediacy, does the same: partially concealing in its developed image, in the very fact of its development, traces of the process of its own production. Root’s theory of photographic portraiture thus betrays the indexical and chemical nature of the medium that it both suggests with its own language and seeks to avoid. As I have noted, there is a telling example of this avoidance—and its foregrounding in Root’s text—in his suggestion that, in order to create and summon the most genuine expressions of the sitters in the studio, the “chemical room” or darkroom “should be so arranged, as to prevent all fumes of chemicals from reaching and annoying visitors to the apartments.”24 Whatever else Emerson may mean in “Experience” when he addresses the unhappy and unhandsome condition of our necessarily mediate existence (“We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately”) and compares it to the “gulf . . . between the original and the picture,” it is tempting to think that he has an understanding of a studio experience like Root’s in mind when he concludes, “It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and will find a way to punish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory” (CWE, 3:46). Root’s notion of photographic “presentments” celebrates the medium’s representative potential to render biographical likeness. But it does so by effacing the underlying potential of those unique presen24. Ibid., 32, 144, 101.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

91

tations, as photographic images, to be repeated and reproduced, developed. Emerson’s daguerrean “perfect representation” invokes these same conventions of biographical photography located in the parlors of the portrait studio, but celebrates the reverse, the chemical secrets of photography’s dark chamber. Shakespeare’s vivid images are perfect precisely because of the reproducibility that informs the image and unsettles its originality. For Emerson the dialectical dynamics between original and reproducible, (immediate) essential identity and (medial) mechanical difference, (positive) presentment and (negative) representational traces, are precisely what any artistic production naturally reproduces. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare because, as with a photographic picture, what makes him positively recognizable to us as “Shakespeare” is precisely that negation that makes him other than himself. If Shakespeare is also or already a “Daguerre,” as Emerson’s analogy suggests, it is because his demonstrable identity, his representative allo-biography, is as uncanny as a Daguerre—the proper noun also used to refer more generally to the daguerrean image. Shakespeare’s expression thus demonstrates its own power latent in the forms of its representations, shifting our focus, as Emerson says in “Poetry and Imagination” with regard to the crucially metonymic nature of the poetic imagination, back from the represented “forms” onto the process and “method” they reproduce: “Then we see that things wear different names and faces, but belong to one family, that the secret cords or laws show their well-known virtue through every variety . . . and the interest is gradually transferred from the forms to the lurking method.”25

Use with Caution Developing upon that “lurking method,” Emerson asserts in “Poetry and Imagination” a remarkable proposition as to the character and use of all thought. “All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless passing of one element 25. Emerson, Complete Works, 8:5. In the lines that precede “lurking method,” Emerson points to Faraday and the lessons from chemistry as “broad hints” indicating that the “conveniency we call Nature is not final,” “suggesting that nothing stands still in Nature but death; that the creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else, streaming into something higher; that matter is not what it appears;—that chemistry can blow it all into gas” (4).

92

Mediating American Autobiography

into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis . . . the imagination is the reader of these forms.”26 I am not sure that Emerson’s readers have taken this lesson in metonymy to heart with regard to Emerson’s own method of thinking and his imaginative readings of nature’s forms. Emerson’s photographic thinking offers us a crucial marker of this metonymy and method of his larger thought, particularly his readings of the uses of greatness and representativeness. Toward the end of his third lecture in Representative Men, “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” Emerson warns his reader to recognize the nature of Swedenborg’s mysticism. He cautions us to remember that in reading and quoting from the originality of this thinker, we are reading what is itself already quotation, that we are already reading originality’s necessary reproduction. This caveat lector is an appropriate place to end this chapter, if only because the familiar doubleness of the image—another image onto the problem and power of images—recalls us to the strangeness of reading the implications conveyed through photography’s representative picture: These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are perverted. . . . But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth,—not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen. (CWE, 4:74)

Swedenborg’s symbolic “pictures” are potentially as dangerous as the portrait that would claim to fix the transitional truth of any representative “image” of thought. Emerson’s warning, here, thus also doubles back on itself. “These pictures” are also Emerson’s, not merely because the syntax of the passage is, once again, ambiguous and “impressionable,” but more to the point, Emerson’s very concept of the representative or genius and his/its symbolic nature is 26. Ibid., 8:14. In “Art and Criticism,” Emerson further defines metonymy as the figure of, and for, the fluidity and convertibility of all expression, all writing: “All conversation, as all literature, appears to me the pleasure of rhetoric, or, I may say, of metonymy. . . . Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be only a new version of our familiar experience, and we set about translating it at once into our parallel facts. We have hereby our vocabulary” (Complete Works, 12:300).

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

93

largely informed by Swedenborg’s “doctrine of Representations and Correspondences” (as Emerson cites him in this same essay), his theory of “identity and iteration” readable in nature’s “endless picture language” (CWE, 4:65–67). Here, then, is another provocative image of what makes Emerson’s conception of genius, and its portrayal in this book, a flickering paradox of its own dis/appearance: the representative language of Swedenborg, one of the origins for the very conception of representativeness that Emerson is in the process of displaying, must be read “as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth.” In his attempt to fix a dictionary of nature’s symbolic language, Emerson’s Swedenborg neglects this truth of any image’s evanescing and accidental picturing of the truth. “The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught,” Emerson comments of Swedenborg’s books, “and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written” (CWE, 4:68). I would like to suggest, finally, that this picture of Swedenborg’s slippery mis/ representativeness (depending on how carefully or inventively we read him), offers a view onto the very slipperiness of Emerson’s photography we have been tracing here. The absence of any explicit photographic figure in the Swedenborg passage—a passage that nevertheless implicates the very nature of photography and places it before the reader’s eyes—might also suggest the significance of the absence of actual images in Representative Men. That absence seems particularly striking not only in view of Emerson’s engagement with photography and visual representation, as we have surveyed it, but in the face of the contemporaneous biographical project Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans. However, the representative vision of biography that Brady’s Gallery offers its readers in 1850 replicates the kind of stereotyping of vision that Emerson finds dangerous in Swedenborg: an engraving of the image’s tenacious fluctuation, an effacement of the partiality of its truth. There is in Brady’s book, in this regard, precisely the same conception of photographic immediacy, and the same avoidance of the traces of mediation, that we find Root stressing so systematically the following decade. Indeed, Brady’s images, as the introduction written by C. Edwards Lester proposes, are to be viewed as efforts in photographic conservation; they are not reproduced images of monumental greatness or genius so much as the preservation of genius and greatness in the form of a monument. “The first half of the century has now drifted by,” Lester intones, “. . . and we wish before those great men who have made it illustrious are gone, to catch their departing forms,

94

Mediating American Autobiography

that through this monument of their genius and patriotism, they may become familiar to those who they will never see.”27 The difference, then, between the vision of greatness offered in Brady’s Gallery and the one we find through the “lens” of Emerson’s “uses” of greatness is that between permanence and fluctuation, between what Lester calls conservation and what Emerson calls conversion. This difference is further marked photographically: a difference between the view of photography as a monument of permanence and truth and the recognition Emerson suggests from the beginning, of photography as a means of reproducing pictures of truth’s accidence, beginning with (and contingent upon) its own. As Alan Trachtenberg perceptively observes with regard to Brady’s Gallery, this contingency remains largely effaced in the final product offered to readers; the lithographic engravings produced from Brady’s daguerreotypes serve to fix the uncanny fluctuations and traces of mediation of the original daguerrean images. Trachtenberg points out the reproductive sleight of hand that the whole of Brady’s Gallery offers in the monuments of its visual and verbal pictures: “Like d’Avignon’s lithographs, Lester’s prose diffuses the daguerrean effect, transforming whatever is ambiguous and indecisive into conventional heroic rhetoric.”28 Set against this diffusion of the image and the conventional occlusion of the photographic process by way of its apparently fixed form, Emerson offers a double image for a method of reading Swedenborg’s symbols and analogues and—to the extent that language is symbol and all thinking is analogizing—a method of reading as such. Read these pictures, Emerson suggests, as one reads and reproduces a “Daguerre.” Shift the image back and forth, from positive picture to its other half, what Emerson calls in “Fate” the circumstances of “negative power”; recognize an image of truth’s reproducible identity: a picture true precisely in its failure to fix the endless permanence of its transition, the means of its representation (CWE, 6:8). This metonymic and “magnetic tenaciousness” of Emerson’s images in Representative Men finds its counterpart in the conception of the book overall. Each representative figure is double, as the chapter titles remind us, a unique name and a general type; and each portrait, in a further trans27. C. Edwards Lester, ed., The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, containing the portraits and biographical sketches of twenty-four of the most eminent citizens of the American Republic, since the death of Washington. From daguerreotypes by Brady— engraved by D’Avignon, n.p. 28. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 50.

Emerson’s Photographic Thinking

95

figuration of the biographical convention of emulation, offers a double image of the (double) subject—concluding with the problems attending each figure, the positive aligned with the negative. Though there is no “Daguerre” in the Swedenborg passage, no explicit analogical thinking of photography as we have found elsewhere, Emerson’s visual rhetoric still implicates the method of photography. That such photography remains implicit in Emerson’s picturing of Swedenborg’s thought should come as no surprise, given the very implication of Swedenborgian thought in the origins of photography. As Rosalind Krauss argues in “Tracing Nadar,” one of the speculative keystones of early photography, the view of the image’s representativeness or the “inherent intelligibility of the photographic trace,” develops out of the nineteenth-century “marriage of science and spiritualism” that she explicitly locates in the physiognomic theories of Lavater and the “representative” writings of Swedenborg. Krauss emphasizes the indexical nature of the photographic or “luminous trace”: an impression that “can double as both the subject and object of its own recording.” Photography thus offers a double image whose representational value as a trace is as much metonymic as metaphorical. To use Emerson’s definition of metonymy, photography works by “using one word or image for another”; but that image or symbol, rather than replacing its object entirely, represents it by indexing its own accidental and fugitive relation to it, its own “magnetic tenaciousness.”29 In other words, such a “fluent symbol” in image or word shares the double consciousness of Daguerre’s strange discovery. Photography’s metonymic character lies in its ability to reveal—which is to say its inability to conceal—the doings of the medium. It is for that reason that photography shares in the fate of Emerson’s books and figures so crucially in the thinking within them.

29. Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” 42. In fact, Krauss reads Swedenborg by way of Emerson, citing his own citations of Swedenborg from Representative Men, though she makes no connection between Emerson and photography. Emerson’s definition of metonymy is from “Art and Criticism,” Complete Works, 12:300.

3

- Pencil of Nature Thoreau’s Photographic Register

He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau”

In remembering Henry David Thoreau in his 1862 eulogy, Emerson turns to the language of photography to convey the pertinacious vision of the man he names “our naturalist.” Even casual readers of Thoreau will sense what Emerson means by “his memory was a photographic register.” The commitment Thoreau brought to recording the particular nature of the world he would spend his life observing and registering in his writing reaches us with the descriptive force of the photographic. Thoreau sought to record his world, in other words, as thoroughly and faithfully as photography claimed to do— a claim, in fact, that began at the same time that Thoreau began writing. Following Emerson’s lead, various editors and artists have amplified and illustrated this photographic register of Thoreau’s work with a thoroughgoing history of reproductions—portraits of the author and his environs—that visually complement the verbal texts and provide a map for what one Sierra Club edition names “Thoreau Country.”1 Remarkably, however, there has been little criti1. In addition to the considerable work of photographer Herbert Gleason, whose images adorn the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s Writings (discussed below), 96

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

97

cal investigation regarding the register of photography in Thoreau’s writing. This chapter sets out to address that neglect in exploring the juxtaposition of photography and writing in Thoreau’s work. In demonstrating the overlooked significance of the photographic in Thoreau, I argue that Thoreau engages the new visual technology of representation not merely as a figure in his writing, but as a crucial figure for that writing: photography, in this sense, offers Thoreau a complex image for how the writer registers the nature of his world. In his eulogy of his neighbor, Emerson selects a photographic analogy that conveys Thoreau’s senses of pertinence (and impertinence). Here is another slippery Proteus not so easily caught. Photographic register implies a provocative coincidence of visual technology and the intensely autobiographical method of Thoreau’s observation, the basis for his writing. Thoreau’s first-person experience of all he saw and heard is retained in his books, Emerson suggests, much like a photographic recording. The editors of the 1906 Houghton Mifflin edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau render this coincidence of autobiographical vision and photographic register more formal and significant. In the “Publishers’ Advertisement” that precedes Emerson’s eulogy, we are introduced to two crucial features of this new “complete view” of Thoreau’s work: the inclusion of the journal (fourteen volumes in this edition) and the inclusion of photographic reproductions, beginning with the frontispiece portrait prefacing the initial volume (that now-iconic image of a partially bearded Thoreau reproduced from an 1856 daguerreotype [see fig. 4], one of only two photographic images taken of him) and extending throughout the edition in the elegant photographic illustrations (photogravures) of Thoreau’s Concord made by the naturalist photographer Herbert Gleason. The publishers emphasize that the two reproductions, the journal recordings and the photographic prints, are not to be viewed as merely supplements to the previously published work. They are, as illustrations and observations, a part of that work as such: there is the book published in 1946 titled Thoreau’s Walden: A Photographic Register, with photographs taken by Henry Bugbee Kane to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Thoreau’s Walden experiment. More recently, there is the book by naturalist photographer Eliot Porter, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” in which Porter’s images are published next to excerpts from Thoreau’s writing, and the Sierra Club book Thoreau Country: Photographs and Text Selections from the Works of H. D. Thoreau, which returns to Gleason’s images.

98

Mediating American Autobiography

Figure 4. Frontispiece portrait of Henry David Thoreau from the 1906 edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. (Reproduced from a daguerreotype made by Maxham of Worcester, Massachusetts, 1856. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

Mr. Gleason has made a careful study of all Thoreau’s writings, including the manuscript Journal, and has explored with equal thoroughness the woods and fields of Concord, visiting the localities mentioned in the Journal and getting photographs, not only of the places themselves, but also of many of the fleeting phenomena of the natural year in the very spots where Thoreau observed them. . . . It will be apparent that Mr. Gleason’s pictures are in the fullest sense illustrations of the text which they accompany. (WT, 1:v–vi)

This, too, is apparent: the editors suggest for Thoreau’s writings and manuscripts an analogy between photographic depiction and natural

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

99

description; Thoreau has invited the careful study of the photographer Gleason. In what fuller sense of the word might photography as an idea and representational technology in the 1840s and 1850s (not just Gleason’s photographs in 1906) be said to illustrate Thoreau’s text and the natural world that his work seeks to record? Or, to use the word Thoreau plays upon in the opening lines of Walden, in what sense is photography pertinent to the writer’s mode of life and— always of a piece with that life—his method of writing? Despite these indications and illustrations of a photographic register that we find through Gleason’s prints and earlier through Emerson’s words, Thoreau criticism has paid little attention to the question of the naturalist’s representational interest in photography. Robert Richardson’s rather quick dismissal of the matter in his fine biography of Thoreau has perhaps limited the critical interest: “Thoreau’s own vision of nature did not lead him either to photography or even to the language of photography.”2 In point of fact, throughout this chapter we will observe Thoreau’s interest in photography and the complex use of its language in his writing, focusing on several examples in which the new medium either makes an explicit appearance in the language of his work or, more implicitly, functions in the working and process of the thought and writing itself. This implication of a photographic process within Thoreau’s writing process reaches deeper than, and at times even contradicts, conventional photographic metaphors for vision. Richardson and other critics following him, I would argue, have neglected to read this more complicated register of photography in Thoreau’s visual language. Photography, nature’s newest representational medium, functions not merely, but complexly, as an analogy for the older medium, writing. According to Thoreau’s reading of the photographic medium and his reflections upon it in his writing, photography shares in the same fundamental dynamic of composition and inscription that this naturalist identifies with the medium of writing and exemplifies in page after page of his work. That work, emerging like a photograph from its subject matter, participates in the very “composition” of nature, a composition it seeks not so much to represent as to reproduce. Thoreau’s photographic register calls our attention to a technological concept of graphic reproduction—a conception photography shares with the pencil—and allows us to contextualize

2. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 51.

100

Mediating American Autobiography

and revivify a crucial tension in Thoreau’s work between (metaphorical) representation and (metonymic) reproduction. Focusing on his journal, Sharon Cameron characterizes the metonymic premise of Thoreau’s work as his “writing nature.” Thoreau notes in his journal that “a man writing is the scribe of all nature—he is the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing” (JT, 7:44). For Cameron, the analogy seems familiar (the book of nature), but its premise is more radical and unsettling. Thoreau wants not merely “to record nature or to take its dictation,” she argues, so much as to “incarnate its articulating will”; “writing nature” not in the sense of representing it from his fixed point of view, but in the sense of reproducing a nature that is already representational, a nature that subsumes, if not obliterates, his perspective within its workings: “nature writing itself.” In “Romancing the Real: Thoreau’s Technology of Inscription,” Laura Dassow Walls approaches a similar understanding of this metonymic desire to articulate, by participating in, nature’s writing. Focusing on the “writerly technology Thoreau developed and deployed through the 1850s” in large part in association with scientific technology, Walls understands Thoreau to “act on a productive desire to articulate nature” in the very marks—the very composition—of his writing. Thoreau’s interest in inscription certainly approaches the poetic, in various metaphors of pencils and leaves in his writing; but at the same time, perhaps even more crucially for Thoreau, his interest redefines the conventional definition of technology (namely, opposed to the poetic), consistently imagining writing at its (own) most metonymic level of contexture—the tools used to make writing. As Walls reminds us, Thoreau was engaged in the invention of literary technology, quite literally speaking, “both by his successful redesign of the common American pencil (which made gathering field notes much easier) and his invention of a machine to produce superior graphite (or ‘plumbago’) dust for the new reproductive technology of electrotyping.”3 In theory and in practice, photography is also a technology of inscription. To think of writing and photography as linked or (as Thoreau would suggest) “analogous” technologies of inscription is to recognize the crucially metonymic character of these two representational media. The photographic medium thus shares with Thoreau’s 3. Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s “Journal,” 47; Laura Dassow Walls, “Romancing the Real: Thoreau’s Technology of Inscription,” 141, 140.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

101

“writerly technology” the characteristic that photographer and theorist Allan Sekula identifies as photography’s “complex metonymic power.”4 For Sekula and other theorists, as we have seen, this power reiterates the constitutive tensions of all photographic meaning. Photography’s celebrated immediacy and objective truth (the impression is “drawn” or made by the object itself) develops, nevertheless, from the contingencies of the very mediation that the photographic process offers as such—from exposure to development to the circulation of the resulting image. This metonymy underlying and unsettling the metaphoricity of photographic truth makes the photographic image readable and communicable as an icon, potentially symbolic in the case of certain images—but only and always, therefore, by being readable as such, by remaining potential and residual, contextual and contingent. The unique, representational character of the photographic image is bound up, paradoxically, with its reproducibility, the means of the image’s making and multiplication; photographic meaning is marked and made present by way of the (continual) disappearance of the subject in (and into) the very process of its ongoing registration that the photographic image shares with other traces of nature. It is this registration of disappearance that is of particular interest to Thoreau. The contingencies of the photographic process reiterate the complexities of a process of natural inscription, “all the traces left by this local, partial, and arduous process,” as Walls argues, that Thoreau chooses to foreground and “refract” into writing.5 The first critic to recognize Thoreau’s desire to reproduce these contingencies of nature’s contexts to the point of resisting nature’s very description was Emerson, who identifies Thoreau’s resistant “power of observation” in the sentences that precede his figure of the “photographic register” in his eulogy. “His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society. ‘Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in my mind, would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.’” Having thus called up Thoreau’s voice, Emerson then concludes with a further hint toward the uncanny: “His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses” 4. Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” 100. 5. Walls, “Romancing the Real,” 134.

102

Mediating American Autobiography

(WT, 1:xxx). In the pages that follow, to help read this dynamic and complicated figure of photography in Thoreau’s writing, and specifically to see how Thoreau’s recognition of its metonymic power figures as one of his “additional senses” of observation and description, I juxtapose Thoreau with a more recognizable photographic writer: William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor given partial credit for discovery of the medium in 1839. In particular, I turn our attention to Talbot’s text The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), the earliest attempt to “illustrate” photography and its nature in book form. Talbot’s photochemical experiments and his writings on those experiments represent a prominent example of photography’s emergence within the field of natural history and science—significant proof that photography, as Roland Barthes reminds us, was invented not by the painters but by the chemists. Thoreau may not have read Talbot or seen The Pencil of Nature directly, but he was certainly invested as a reader and writer in the combination of natural philosophy and poetry that interests Talbot and other key inventors of the medium.6 Moving back and forth between Thoreau and Talbot, between writings informed by photography and writings about photography, I employ a compositional perspective that Thoreau names in his journal “two views of the same.” In juxtaposing these two figures, I suggest no immediate connection between Talbot’s experiments and Thoreau’s work. Rather, I seek to unfold the joint scientific and aesthetic contexts that Thoreau’s “photographic register” shares with photography’s invention and, most especially, with what Talbot calls the medium’s “boundless powers of natural chemistry.”7 At the same time, focusing on the complexity of photography’s metonymy in terms of three related facets of the photographic process—namely, mediation, development, and composition—I read Talbot in sharp contrast to Thoreau. As a photographer and inventor, Talbot turns to writing, in the prefaces and captions that surround his images, to contain and erase the traces of photographic contingency that remain in his compositions, contingencies that constitute the invention. In con6. For Thoreau’s readings in natural history and his interest in science, see Walls, “Romancing the Real,” and her larger study, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science; for photography’s interest and emergence in the same kind of natural history that interests Thoreau, consult Geoffrey Batchen’s Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography and Larry Schaaf’s Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography. 7. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 39.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

103

trast, refusing to detach description from its surrounding contexts, Thoreau turns to photography, primarily in the language of his journal, to develop and articulate such traces in the register of his writing.

Nature’s Amanuensis In February of 1841, just two years after the discovery of photography was made public in Europe and thereafter introduced to America, Thoreau began experimenting with the nineteenth century’s newest and most spectacular representational medium. As far as we know, Thoreau did not literally experiment with the photochemical materials of the medium or its process of image reproduction. Instead, he experimented with the idea of photography in the workshop of his journal. “It is easy to repeat, but hard to originate”; Thoreau begins his entry for February 2, 1841, with that general proposition, and then turns for exemplary help to the photographic medium, specifically the daguerreotype, its most popular form at the time: Nature is readily made to repeat herself in a thousand forms, and in the daguerreotype her own light is amanuensis, and the picture too has more than a surface significance,—a depth equal to the prospect, —so that the microscope may be applied to the one as the spy-glass to the other. Thus we may easily multiply the forms of the outward; but to give the within outwardness, that is not easy. ( JT, 1:189)

To consider this passage as some sort of experiment with the photographic medium is to think of the experiment, of course, largely in the figurative sense. Thoreau is not literally inventing photography nor making a photographic recording onto a sensitized plate or piece of paper, as Daguerre and Talbot and a host of other proto-photographers were doing at the time, and had been since earlier in the century. Rather, Thoreau is marking in his journal the recent appearance of the photographic medium and speculating upon its imaginative, representational potential. We can think of this type of verbal picturing of photography and figurative recording of the medium’s imaginative potential as a rich example, as Sharon Cameron emphasizes, of the “dominantly visual character” of Thoreau’s work.8 8. Cameron, Writing Nature, 14.

104

Mediating American Autobiography

Such figurative recording, I want to emphasize further, remains appropriate and even crucial to photography and its historical invention. In fact, as Alan Trachtenberg argues with specific reference to Thoreau, the kind of verbal picturing we find in this passage is not only representative of early responses to the medium, it is a speculative picturing of “photography in the medium of language” crucial to the conception of photography as such.9 As we saw in the last chapter, Emerson also took up this picturing of photography in his journal in the same year. In writing about the medium and reflecting upon its potential, then, Thoreau engages photography at the very origins of its natural history. And with less ambivalence than we find in Emerson’s earliest responses to daguerrean portraiture, Thoreau offers with his words a recognition of the medium’s potential to write nature. Thoreau’s figure of photography as nature’s “amanuensis” offers a vivid case in point. With connotations of dictation and inscription— linked etymologically to manual, an amanuensis connotes one who writes by hand—Thoreau’s word registers a complex metaphor of photography (a form of natural writing) that is already by 1841 its most conventional figuration. Photography, so the tenor of the metaphor goes, is nature’s graphic medium that, unlike any previous representational art or technology, renders a purely natural image, free of the mediating and subjective complications of the artist’s hand or pencil. The medium, in other words, produces not merely any “book of nature,” but nature’s ultimate autobiography, nature inscribed and reproduced in “her” own light and writing. As with the very name photography, which metaphorizes the process and technology of the medium as some conjunction of light (photo) and writing (graphein), as something at once natural and cultural, so too we find the kind of metaphorical description and speculation evident in Thoreau—speculation as to what the medium is, or purports to do—throughout the early reflections on photography in the writings of its inventors and practitioners. In the second paragraph of the same entry, Thoreau extends the implicit and operative analogy between photography and writing, in fact, by calling attention to the potential of the photographic to serve as an analogy for all other kinds of poetic reproduction. “That an impression may be taken, perfect stillness, though but for an instant, is necessary. There is something analogous in the birth of all rhymes” (JT, 1:189). 9. Trachtenberg, “Photography,” 22.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

105

There is also something unconventional at work in Thoreau’s idea of photography’s analogical power. To recognize that, we need to recall the conventional figurations of photography, how the medium was pictured in and through language, conceptions that Thoreau both registers in his passage and begins to revise. As we have seen, Daguerre’s discovery was announced in January 1839 as consisting in “the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura,” as a natural process, more than merely a machine; as Daguerre describes it, “[It is] not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.”10 Daguerre suggests that the invention does not draw upon nature in the sense of representing it, representations being mediated by the hand of man; rather, drawing upon nature’s own spontaneous “drawing,” its own reproductive and inscriptive (“chemical and physical”) processes, daguerreotypy gives us nature herself. However, Daguerre’s strange syntactical construction—nature given the power (by Daguerre) to reproduce herself—belies the conceptual tensions and underlying paradoxes at hand. Talbot, Daguerre’s counterpart in England, would devise a different photographic process than the Frenchman (using paper and printing from negatives, closer to what we think of today as photography), but would conceive the medium’s purpose along much the same lines. Understanding that in the “manual process” of portraiture or any kind of sketching or drawing from nature, “the hand is liable to err from the true outline,” Talbot would begin to conceive of a process he would call “the new art of Photogenic Drawing.” “Contemplating the beautiful picture which the solar microscope produces,” Talbot reflects back upon his “early researches in photography” conducted in the 1830s, “the thought struck me, whether it might not be possible to cause the image to impress itself upon the paper, and thus to let Nature substitute her own inimitable pencil for the imperfect, tedious, and almost hopeless attempt of copying a subject so intricate.”11 Thus photography replaces the inaccuracies of the “pencil of man,” but, oddly, only in being caused and allowed (by Talbot, in this case) to “substitute her own inimitable pencil.” The photographic process, in this conception, is something of an original reproduction, a substitute—as the 10. Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” 11, 13. 11. Talbot, “Early Researches in Photography,” 48.

106

Mediating American Autobiography

“pencil” metaphor is another substitute—for a “Nature” it simultaneously represents and replaces. Talbot’s verbal picturing of the medium consistently brings to mind the fundamental tensions his words intend to resolve. Such are the tensions basic to photography’s earliest conception as, to re-cite Nancy Armstrong’s phrasing, a complex process of “unmediated mediation.” These conceptions and reflections on photography’s immediacy pinpoint the medium’s very identity as a medium. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin name this identity remediation, a paradoxical juxtaposition between claims for immediacy and hypermediacy that is the ground for every new medium. “Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience,” they argue about all media technologies since the Renaissance, “the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium.”12 This is surely the case with Talbot’s pencil, and he amplifies this tension not just in his writings about photography but in the very title of the book he publishes to offer evidence of photography’s promise. Published serially from 1844 to 1846, Talbot’s Pencil of Nature is a book of photographs and, more importantly, a book about photography and its future uses. In the 1840s, Talbot’s title phrase is already part of photographic convention, already familiar to the way photographic discourse distinguishes the new medium (and implicitly, its immediacy) by reference to previous forms of mediation. As Talbot suggests in his prefatory “Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,” he conceived the medium in the early 1830s in response to a failed attempt to sketch and draw nature as accurately as he desired. He offers there the often-cited account of how he somewhat accidentally came upon the idea for photography. In 1833, while attempting to trace sketches of Italian scenery with the use of the optical device known as the camera lucida, Talbot desired and imagined a more effective means to make accurate imprints from nature out of his own failure to do so. “I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success. For when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I 12. Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 14; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 19.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

107

found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.”13 From this melancholy failure to trace and record from nature, Talbot began his initial experiments to reproduce images that would be “impressed by Nature’s hand” and formed “without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.” Talbot’s theory suggests the pertinent context for Thoreau’s understanding that the photographic impression is reproduced in nature’s “own light.” The basis of photography is the photochemistry with which Talbot would go on to experiment and which he would discuss at length in his writings, speculations into what he calls in his 1839 account of his discovery the “boundless powers of natural chemistry.” As he further indicates toward the end of his “Brief Sketch,” his experiments expanded upon the earlier “researches on the action of Light by Wedgwood and Sir H. Davy,” photochemical experiments published in England in 1802, which, Talbot adds, “establishes their claim as the first inventors of the Photographic Art.”14 Moreover, Talbot would carry out his own experiments, in no small measure, with the collaboration of the chemist and natural philosopher Sir John Herschel, a photographic inventor in his own right. To understand the “nature” of the “Photographic Art,” at least as Talbot reads and conceives it, we need to give more attention to what Carol Armstrong calls the “Herschelian natural philosophy of (photographic) chemistry” that, however uneasily, informs the art.15 Talbot expounds in his “Brief Sketch” on “the invention of this theory,” and what he has in mind, specifically, is the underlying photochemical (or photogenic) composition of any and every photographic picture: The picture, divested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another. Now Light, where it exists, can exert an action, and, in certain circumstances, does exert one sufficient to cause changes in material bodies. Suppose, then, such an action could be exerted on the paper; and suppose the paper could be 13. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 76. 14. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 39; Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 75, 48, 83. 15. Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 186.

108

Mediating American Autobiography

visibly changed by it. In that case surely some effect must result having a general resemblance to the cause which produced it: so that the variegated scene of light and shade might leave its image or impression behind, stronger or weaker on different parts of the paper according to the strength or weakness of the light which had acted there.16

This “theory” of the photogenic basis of the picture, the light and photochemical reactivity (also known at the time as actinism) that constitute the image, suggests the indexical status of the photographic image that theorists of the medium consider its “ultimate nature.” Carol Armstrong, with reference to Talbot’s photographic prints published in The Pencil of Nature, calls this photography’s “indexical sine qua non,” understanding, as Talbot did, that the image, as an impression, remains a part—a chemical and physical trace—of what it represents. As Talbot’s “divested” photograph suggests, the resulting image bears a “general resemblance” not so much to what it represents (the image as icon) as to the action that causes and produces its visible changes. This is the indexical and metonymic power of the medium that Barthes has in mind when he reminds us that it was the chemists, not the painters, who invented photography: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.”17 Like his compatriot and fellow inventor Herschel, Talbot was a chemist in the researches that led to the making of photographic impressions. However, in the writing that frames those impressions as a “new art of Photogenic Drawing,” most notably in the preface to The Pencil of Nature and, as I will show further on, in the captions that are juxtaposed with each photographic reproduction in the book, Talbot turns from the underlying metonymy of photographic impressions to the metaphors of drawing and painting. As Barthes suggests, this turn from the metonymics of photochemistry to the painterly metaphorics of optics and art is a long-standing confusion in the history of the medium. As I have suggested, it is a familiar turn away from the medium as a medium—despite the very language and conceptions of mediation that inform the claims for immediacy. As we saw from Emerson’s perspective, this blindness to mediation is a characteristic of the times. In contrast to Talbot, and even more tenaciously than Emerson, Thoreau is interested in photography as a chemist and not as a 16. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 77–78. 17. Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 160; Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

109

painter. Thoreau makes specific engagements with photographic chemistry that we will explore in the next section. In the 1841 journal passage, we begin to witness this difference from the painterly conventions of photographic discourse in Thoreau’s linking of photography to writing. Thoreau reverses the conventional analogy that this writerly depiction of photography employs and foregrounds. Rather than using figures of writing and the tools of inscription to think of and imagine photography and the phenomenon of its “ultimate nature,” Thoreau uses photography to think of and imagine the ultimate nature of writing. What begins as a picturing of early photography in Thoreau’s chosen medium of language turns and develops into “something analogous,” something basic to his understanding of photography: a picturing of writing by way of the medium of photography. Photography begins to matter in Thoreau’s writing along the lines of this reversal of analogy and convention. In his discussion of the important (and neglected) “literary record” of photography, Trachtenberg cites Thoreau’s journal meditation because of its significant focus on writing. “Most important for Thoreau is the analogy to writing,” Trachtenberg reads Thoreau’s passage; “the daguerreotype reveals how an exact and accurate description of facts can release symbolic resonances and implications. Under the right circumstances a copy—a repetition or reproduction of things in the world—might be an original, and originating, experience.”18 For Thoreau, then, one of the key implications resonating in the photographic medium is, as Trachtenberg argues, its underlying paradox of original reproduction. Whereas that tension, or some other variation on it, can be read just under the surface of Talbot’s language of mediated immediacy, we find in Thoreau’s conception the foregrounding of such language that not only recognizes the underlying tension, but would seem to celebrate its complications. Rather than attempting to resolve or efface the paradoxes of natural writing and original reproduction that such photographic descriptions evoke, Thoreau’s passage elaborates upon the larger significance of them. Indeed, Thoreau celebrates the ambiguity of photography’s position as a form of representation that somehow links and juxtaposes invisible interiority with the external world, depth with prospect, origination with repetition: “giv[ing] the within outwardness.” As Thoreau reads it, this mediacy is what makes photographic representation—a process of taking impressions 18. Trachtenberg, “Photography,” 22.

110

Mediating American Autobiography

and making something analogous from that—both difficult to conceive and so promising to contemplate. Thoreau is interested in a view of mediation that collapses subject with object, observer with observed, much as the photographic process collapses in its chemistry the subject and the object of its vision. Thoreau’s amanuensis registers the conventional metaphor of photography as a form of natural writing. But Thoreau would also have known that the etymological connotations of the word (manual) trace back to a peculiar meaning, “slave with secretarial duties.” That connotation, unearthed, helps us to better recognize the paradoxes that Talbot and others, forcing nature to become herself in reproduction, continually belie in their conceptions: the photographic medium remains subject to the very manual “nature” it is also the subject of; like an amanuensis, it is pure medium, awaiting its dictation. If amanuensis suggests a commonplace of photography figured as some form of Nature’s autobiography, Thoreau reminds us that photography’s ultimate nature, precisely as autobiographical, offers no easy objectivity. The photographic medium, rather, is as contingent and complexly metonymic—to recall Sekula’s definition of the medium, and yet another connotation of amanuensis—as nature herself. Photography is analogous to writing because it is a reflexive medium, not just a medium for reflective visual representation. In this conception, photography is a medium that reflects upon its own conceptual nature as a representational medium. Much as Stanley Cavell writes of the joint philosophical and writerly senses of Walden, Thoreau’s reading of photography, in this regard, might also be thought of as “about its own writing and reading.”19 Thoreau writes through the idea of photography more than simply about it, to the extent that he represents photography in the terms of the very reading and writing, the self-registering, that his project of recording nature shares with this other technology of inscription.

The Unfinished Picture Thoreau’s 1841 journal passage on the daguerreotype appears in the context of several entries from the same period in which he repeatedly reflects on the process of writing and its significance both for his 19. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, xiii.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

111

work and for what his work would survey.20 For Thoreau, photography (or daguerreotypy) serves to remark upon the significance of that writing process because the visual medium shares with writing the crucial and dynamic character of impressionability. Writing’s impression, like photography’s impression, always moves between two senses of the word: between the spatial sense of impression as that which is registered or reported in image or word, an impression that is made; and the more temporal sense of impression as that which reproduces or traces the thing (the image) impressed and registered, the making of an impression. Ten years later, in another period when Thoreau concertedly takes up the question of what he calls the “art of writing,” this dual understanding of impression becomes paramount. Reacting to Thomas De Quincey’s style of “impressions” that “express themselves with too great fullness and detail,” Thoreau complains that his sentences “say all they mean,” “are not concentrated and nutty.” Instead of De Quincey’s style, Thoreau proposes “sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things . . . sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life, went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation” (JT, 2:418–19). We might be tempted to read this call for an “impression” as photographic in its simplest or at least most familiar sense—the sense, for example, we have seen informing Talbot’s photographic desire to sketch accurately from (and as accurately as) nature: to reproduce immediately what is there, and to fix the reproduction. Thoreau similarly wants the page and its sentences to represent their subject faithfully and accurately, immediately, it would seem, and without distortion from man: something approaching Talbot’s “impressed by Nature’s hand.” But in fact, Thoreau complicates this understanding of an “impression” that we might (too) easily compare to the photographic, complaining that De Quincey’s sentences are too “faithful, natural and lifelike,” too accurate and, therefore, not suggestive 20. Richardson notes this context for the 1841 daguerreotype passage; however, he reads the implication of daguerreotypy as indicating Thoreau’s disinterest in photography, a point he elsewhere makes in arguing that Thoreau’s interest in the visual is related primarily to painting and not to the new medium of photography, Henry Thoreau, 94.

112

Mediating American Autobiography

enough. Thoreau’s interest in the suggestiveness, rather than the exactness, of writing is very much the issue here. For Sharon Cameron, who links this same passage to the radical strangeness of Thoreau’s journal project, sentences “which lie like boulders on the page” are more forbidding of conventional representation than faithful; such sentences suggest the crucial difficulty of reading the journal rather than an ease or simplicity with which it records or writes nature, or by extension, grants us access to it. For Cameron, then, this is a passage, like many in Thoreau’s journals, not about man writing nature but, to a great extent, about the resistance to that convention; Thoreau is interested, rather, in “nature writing itself.” That may still sound like Talbot or Daguerre and the conventions of photographic writing, penciling “pictures of nature’s painting.” However, as Cameron carefully reads Thoreau’s meditations on, and experiments in, a style of writing that would be faithful to the nature it records and reproduces, such writing remains resistant to these very conventions of stylistic comprehension and composition that it would seem, nevertheless, to evoke. It is not merely reproducing nature in writing, we might extend Cameron’s phrasing, but reproducing nature (already) writing and registering itself.21 Impressions, for Thoreau, are suggestive and appropriately faithful to the extent that they follow along the continuum of that dynamic. The significance of an impression as a recording or reporting from nature lies in its ability to remain incomplete and unfixed, to shift in meaning. Thoreau elsewhere associates this suggestiveness of the “art of writing” with the “primitive analogical and derivative senses of words” that the etymologist traces and with the “allegorical significance” of the life such words trace: “The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations” (JT, 2:462, 5:203). Thoreau’s use of allegorical and analogical identifies the key to his conception of writing as the creation of new impressions: not merely the spatial fixing or recording of images (be they verbal or visual or something in between), but further, their temporalized reproduction by way of their continual movement and displacement. Impressions thus offer the kind of raw, allegorical resonance that Thoreau reads in the visual phenomena of nature, perhaps most pointedly in reflections. In reflections, Thoreau marks not exact repe21. Cameron, Writing Nature, 47; Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 77.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

113

tition, but repetition through difference: “The reflection is never a true copy or repetition of its substance, but a new composition, and this may be the source of its novelty and attractiveness, and of this nature, too, may be the charm of an echo. I doubt if you can ever get Nature to repeat herself exactly” (JT, 10:97). In a word, a suggestive word of Thoreau’s, such dynamic impressions are not merely repeated or reported, but developed. We find that key word, developed, in an 1852 journal passage in which Thoreau returns to thinking about the process and value of the very writing he is doing. Appropriately enough, Thoreau begins this reflection with a sentence fragment: To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it is a distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentiments and thoughts which visit all men more or less generally, that the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion. . . . Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves. My thoughts are my company. They have a certain individuality and separate existence, aye, personality. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought. (JT, 3:217)

In the company of these thoughts on the chance juxtapositions and recordings that journal passages “frame,” a process Thoreau compares to an “unfinished picture,” we can locate the paradoxical analogue that Thoreau’s “art of writing” shares with photography. Even more to the point, here, it is the paradox and juxtaposition that underwrites Thoreau’s suggestive use of photography in these same lines. Photography is about fixing (recording) views in nature by way of a process of unfixing those views from their original locations: both in the initial (latent) exposure and subsequently in that exposure’s development. Photography’s “pencil” faithfully frames the nature of such views (or thoughts) by exhibiting them as part of a contingent process, as “unfinished picture[s]” whose “separate existence” suggests incomplete

114

Mediating American Autobiography

views toward, but not of, completion, a “frame in which more may be developed and exhibited.” Consider, as an example of Thoreau’s photographic imagining of the accidental and uncanny, the vision of photography’s “translation” that we find in an 1855 journal recording. Thoreau begins to record a winter vision he has had in a neighboring swamp: “I had a vision thus prospectively of these birds as I stood in the swamps. I saw this familiar—too familiar—fact at a different angle, and I was charmed and haunted by it.” Then, turning to the difficulty he has in fully recording the nature of this uncanny vision, Thoreau turns to photography. “Then I try to discover what it was in the vision that charmed and translated me. What if we could daguerreotype our thoughts and feelings! for I am surprised and enchanted often by some quality which I cannot detect. . . . Here the invisible seeds settle, and spring, and bear flowers and fruits of immortal beauty” (JT, 8:43–45). Notice that daguerreotype appears here in the form of a verb, an imagined desire. Well after this invention has achieved its familiar status and proliferation (particularly the daguerrean form), Thoreau continues to imagine photography’s potential. That potential is surely linked here, as it was in the 1841 journal passage, with some kind of metonymic, self-registering vision: to compose and arrange a self’s impressions and thoughts—to translate the spontaneous moments of the self’s ongoing translation in nature. But that potential translation and “vision” is no less crucially linked to what remains invisible or undetected; as we have seen, this is by nature of the trace that the photographic impression at once is and offers to us. Here, the very photographic figure that would appear, at least conventionally, to mark the idea of clear and uninhibited seeing, of singular and panoptic points of view, turns, strangely, to thoughts of what such vision can not yet see. We can turn to Talbot, once again, to situate the language of Thoreau’s photographic register and to recognize Thoreau’s resistance to conventions of photographic transparency. In plate 8 in The Pencil of Nature, Talbot publishes a print of two book-lined shelves, presumably taken in his library (see fig. 5). In the elliptical text that adjoins the image, titled “A Scene in a Library,” Talbot offers no direct comment on what the picture actually represents, as he does for the other plates. Instead, he offers his own “rather curious experiment or speculation” on what amounts to the spectral potential suggested in the discovery of photography, as yet unproved:

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

115

Figure 5. William Henry Fox Talbot, “A Scene in a Library.” Salted-paper print. Plate 8 from The Pencil of Nature, 1844–1846. (Courtesy George Eastman House.)

When a ray of solar light is refracted by a prism and thrown upon a screen, it forms there the very beautiful coloured band known by the name of the solar spectrum. Experimenters have found that if this spectrum is thrown upon a sheet of sensitive paper, the violet end of it produces the principal effect: and, what is truly remarkable, a similar effect is produced by certain invisible rays which lie beyond the violet, and beyond the limits of the spectrum, and whose existence is only revealed to us by this action which they exert. Now, I would propose to separate these invisible rays from the rest, by suffering them to pass into an adjoining apartment through an aperture in a wall or screen of partition. This apartment would thus become filled (we must not call it illuminated) with invisible rays, which might be scattered in all directions by a convex lens placed behind the aperture. If there were a number of persons in the room, no one would see the other: and yet nevertheless if a camera were so placed as to point in the direction in which any one were standing, it would take his portrait, and reveal his actions.

116

Mediating American Autobiography

For, to use a metaphor we have already employed, the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness. Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced with effect into a modern novel or romance; for what a denouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper.22

For a more complete reading of the intricacies of this incredible “scene” and its function in Talbot’s book, I defer to the compelling analysis Carol Armstrong offers in Scenes in a Library. What I would like to draw out, here, informed by Armstrong’s reading, is the way in which the scene is problematically self-reflexive. As Armstrong suggests, the plate is self-reflexive to the extent that it “images the world of books into which the photograph would be inserted,” among which “The Pencil of Nature itself surely would be included.” But the plate (that is, the image as well as the verbal speculation/description) is further self-reflexive to the extent that it both reflects upon and enacts the kind of “novel” speculation and imagination that it locates in photography. For Armstrong, then, “the mismatch of image and text is an instantiation of the speculative rather than bespoke nature of the relationship between text and photographic plate.” The speculative mismatch lies in the “gap between reading and viewing” that, as Armstrong suggests, the plate opens up and that, in the end, Talbot seeks to resolve: the text does not merely read (supplement) the image in the sense of viewing it, but in fact, proposes an understanding of the photographic image to be, as a form of reading and speculation, potentially unviewable. For Armstrong, Talbot is proto-Barthesian in this example, not only before the letter but against his own grain. In a book essentially about what Barthes would later call the studium of photography, the remarkable uses to which the medium can be put, studied, and made more familiar to us all, we find a punctum at the heart of photography, unsettling its representational conventions of visibility and familiarity, displacing photographic authority from photographer, from text, and even from the photograph itself, onto the as-yetuncertain future of its potential reading.23 22. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 91–92. 23. Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 126, 128. Armstrong makes the insightful link between Talbot and Barthes by way of understanding Barthes’s crucial punctum as a version of the chemical nature of the medium: “The qualities of the

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

117

We can think of this self-reflexive play between text and image, or between reading and viewing, as a problem for Talbot along the very same lines that the photographic impression is paradoxically double: the impression constitutes the “ultimate nature” of the image, informing its claims to objectivity and representational immediacy, only by being itself, as an impression and index, thoroughly mediate and endlessly reproducible. Talbot’s speculative “scene” presents another version of the fault line of photography’s mediated immediacy; here, the incredible objectivity of the camera and its optics is in tension with the more “allegorical” and invisible means of that vision, that other “camera” or “darkened chamber” crucial to the photographic process in which the impression is developed into an image: the chamber (camera) in which the film is exposed initially and then developed in the darkroom, so called to this day. Talbot’s reiterated metaphor of the eye of the camera, in this regard, might better be thought of as his attempt to remetaphorize the metonymic and destabilizing implications of the photographic process and its technology of reproducibility that he locates, in fact, at the heart of photography’s novel “idea”: the secret workings of “the darkened chamber.” Talbot’s “scene” offers a vivid example of the representational contest of early photography: a tension between the metaphorics of the fixed photographic image (the camera eye) and the underlying technology and unsettling metonymy of photographic chemistry. As Judith Roof argues about this symptomatic tension, photographic reproducibility (linked to its photochemical indexicality) introduces a technology that enables “metonymical faithfulness” but only by disrupting and displacing the metaphorical closure of the image, since the impression is “subject to a series of contiguous chemical and mechanical operations.” For Roof, as we have seen, the history of photographic discourse consistently “remetaphorizes” the potential and crucial disruptiveness of photography’s “errant metonymy,” its displacement of art by technology, ritual by reproduction, painterly photograph that fascinate Barthes the most are either those that fascinated the nineteenth century as well, or those that are best represented in nineteenthcentury photographs: the detail; the so-called punctum; the particular melancholia and mournfulness, the ca-a-ete of photography; its spectral dimension; the sense of the constative force of the photograph (because of its status as a direct ‘emanation’ of the real); and finally, the attachment to the chemistry, over and above the mechanical aspect of the medium,” 10.

118

Mediating American Autobiography

composition by chemistry.24 Talbot’s “testimony of the imprinted paper” is a case in point: conceived as a spectacular form of immediacy, revealing what remains invisible to the human eye, the evidentiary value of the photograph nevertheless remains contingent upon, displaced onto, the mediating process of taking and making the imprint. The various metaphors of nature’s painting and printing, in other words, work to contain the contingency of the process that his language can be said not only to evoke but—at least as Thoreau would view the fundamental metonymy of language—also to exemplify. In the end, it seems that what Talbot cannot envision, or what remains as yet unimaginable to him, is not the future of photographic technology he is (in fact, quite remarkably) anticipating, so much as how that technology would unsettle and leave perpetually unfinished the reading and writing practice (the other kind of sketching) he is employing. Talbot turns a blind eye toward what photography could reveal about the analogous processes of writing—the kind of speculative writing Thoreau imagines in and for his writing: frames of thought accidentally thrown together through which more may be revealed and developed. What if books were likened not to the camera focusing an image, but to the chemistry that registers it? In fact, Thoreau had considered this power of the writing medium to register the contingent at the very origins of his own writing, before photography’s discovery. Thoreau had something of his own “scene in a library”: a composition from 1835 in which he imagined the value and novelty of the kind of journal writing he would become known for, specifically, in terms of its speculative potential to record the life and thought that happen to us spontaneously. Thoreau pursued this reflective speculation, moreover, with a figure of quasiphotographic technology. “As those pieces which the painter sketches for his own amusement in his leisure hours are often superior to his most elaborate productions, so it is that ideas often suggest themselves to us spontaneously. . . . Hence, could a machine be invented which would instantaneously arrange on paper each idea as it occurs to us, without any exertion on our part, how extremely useful it would be considered!”25 The echoes here with Talbot’s desire to invent photography are remarkable, but also distinguishable. Thoreau’s idea of “instantaneous arrangement” differs crucially from Talbot’s vision 24. Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 37, 41. 25. Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, 8–9.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

119

in that Thoreau desired not the overcoming of the accidental and contingent, the fixing of what would otherwise pass, but rather the recording of the momentary in which the dynamic nature of the accidental might continue to inspire and suggest thought. Thoreau was interested not in “elaborate productions” but in the underlying mechanics of their reproduction.

A True Description The appearance of the daguerreotype in Thoreau’s 1855 recorded swamp vision reiterates a peculiarity evident throughout his reflections on the nature of visual phenomena. In such passages, we find a doubling of perspective that suggests at once the importance of vision to this writer and the unsettling of its common view. The uncanny features of his winter vision in the swamp of seeing the familiar differently, it turns out, are characteristic of Thoreau’s multiple and fluctuating “perspective” concerning the nature of visual experience generally, one in which the notion of a singular and fixed “point of view” is consistently re-vised and clarified, seen differently in terms of a process of writing and comprehension that enacts what Thoreau names “two views of the same” in an 1851 journal passage: “It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects, make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same.” As Thoreau goes on to suggest in this passage, yet another meditation in which his concerted foci on writing and vision intersect, the truer “point of view” of any composition, verbal or visual, would result from the composer’s attention to what he is not, at least not consciously or clearly, viewing: “That way of viewing things you know least of, least insisted on by you, however, least remembered,—take that view, adhere to that, insist on that, see all things from that point of view” (JT, 3:156–57). Thoreau’s “truer discipline for the writer” recirculates those other locations in his journal where the “habit of writing, of keeping a journal” is imagined in terms of photographic development. With “two views of the same,” we see a similar interest in the process of image development that Thoreau aligns with the prospectiveness and contingency of thinking: the emphasis is on the emergence of an idea

120

Mediating American Autobiography

as though it were an image in the darkroom of the mind, moving from negative to positive, from shadowy impression to composition on paper. Once again, Thoreau engages the language of photography as an analogy for representational description, only to subvert its conventions of immediate vision in favor of composition in another sense. Cameron notes that Thoreau, in his desire to go beyond and beneath a conventional representation or composition of nature, in favor of reproducing nature in its composition, engages analogies and tropes of mediation that emphasize failed attempts at correspondence.26 Composition, viewed in the photographic senses of natural chemistry, offers this alternative (and subversive) point of view on the potential for natural representation. In this final section, it remains for me to suggest how Thoreau’s photographic register invests the “truer discipline” of writing and composition with the representation of failure. In “Walking,” a lecture first delivered in 1851 and published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 shortly after his death, Thoreau continues to track this perspective on latent and uncanny points of view, “enchanted often by some quality which I cannot detect,” through a meditation on nature’s certain strangeness, its familiar alterity. “For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only.” Here, we see the ethos of Walden from the other side; Thoreau, it turns out, was as much a sojourner in nature as he was in civilized life. The reversal or shifting of the kind of naturalist perspective long associated with Thoreau becomes even more provocative in what follows. “Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features,” Thoreau remarks, echoing the lesson from Walden in which nature’s “wildest scenes . . . become unaccountably familiar” (WT, 2:232). He continues in “Walking”: The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds. . . . These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary. (WT, 5:242) 26. Cameron, Writing Nature, 46.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

121

Figure 6. Herbert Gleason, “The Old Marlborough Road.” Photogravure. Placed in vol. 5 of the 1906 Writings of Henry David Thoreau in the essay “Walking.” (Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

Thoreau’s intense surveying of nature, the operative metaphor and method by which, reading through his eyes, the depths of our nature become more familiar to us, turns out to be as transient as his stay at Walden Pond. We are acquainted with but one side of our familiar field of vision, Thoreau implies; and in that partial acquaintance, we continually fail to see the nature and the world we think we see.

122

Mediating American Autobiography

“Nature” appears in this passage as a quasi-photographic picture. In this reflection upon his surveying experience, Thoreau’s language invokes the terms of photographic portraiture; like Talbot before him, Thoreau seems to engage here the representational desire to capture the “pictures of nature’s painting” with something more permanent and unmediated than mere painting or sketching. But in that similar approach, we find that the portrayal and the description, even as a photographic “sketch” of sorts, nevertheless fails to capture what it surveys. Or, more to the point, the sketch is itself about the necessity of that failure and not simply, as with Talbot, about desiring to avoid that failure. In Thoreau’s visual remediation, any survey of the “familiar fields” can only be a temporary register; the final product remains just as evanescent as the traces Talbot desired to fix: “fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.”27 In this recognition of fading and the failure to fix what it would represent, photography appears in Thoreau’s passage to mark only what we have long taken to be the very opposite of its nature: a tendency to disappear. As a juxtaposing figure, once again, of writing and vision, of seeing and marking the world, Thoreau’s photographic vision appears (ironically) as dimly as the world he claims to read through it. Why ironically? Because the vision transcribes a process in which the development of photographic pictures and views, by its very (chemical) nature, informs and unsettles the permanent conditions of those views. Thoreau grasps that that paradox of informing and unsettling is in the very grain of every photographic scene, in its chemical composition. Earlier in “Walking,” Thoreau suggests the pertinent, photographic context for the passage including the statement “they have no chemistry to fix them,” which follows. Offering another example of the strangeness of “this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,” Thoreau points to the following piece of photochemistry: “There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered ‘actinism,’ that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal ‘are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine’” (WT, 5:238). Actinism is one of the early names used to describe the photographic process; it is also what Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce, anticipating both Talbot and Daguerre, called the “fundamental principle of this discovery”: “Light, in its 27. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 77.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

123

state of composition and decomposition, has a chemical action on bodies. It is absorbed, it combines with them and communicates new properties to them.”28 This discovery of light’s chemical activity reiterates the experiments in natural philosophy published by Sir Humphry Davy and Thomas Wedgwood in England around the same time, and upon which Talbot would draw. Writing in 1802, Davy identified the general character of chemistry to be fundamentally about composition and decomposition, about the altering “action on bodies”: “Chemistry is that part of Natural Philosophy which relates to those intimate actions of bodies upon each other, by which their appearances are altered, and their individuality destroyed.”29 Like Davy and Wedgwood, Niepce is considered one of the inventors of photography, since he too experimented with forming what he called “heliographic” images through this principle of light’s chemical action; he failed, however (also like Davy and Wedgwood), to find the chemistry that would adequately fix the images—which is to say, preserve the “composition” from its alternate and alternating identity, the very principle of decomposition that informs it. Niepce’s faded image, “View from His Window at Le Gras,” made circa 1826–1827 and considered to be the first photograph ever taken, remains a testament to the photochemistry that is at once photography’s informing and unsettling light. In its partially degraded form, the image Niepce referred to as a point de vue traces the composition of its subject, a view from the photographer’s window; the image offers the viewer a second view of the same familiar and still fading image, a window onto that other, fundamentally metonymic sense of its own photographic composition: the conditions of exposure and photochemical decomposition that are, less visibly, the point of view of every photographic trace. This fluctuating relation between fixed and fading images, visibility and invisibility—this dynamic of photography’s fundamental 28. Niepce’s discussion of his discovery is published in Louis J. M. Daguerre, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, 41. Marcus Root points to actinism in The Camera and the Pencil, favoring the term coined by Niepce, heliography, over the term coined by Herschel and favored by Talbot, photography: “Photography, ‘Light-Sketching,’ with all its derivatives, is a misnomer, since it is not light, but actinism, which is the producer,” xviii. 29. Humphry Davy, “A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,” 211.

124

Mediating American Autobiography

actinism—repeats the underlying paradox of the idea of photography. It is a paradox of photographic composition as decomposition, Geoffrey Batchen argues, “repeated in each of its individual instances.” “William Henry Fox Talbot’s earliest contact prints, for example, also hovered somewhere between life and death; perversely, the very light needed to see them proved fatal to their continued visibility.”30 Unlike Niepce or Davy, Talbot went on to discover photochemical processes that render the traced image less vulnerable to the degradations of fading and decomposition. But such fixing, the key to the photographic discovery, is still part and parcel of the photochemical process of reproducing traces; that process remains photography’s creative and potentially destructive “informing” light. Rereading Niepce’s and Talbot’s descriptions of the process and the fundamental metonymy of its “composition” and “impression,” we are reminded that photography needs to be thought of not merely as an optical process of representation (akin to painting, “nature’s painting”), but as a medium in which ongoing photochemical reproducibility underlies the optics and complicates its own claims of transparent, iconic identity. As Carol Armstrong elucidates in her reading of Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, several of the photographic plates he includes and comments upon point explicitly to the photochemical basis of the medium and the impression’s “indexical sine qua non.” Talbot’s photogram of a leaf (plate 7 in The Pencil of Nature) is one such example: an image, in fact, produced without a camera or lens (as many of his early images were) by exposing the object directly (photochemically) onto the sensitive paper. In effect, Talbot’s photogram (or contact print) reduces photography and its process to its most basic composition, and in doing so, in once again asserting the impression’s metonymic faithfulness, the assertion reiterates—by its own nature—what Armstrong reads as “its fundamental instability, its fragility, its fading and disappearance, and the potentiality of its ghostly return to invisibility—and to the chemical fact that the photograph was (and is) more impermanent by nature than other images, no matter the efforts to make it otherwise.”31 Thoreau’s readers today may well be familiar with Talbot’s photogram of the leaf without knowing it. The 1997 Beacon Press edition of Walden, annotated by Bill McKibben, reproduces two views of Talbot’s photographic leaves on its cover. I assume, since McKibben 30. Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” 12. 31. Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 16.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

125

makes no reference to Talbot or to photography in his introduction, that the images are offered as representations of a familiar icon and symbol in Thoreau, the leaf, not as markers of the process that Talbot used to reproduce the leaves onto paper. Photography, once again, seems interested in Thoreau more than we realize. And like the pictures themselves, Talbot’s written composition surrounding these images, as I have been arguing, belies the instability and impermanence of photographic depiction in his attempts to “fix” the problem. In plate 24, “A Fruit Piece,” Talbot concludes The Pencil of Nature by adverting his reader to the reproducibility that makes the photographic image unlimited in theory and susceptible to accidental circumstances and aesthetically limiting contingencies in practice. “The number of copies which can be taken from a single original photographic picture, appears to be almost unlimited,” he notes, “provided that every portion of iodine has been removed from the picture before the copies are made.” Assuming that this “accident” of continued exposure and decomposition is prevented, there are still other complications that Talbot goes on to address. “But being only on paper, it is exposed to various accidents,” which include the accidental circumstances of the photographic exposure itself, “the circumstances of light and shade and time of day, &c.” Of course, Talbot knew this from the beginning, commenting in his 1839 “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” that “the same natural process which formed the images would destroy them.”32 In other words, Talbot recognized—and equally seemed to resist the recognition—that the decompositional implications of reproducibility are fundamental to the photograph as such. The impression is an exposure of its circumstances, points of its own view. Photography provides a view or picture, a trace of its subject, precisely by being subject to its own condition as a photochemical trace. That chemistry remains the source of the photographic impression’s intimacy and celebrated ontology, but also, ironically, the basis of the impression’s instability and impermanence, its self-displacing identity as a reproducible impression: it is “those intimate actions of bodies upon each other,” as Davy observed, “by which their appearances are altered, and their individuality destroyed.” Photography can render images of the familiar world, then, to return to Thoreau’s quasiphotographic passage from “Walking,” but only through the potential 32. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 103; “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 37.

126

Mediating American Autobiography

of such images to move, to fluctuate, to alternate between fixed and fading, appearance and decomposition. In this sense, the recognition Thoreau expresses in that passage that seems to resist the claims of photography (“they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass”) turns out to be more engaged by an understanding of the nature of photography than Talbot seems willing to admit. There is no chemistry to stop the process of decomposition and fix the picture because the very process is, fundamentally, that chemistry. Similarly, to say that the “world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace” is to recognize that the “picture” (Thoreau’s primary figure for this evanescent “acquaintance”) is just that: a trace, a mark whose “ultimate nature” is to leave an impression by marking, in some form, its own leaving. Photography thus matters in the complexity of Thoreau’s project of registering nature’s fundamental metonymy in all of its leavings. Such is “that point of view” we find in the various traces and visible marks of nature and man, from leaves to footprints to arrowheads to sand banks that Thoreau foregrounds in his writing. These traces of nature’s ongoing process remind us of the unfamiliar and paradoxical other half of the representational condition of self-registering nature: call it, as Thoreau suggests in “Walking,” the power to fade.33 In some locations of the journal, Thoreau visibly marks the potential of these traces. For example, writing about the Indian arrowhead and its significance as an autobiographical inscription—“the footprint, the mind-print of the oldest men”—Thoreau includes a visible tracing of this “mark” rendered in his own hand. Reproducing those marks in his journal in image and word—“fossil thoughts,” as he calls them—Thoreau remarks, “I would fain know that I am treading in the tracks of human game,—that I am on the trail of mind,—and 33. In an early spring 1853 journal entry that reads as a companion to the “chemistry” passage from “Walking,” Thoreau celebrates nature’s chemistry and mechanics as an ongoing, unseen process, a kind of darkroom where nature develops: “It impressed me as a wonderful piece of chemistry, that the very grass we trample on and esteem so cheap should be thus wonderfully nourished, that this spring greenness was not produced by coarse and cheap means, but in sod, out of sight, the most delicate and magical processes are going on. The half is not shown. . . . The process that goes on in the sod and the dark, about the minute fibres of the grass,—the chemistry and the mechanics,—before a single green blade can appear above the withered herbage, if it could [be] adequately described, would supplant all other revelations. We are acquainted with but one side of the sod” (JT, 3:69).

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

127

these little reminders never fail to set me right.” But, as we are told further on in the same entry, “these little reminders” resist the memorialization of museums and cabinets and thereby also never fail, by their very nature as traces, to be forgotten (JT, 12:91–92). The tensions that constitute Thoreau’s photographic register perhaps reach no greater extreme than in a late journal entry, from October 1860, in which Thoreau takes up the difference between the scientific and the imaginative. Let us consider this as a final example of why photography in Thoreau’s writing and thought has tended to resist our notice and, moreover, why it is difficult to make any final judgments about this suggestive, visual figure of composition and comprehension. Thoreau makes a distinction between the scientific and the imaginative by way of the following analogy, an apparently antiphotographic aesthetic that Robert Richardson might well have had in mind: “The scientific differs from the poetic or lively description somewhat as the photographs, which we so weary of viewing, from painting and sketches, though this comparison is too favorable to science. All science is only a makeshift, a means to an end which is never attained.” Thoreau goes on to contrast the “dead” language of scientific description with the living language of poetry based upon the “unconsidered expressions” and “unconscious affirmations” that the poetic, as he sees it, enables. Photography once again enters into the way he thinks and writes this view of “true description” and its partially unconscious process: A scientific description is such as you would get if you should send out the scholars of the polytechnic school with all sorts of metre made and patented to take the measures for you of any natural object. In a sense you have got nothing new thus, for every object that we see mechanically is mechanically daguerreotyped on our eyes, but a true description growing out [of] the perception and appreciation of it is itself a new fact, never to be daguerreotyped, indicating the highest quality of the plant,—its relation to man. (JT, 14:117–18)

Thoreau critiques a conventional view of the scientific and its descriptions: the scientific viewed as exact measurement, as perception devoid of its other half, imagination. This critique should not be read, therefore, simply as an antiscientific aesthetic, no more than his critique of the conventional aesthetic language of Gilpin or Ruskin should be viewed as an antiaesthetic science. Thoreau’s photography

128

Mediating American Autobiography

in this analogy bridges these two ways of seeing nature. True description can never be mechanical merely if it is to render what Thoreau earlier termed “a new impression”; but, at the same time, true description of a “natural object,” which for Thoreau would be equally linked to factual apperception and recording, cannot be wholly imagined as a painting might be. Instead, description must “grow out” of the context it also represents. What Thoreau here calls “true description,” in other words, reiterates the kind of metonymic imagining that his writing seeks to realize. Description must reproduce the dynamic nature of what it would represent. The idea of photography, here—to be daguerreotyped—serves as a pertinent analogy and image for the kind of observation and perceptive registration that characterizes Thoreau’s writing. What we see in this particular frame, in other words, is not a discursive use of photography that merely contradicts his earlier, more favorable descriptions. Rather, we read the very thinking and recognition of the idea of photography at work—here and elsewhere—as an example of the paradox it usefully indicates in every instance. Photography is also, by nature, never to be daguerreotyped or photographed (in the past tense, in the sense of a verb turned into a noun), despite—and we might say, because of—the best efforts of Talbot or Daguerre or any photographic inventor. I thus align Thoreau’s use of the photographic register in this passage with the kinds of contradiction that Laura Walls reads as a product of Thoreau’s “technology of inscription,” marks of the writer’s desire to blur the boundaries between science and poetry, objectivity and subjectivity, transparency and opacity. Walls argues that Thoreau locates (refracts) this process of inscription in the messiness of the unpublished journal and not in the finished product of Walden. In choosing the option “of acknowledging the traces, letting his tracks show,” instead of, as Walls argues of Walden, “erasing all the traces left by this local, partial, and arduous process, letting only the final inscription of truth remain,” Thoreau seeks an “articulation” of nature that implicates the subject with the object of representation, the product with the process.34 In contrast, we might say that Talbot’s desire to establish and fix conventions for the new medium, whether as an art or as a science, represents not the opposite of Thoreau’s negative photography (“never to be daguerreotyped”) so much as its reversal, that The Pencil of Nature is Walden and not the 34. Walls, “Romancing the Real,” 134.

Thoreau’s Photographic Register

129

journal. In the end, wanting photographs that will remain familiar and recognizable to his audience, that will last as singular points of view, Talbot hopes to erase the traces of the photographic process from which his images emerge. Photographic writing in Thoreau always means something more than and beneath the conventional view of the photographic, to the extent that conventional and familiar views are always pictures of unfinished and unsuspected recognition. These pictures and marks, these key words of the photographic imagination that Thoreau reproduces in his work, are registers of memory and objective nature, to be sure; they suggest an authentic and autographic contact with nature that the author seeks. But like Talbot’s contact prints, which index their exposure to the “various accidents” that constitute the impression and leave them always partial to further exposure and accident, as Talbot ruefully admits, the “mind-print[s]” of Thoreau’s photographic traces suggest a registering of memory unfinished by nature and potentially unnoticed by most. So concludes Thoreau in November of 1861 in his final journal entry, where he writes, after observing the metonymic, “self-registering” traces of the wind in the gravelly composition of a railway causeway, “All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most” (JT, 14:346).

4

- Pictures in Progress The Claims of Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

There is a still deeper shade to be given to this picture. The physical cruelties are indeed sufficiently harassing and revolting; but they are as a few grains of sand on the sea shore, or a few drops of water in the great ocean, compared with the stupendous wrongs which it inflicts upon the mental, moral, and religious nature of its hapless victims. —Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery”

In the opening of Walden, Thoreau makes a claim for reading the autobiographical content of the “following pages” as something of his own slave narrative. “I sometimes wonder,” he remarks pointedly, “that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” That more troubling and familiar form of slavery existing north and south, Thoreau suggests, is a slavery of the imagination: “Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?” (WT, 2:8). Remembering that Frederick Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855, the year after Walden was published, and that Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of 130

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

131

the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, was published in 1845, the same year Thoreau made his Independence Day “escape” to Walden Pond, we can appreciate the pressing context for Thoreau’s claim. Abolitionist-supported slave narratives, Douglass’s example foremost among them, were not only incredibly popular at the time of Thoreau’s writing, they were also being claimed as belonging to a genre original to America. We can also see why, for many readers still to this day, Thoreau’s comments suggest a troubling indifference to slavery. Actual slavery in the South, marked and embodied along racial lines—where, as Douglass would detail so poignantly, it was physically and psychologically “hard to have a southern overseer”—becomes for Thoreau yet another “form of servitude.” The current and difficult facts of slavery in practice are apparently displaced by his greater concern with slavery in form and theory. Thoreau may pointedly appeal to the popular genre of slave narrative, here, but only to subvert its familiar focus: not to give objective and factual views and descriptions of slavery, but instead to give the very opposite, something Thoreau calls further on in this passage from Walden the “fact of the imagination,” a philosophy, and almost an aesthetics of antislavery that is not marked by race or geographical lines. Whatever else we might say about Thoreau’s appeal to the language of slavery, what it introduces or what it avoids, it is clear that this focus on slavery’s imaginative “form” seems as foreign to the facts of both slavery and abolitionism as he claims slavery itself is foreign to him. Douglass well knew and reiterated those facts of slavery and abolitionism; and in that regard, his critical examination of the “nature of slavery” would seem to take us far from the new art and imagination of photography. And yet, at the same time that real differences between Thoreau and Douglass can and will be observed—the difference between fleeing from Concord, for example, and fleeing from Maryland—the imaginative position Thoreau takes regarding slavery can also help us begin to recognize a significant (and largely overlooked) interest in the “fact of the imagination” that Douglass would himself appeal to in his work. For Douglass, I contend, imagination matters in the realization of freedom and self-representative identity; the writer’s life and, more to the point, his autobiographical writings move toward that realization of authorial identity. There is a visual literacy that is crucial to Douglass’s imagination and re-visioning of identity, a visual rhetoric that informs his thought and claims along

132

Mediating American Autobiography

with his more familiar and celebrated achievement of verbal literacy. For Douglass, this critically engaged, visual imagination is schooled in the medium of photography and the expanding role this technology of self-presentation plays in the 1850s and 1860s. As we know from his Narrative, Douglass learned to write, in part, by writing between the lines of his master’s copybook. Douglass’s photographic literacy, as I will show, emerged from that same copybook and adds a deeper shade to the picture of his rhetorical power and his emergence as a “Representative American man.”1 Consider this moment from the archive of this former slave’s photographic memory, largely neglected by Douglass criticism. In December 1861, Douglass rises to speak in a lecture series in Boston, a series that has included before him the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The orator and editor is well known for the kind of testimony he has been providing in antislavery speeches and writings for twenty years. Douglass is America’s most famous fugitive from the “peculiar institution”; he is slavery’s, and soon to be, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it, black America’s representative man.2 Surely we can appreciate why his audience on that occasion is utterly perplexed to find Douglass apparently resisting his familiar role and proceeding to lecture not on what was on everyone’s mind, slavery and the recent outbreak of the Civil War. Instead, under the suggestive title “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass presents a talk on the “influence of pictures” and the proliferating visual—and specifically, photographic—culture of mid-nineteenth-century America. An alternate version of the lecture, believed to be from 1865, exists in manuscript only. As John Blassingame notes in his preface to the earlier version of “Pictures and Progress,” it is only at the end that Douglass turns his attention back from reading pictures to more familiar ground, slavery and the 1. In his introduction to Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, James M’Cune Smith describes what he calls Douglass’s “visible progress” in this way: “And the secret of his power, what is it? He is a Representative American man—a type of his countrymen” (A, 132). 2. Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues: “He spoke to recreate the face of the race, its public face . . . the most representative colored man both because he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race’s great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images,” “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black” (129).

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

133

Civil War, thereby saving the lecture from “total failure,” as one contemporary reviewer observed, “by switching off suddenly from his subject, and pitching in on the great question of the day” (FDP, 3:452). Today we find Douglass and his critical audience in positions similarly opposed regarding the author’s interest in what he calls “picture making” power. His interest in the critical force of reading pictures continues, largely, to escape us. We are familiar with Douglass’s image from any number of the photographic portraits that circulated early in the writer’s career and continued until the end of his life in the 1890s; Douglass’s interest in the rhetoric of such portraiture and the photographic process behind the portrayals, however, has been ignored if not excluded. We find no small measure of that exclusion in the fact that while each of Douglass’s three autobiographical narratives begins with a frontispiece image (see fig. 7), reproductions of the author that Douglass had a careful hand in selecting, many reprints of Douglass’s work, particularly the initial and now canonical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), do not include these visual representations.3 Writing of the role that photographic portrayal plays in the constitution of nineteenth-century America’s “master narrative” of racialized identity, and the concomitant tendency to neglect this photographic influence despite the evidence of the pictures, Laura Wexler coins a term that applies accurately to the case of Douglass: photographic anekphrasis. “Anekphrasis would describe an active and selective refusal to read photography—its graphic labor, its social spaces—even while one is busy textualizing and contextualizing all other kinds of cultural documents,” Wexler explains. We encounter this refusal to 3. William S. McFeely argues, regarding Douglass’s concern for every aspect of the appearance, not just the content, of his narratives: “His later quarrels with his British publisher make it clear that he cared not only about the content—he resisted any censoring of material thought to be offensive to Christians—but also about the appearance of the front matter and the cover. Such concerns must have been with Douglass even at the time of the first printing of the first book,” Frederick Douglass, 115–16. This concern for appearance would come to a head years later with regard to the publication in 1881 of the first edition of The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. As Peter Ripley observes, Douglass “was distressed with the overall quality, particularly with what he described as the ‘coarse and shocking woodcuts’ that had been included without his approval. ‘I ask and insist,’ he wrote his editor, Sylvester M. Betts, ‘that an edition of the book . . . be published without illustrations.’” The illustrations remained, however, and as Ripley suggests, Douglass began plans for another edition of Life and Times forthwith, concluding, “I have no pleasure whatever in the book, and shall not have while the engravings remain” (“The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 23).

134

Mediating American Autobiography

Figure 7. Frontispiece portrait of Frederick Douglass from My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855. (Engraved by J. C. Butre from a daguerreotype. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

read photography in Douglass criticism despite the author’s thorough understanding and use of the ekphrastic power of the photographic image—the rhetoric of an image, the dynamic relation between images and words. As Colin Westerbeck observes in his recent survey of numerous daguerreotype portraits taken of Douglass within the first fifteen years of the medium’s introduction to America, “His rise to prominence ran parallel with the rise to popularity of the daguerreotype as a medium for portraiture.” And thus, as Westerbeck speculates, Douglass would have realized “that his daguerreotype could be yet

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

135

another autobiography.”4 Westerbeck’s essay is published in Museum Studies; its occasion was an exhibit, African Americans in Art, which included an early daguerreotype portrait of Douglass. I would argue that literary studies of Douglass can benefit from this kind of attention to the photographic contexts of Douglass’s rise to popularity and to a revised understanding of the composite character of his autobiographical project, its conjunctions of verbal and visual literacies. The place to begin this revision is with Douglass’s own claims for photographic literacy, which I will do by looking closely at the neglected “Pictures and Progress” lecture. I will draw direct connections between the interest in “photographic processes” that Douglass expresses in this 1861 lecture and the critique he levels against the racist science of the American School of Ethnology, a vivid criticism that he offers in a well-known address from 1854, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered.” Douglass takes this school to task for the bias of its visual representations. The lesson, indeed, would seem to be that the proponents and supporters of such racialized views of American identity are guilty not of suspect science so much as a photographic anekphrasis. I will argue, furthermore, that Douglass’s critical investigation of American photographic memory, most particularly in the “Pictures and Progress” lecture, moves from identifying such anekphrasis to unfolding a theory for its reversal, a critical practice in photographic reading. Douglass develops in this thought on photographic pictures, in other words, not just a criticism of pictures, but a theory of pictures and picture making; beyond applying his own critical thought to pictures and the progress they might represent, Douglass pictures critical thought and progress as such in his complex reading of what he calls “our photographic processes.” Douglass’s critique of ethnology and its representational practices is not new to criticism, but the iconology I derive from that critique, and specifically from his photographically informed theory of progress, has not been considered. In the second part of this chapter, focusing on the second of his autobiographical books, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), I apply that iconology to the other textual and rhetorical work, the verbal literacy, for which Douglass and his narratives are more familiarly known. I return to the words and verbal portrayals of slavery that his audience (certainly in 1861) expected 4. Laura Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,” 251; Colin L. Westerbeck, “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,” 145, 159.

136

Mediating American Autobiography

from him, arguing that his photographic literacy adds a deeper shade to that more familiar picture. Douglass’s photographic representations, both the images he includes in his texts and the words he writes about such images and their underlying processes, offer what he calls in the “Pictures and Progress” lecture a “seeming transgression.”5 These lessons in visual literacy take his readers to the heart of his efforts to rewrite slavery, despite (and perhaps because of) their apparent difference from the verbal “pictures” expected by his audience. Such photographic representations are as much a part of the work of reproducing the “picture” of slavery (to use Douglass’s metaphor) as are the passages that performatively tell (and show) the story of his progress toward freedom. And for this reason, some of the verbal passages that represent Douglass’s progress from bondage to freedom might just as well be considered, as I will contend, photographic passages. This points to a second stake of a photographic (re)consideration of Douglass that this chapter moves toward elaborating. The comparison of Douglass’s autobiographical “picture” of slavery to other photographic representations of, and from, the slave system circulating in his day— a whip-scarred back, to take a prominent example—begs the question of the critical force of that picture. Does Douglass’s picture of slavery merely repeat the troubling representations of slavery that it sets out to critique and unsettle? I do not know that this question of representational complicity can ever be finally answered, but I will argue that Douglass’s theory of the dynamic that pictorial representation crucially shares with all criticism and progress—a claim he makes explicitly in “Pictures and Progress”—certainly complicates the notion of fixed or mere repetition. In Douglass’s photographic considerations, we find the continued exploration and critique of photography’s mediated immediacy, applied back to the conditions and claims of autobiographical writing. Though not as free as Thoreau to worry only about a slavery of the imagination, Douglass, nevertheless, emphasizes that justice will emerge through a truer description of the picture of slavery and race in America. 5. In an alternative manuscript version of the “Pictures and Progress” lecture from circa 1865, Douglass suggests, “It may seem almost an impertinence to ask your attention to a lecture on pictures, and yet in this very fact of the all engrossing character of the war may be found the needed apology for this seeming transgression,” “Pictures and Progress” (1). Page numbers for the 1861 version are from FDP and are cited parenthetically in the text.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

137

Our Photographic Processes To an audience expecting Douglass to render, at least by abolitionist convention, a factual “picture of slavery” rather than a philosophical theory of pictures, the choice of his topic, “pictures and progress,” was certainly unusual—but not the topic itself. Douglass’s focus on the abundance and proliferation of visual culture in mid-nineteenthcentury America, specifically in the ever-multiplying forms of photography, was thoroughly topical and entirely familiar to the ocular age he shared with Emerson. Douglass sets out in 1861 to render a picture of the times, and, much like Emerson does in his “Lecture on the Times” (1841), he identifies photography as one of its prominent markers: Our age gets very little credit either for poetry or song. It is generally condemned to wear the cold metallic stamp of a passionless utilitarianism. It certainly is remarkable for many achievements, small and great, which accord with this popular description—and yet, for nothing is it more remarkable, than for the multitude, variety, perfection and cheapness of its pictures. The praises of Arkwright, Watt, Franklin, Fulton, and Morse are upon all lips. But the great father of our modern pictures is seldom mentioned, though as worthy as the foremost. . . . Daguerre by the simple but all abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery. As munificent in the exalted arena of art, as in the radiation of light and heat, the God of day not only decks the earth with rich fruit and beautiful flowers—but studs the world with pictures. Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Photographs and Electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings. (FDP, 3:453)

In his “Lecture on the Times,” Emerson identifies the character of his age through the guise of the “Daguerreotype professor, with cameraobscura and silver-plate,” just then beginning to traverse the land; “let us set up our Camera also,” Emerson proposes. Douglass here makes a similar identification in his turn to Daguerre and the pictorial progeny of his invention. Twenty years later, we find Douglass updating the developments of photography (as the medium would come to be called generally) and the various forms of photographic reproduction. Douglass locates the great potential for image proliferation, the “perfection” of “our modern pictures” first discovered by Daguerre (at least according to Douglass), in the expanding range of photography, whose products “adorn or disfigure” every dwelling.

138

Mediating American Autobiography

Though he does not name him in the lecture, Douglass certainly recalls Oliver Wendell Holmes to our story of photographic memory. In “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” his article on photography and its emerging technologies published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, Holmes similarly focuses on the multitude and cheapness of the age’s photographic pictures. “Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear,” Holmes points out; “form is cheap and transportable.” In his July 1861 follow-up article, “Sun-Painting and SunSculpture,” Holmes expands upon the potential (and trope) of photography’s representational transportation by offering his readers “a stereoscopic trip across the Atlantic.” “These miracles are being worked all around us so easily and so cheaply,” Holmes observes of the literal and figurative reach of photographic technology, “that most people have ceased to think of them as marvels.” Not yet twenty-five years old, the surest sign of photography’s unique status, Holmes suggests, can be found in its ubiquity. “There is a photographer established in every conceivable village.”6 Writing of, and responding to, the new medium in this same period, Douglass also has in mind this “cheapness” of photographic forms and the marvel of photography’s transformative potential. Douglass addresses the social benefits of the “pictorial abundance” he associates with the “wonderful discovery and invention by Daguerre.” Foremost, he identifies that potential of the new medium that American commentators, from the beginning, have tended to emphasize: photography’s democratic potential. “Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them,” Douglass asserts. “What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humbled servant girl whose income is but a few shillings a week may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and court royalty, with all its precious treasures could purchase fifty years ago.” Douglass reads this leveling potential of photography in the transformations in the mid-nineteenthcentury American landscape as much as in the changes of its social fabric. “The smallest town now has its Daguerrian Gallery,” he continues, much as Holmes had observed several months before: And even at the cross roads—where stood but a solitary blacksmith shop and what was once a country Tavern but now in the last 6. Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 748; Holmes, “Sun-Painting,” 13.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

139

stages of dilapidation—you will find the inevitable Daguerrian Gallery. Shaped like a baggage car, with a hot house window at the top—adorned with red curtains resting on gutterpercha springs and wooded wheels painted yellow. The farmer boy gets an iron shoe for his horse, and metallic picture for himself at the same time, and at the same price. .

Douglass locates photography at the American “cross roads” of the nineteenth century. The “inevitable Daguerrian Gallery” and the legion of its metallic pictures stand as ubiquitous signs from the age. Douglass portrays the manifest destiny of photography in America that follows what he terms the “range of the daguerrian apparatus” (FDP, 3:454).7 Image proliferation and photographic mediation, in other words, are not just characteristic of this time in America, they are characteristic of America and its potential—like a photograph— to develop and extend what it represents. Both Holmes and Douglass investigate the representational potential of photography. More than observing the latest forms and techniques of photography circulating in the late 1850s and early 1860s, be they daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs, or stereographs, both writers engage the idea of photography circulating in the proliferation of its forms and images. Holmes’s three essays on photography published in the Atlantic Monthly between 1859 and 1863 offer an extensive example of a crucial picturing of photography in language. His much-cited reading of the value and transportability of photographic “currency” points us to a discursive reading of the photographic medium and its meaning at midcentury. This is a reading not only shared by Douglass, who also employs the medium for figurative purposes, but, as I will argue, one more critically engaged by the former slave. As for Holmes and his insights into photography as a new “technique of circulation,” Tom Gunning provides a perceptive gloss. “Holmes’s description of photographs as a new universal currency is more than a clever metaphor,” Gunning argues. “As Holmes’s discussion demonstrates, photography could be 7. The conflation of daguerreotypy with photography, distinct processes of photochemical reproduction, is Douglass’s own. He is speaking here, as the previous passage indicates, of both daguerreotypes and the multiplications of the latest forms of photography, which in large part supplanted the daguerreotype by the late 1850s. Thus Douglass is thinking of photographic processes, but nevertheless continues to refer to them, at least in name, in terms of what he calls “the daguerrian apparatus.”

140

Mediating American Autobiography

understood in the nineteenth century not simply as the latest stage in realistic representation but also as part of a new system of exchange which could radically transform traditional beliefs in solidity and unique identity. Such fixed ideas could disintegrate in the solvents circulating through the modern networks of exchange and transportation.”8 Gunning’s photochemically tinged language of fixing and dissolving gets to the heart of the photographic matter: the identity an image represents exists in tension between optical presentation and photogenic reproduction, between fixing and dissolving. Talbot, as we have seen, confronted the irony of this photogenic basis of the process, that the image was always in danger of being destroyed by the very process that informed it. Photography’s transformational representation of identity reiterates this (its own) ambivalent identity, this creation through reversals: duplication by way of negative original, pictorial composition by way of chemical decomposition. Holmes displays this tension remarkably in his notion of “photographic intimacy,” the friendship that circulating photographs enables between complete and distant strangers: “A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other’s faces (that is, in nature’s original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship.” As we saw in the case of the Emerson–Carlyle correspondence, photographic portraits enable a friendship by way of a new form of recognition and contact in absentia. But the substance of that contact is challenged by the very logic and means through which the photographic intimacy circulates and is reproduced. Ironically, what becomes more valuable in the representational economy of photographic reproducibility, as Holmes’s parenthetical addition begins to suggest, is the negative that can furnish the portrait in multiples. In the photographic currency of the card portrait, what circulates is not simply the image of the person, so much as the image’s potential reproducibility. Holmes further addresses this value of the negative in the first article, when he declares memorably of photography, “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” giving an alternate take on what photography’s cheap transportability could mean for the world: 8. Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” 18.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

141

In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. . . . We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.9

Holmes tropes upon Democritus’s ancient notion of the image as a skin or filmic emanation given off by bodies. But here, applied to the conditions of photographic portraiture and reproducibility, the potential seems all the more menacing. Not only might we make friends with faces we have never seen, but, using a few negatives, to do so all we need is to obtain the “skin” from their faces; we need not trouble ourselves with what is now little more than the carcass of the core. On Holmes’s view, photography potentially replaces the biology of skin with the text of representation. Douglass’s reflections on photography and the range of its apparatus should be situated with these ambivalently viewed characteristics of the medium and its social potential in mind—in this culture where skin and its representation mean so much. Douglass addresses in “Pictures and Progress” the proliferating forms and images of American photographic culture; but more crucially, he engages the idea of photography that was circulating through those forms and challenging their conventional notions. Perhaps speaking from his own experience as a photographic subject, Douglass also addresses the conventional axioms of photographic representation when he locates the influence of pictorial abundance not just at the “cross roads” of America, but in the private spaces of the family and the self. “It is evident that the great cheapness, and universality of pictures must exert a powerful though silent influence, upon the ideas and sentiment of present [and] future generations.” He continues in this vein: “The family is the fountain head of all mental and moral influence. And the presence there of the miniture [sic] forms and faces of our loved ones whether separated from us by time and space, or by the silent countenents [sic] of eternity—must act powerfully 9. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 15; “Stereoscope,” 747–48 (Holmes’s emphases).

142

Mediating American Autobiography

upon the minds of all. They bring to mind all that is amiable and good, in the departed, and strengthen the same qualities” (FDP, 3:458). The presence of absent forms and faces: this is the crux of Holmes’s sentimental, “photographic intimacy,” here rendered all the more uncanny by Douglass’s extension of this mediating influence to include the silent countenances of the dead. The power of this new photographic presence to inform and act upon the hearts and minds of all, Douglass relates, is not restricted to the “amiable and good.” Photographic “forms and faces,” in other words, can be representational with a vengeance. Douglass, more explicitly than Holmes ever would, addresses this potential problem—this negative—of photographic signification underlying and unsettling the more familiar benefits of portraiture and the biographical presence it enables. This is the problem, for example, by which the same medium that enables expanded and more democratic opportunities for representation also enables more conservative, if not repressive, uses. There is a “price” to the cheapness and universality of these pictures. Douglass hints at this with his example about the “farmer boy,” where the description of the likeness as a “metallic picture” subtly likens the image to the “iron shoe” he receives for his horse, “at the same time, and at the same price.” Douglass makes the “price” of such picturing more explicit when he goes on to read the biographical implications of what he calls the “stern serenity of our photographic processes” (FDP, 3:455). Douglass observes the significant use of the new photographic technologies in the service of biographical representation, noting, “A man who now o’days publishes a book . . . and does not publish his face to the world with it may almost claim and get credit for simpler modesty.” In the age of what Emerson would call “the first person singular” (JMN, 3:70), the book reflects the author; but in the physiognomic logic of the same culture, made more pertinent by the photographic apparatus, the reflection stands incomplete without the adjoining publication of the face. The most significant national example of such photographic presentations of biography appeared in the form of Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans, published, as we have seen, on the same day in 1850 as Emerson’s Representative Men. Douglass emphasizes the “decidedly conservative” potential that attends such photographic “representatives” of self and nation at the same time that the medium and its cheapness enable “men of all conditions” to possess self-images for the first time:

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

143

I think it may be fairly doubted if this pictorial plenty, has done much for modest distrust of our good looks. . . . A man who now o’days publishes a book, or peddles a patent medicine and does not publish his face to the world with it may almost claim and get credit for simpler modesty. Handsome or homely[,] manly or mean, if an author’s face can possibly be other than fine looking the picture must be in the book, or the book be considered incomplete. It may also be proper here to notice, that pictures are decid[ed]ly conservative. . . . Once fairly in the book and the man may be considered a fixed fact, public property. In nine cases out of ten he so regards himself. The picture may be like him or not like him, or like any body else than him. . . . His position is defined, and his whole personae must now conform to, and never contradict the immortal likeness or unlikeness in the Book. (FDP, 3:455)

We move from the fixing of images to “fixed fact, public property.” In these lines Douglass has his eye on a slippery paradox of photographic portraiture: the portrait likeness can potentially supplant the very identity it represents. As Scott McQuire describes this paradox of photography’s democratization of portraiture, “Photography transforms the practice of self-identity and amplifies the duplicity of the term ‘subject’, pointing on the one hand towards the sovereignty of the individual, and on the other to the possibility of being subjected to the rule of a normalizing discourse.” The new medium, as Gunning emphasizes, is thus “one of the most ambiguous emblems of modern experience,” wherein the “circulatory possibilities . . . could also play a regulatory role.”10 Douglass recognizes this potential duality of photography’s transformation of self-identity. He has in mind the medium’s emblematic ambiguity of regulation and circulation when he suggests that photographic representation can reverse the conventional way biographical portraiture is conceived. “The old commercial maxim, that demand regulates supply is reversed here,” Douglass contends, echoing Holmes’s trope of photographic currency: “Supply regulates demand” (FDP, 3:454). In the shifting dynamics of this kind of representational economy, the biographical demand for “life-like presentments” of original identity and authentic selfhood is overwhelmed by the photographic supply of their likenesses, their faces 10. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, 40; Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 19.

144

Mediating American Autobiography

and forms.11 The supply of biographical faces thus regulates demand to the extent that the demand comes to be for the supply of faces themselves and less for the subjects they would represent. The problem, then, is not merely that photographic poses, as we all might attest, can misrepresent the person, but rather, that such poses can represent the person too much. In other words, the person becomes the pose and position defined by the portrait, rather than (by convention) the photographic pose becoming of the person; the person becomes wholly persona. Douglass’s own language in this passage, the flickering connotations of pose and position, person and persona, gestures to the reversal of which he speaks. “The picture may be like him or not like him, or like any body else than him”: what matters, given this potential reversal of image and identity, is not how accurately the picture represents its subject, but how effectively the picture circulates as a representation, and concurrently, how accurately the subject catches up with his picture—now a “fixed fact”—or fails to do so. “Men of all conditions” may, through photographs, finally “see themselves as others see them,” but such seeing is subject to the photographic conditions through which the self is represented and reproduced. To understand the metaphysical stakes of this photographic condition of representing selfhood and its characteristic tension between fixing identity and dissolving it, we might recall Emerson’s reflections on the biographical problem of the new medium. In the 1841 journal entry beginning “Were you ever Daguerreotyped,” discussed in Chapter 2, Emerson compares the posed look of the daguerreotyped sitter to “the portrait of a mask instead of a man”: “the eyes fixed as only they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death” (JMN, 8:116). For Douglass, the “decidedly conservative” potential of photographic portraiture similarly opens onto uncanny reflections of mortality. “Byron says, a man always looks dead, when his Biography is written,” he notes. “The same is even more true when his picture is taken. There is ever something statue like about such men. See them when or where you will, and unless they are totally off guard, they are either serenely sitting, or rigidly standing in what they fancy their best attitude for a picture. The stern serenity of our photographic processes, in tracing the features, and forms of men, might 11. Douglass identifies this shift in his 1855 lecture “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” noting that “the present will be looked to by after coming generations as the age of anti-slavery literature—when supply on the gallop could not keep pace with the ever-growing demand—when a picture of a negro on the cover was a help to the sale of a book” (A, 449).

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

145

deter some of us from operation” (FDP, 3:455). Douglass recognizes the same uncanny potential that Emerson, like others from the culture of early photography, reads in the “operation” of photographic portrayal and in the faces of the portrayed. The ambivalent yoking of stern with serenity is readable on the surface of the photograph. This is part of Emerson’s contention, that in order not to blur the picture (given lengthy exposure times), the sitter must put on a deathlike mask, must assume a photographic pose. But Douglass’s description “stern serenity” further points to implications and ambivalences informing that familiar image and pose, a process lurking beneath or within the product. Added to this tension between photographic regulation and circulation, I would suggest, is the underlying process of photographic reproduction that yields the image and its composition. The photographic image can represent the self at once stern and serene, mortal and immortal, present and absent, like and unlike, familiar and unknown, fixed and dissolved: this legion of representational binaries links Douglass to Emerson and Holmes, and to the more critical engagement of the medium that Cathy Davidson has aptly characterized as “the ambivalent metaphysics of the early photograph.” Davidson’s focus on the “anxieties about the stability of the photographic referent or the identity of the photographed self that perplexed many of its first commentators” further suggests that the ambivalence we are reading in Douglass’s reflections on photography is less a reaction to the medium or a particular use of its form, and more a reading of the representational nature of the medium and its potential uses as fundamentally ambivalent.12 The photographic likeness may seem to express and depict the self’s features more amply and accurately than any previous medium of representation; but it does so only through “processes” that make such unique expressions, such self-images, as reproducible as any other photograph. Photographic faces can be differently figured.

The Distinctive Features of Negro Physiognomy Photography’s manifestation of the shifting relation between self and other—between what a photograph represents and the means with which it represents it—suggests a further stake in Douglass’s 12. Cathy Davidson, “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,” 686.

146

Mediating American Autobiography

concern with the “conservative” dynamics of the medium. That stake, race and the visual economy of American slavery, returns us to the great question of the day that Douglass seems to displace in his focus on photographic pictures, but which in fact he never leaves. If photography and the work of its portraiture allows for greater and more liberal self-possession, Douglass understands that it equally enables conservative, and even worse, possessive uses. We get a sense of this reversal when Douglass describes the tendency of circulating images, “considered a fixed fact, public property,” to force conformity. In 1861, there remained an emphatically visible and divisive form of property, of course: not the metaphorical “skins” of Holmes’s photographs, but the literal forms of slavery, reinforced by the “skin” of race and the legible face of the “Negro” in America. Douglass renders explicit such racial echoes and coercive uses of photographic physiognomy in “Pictures and Progress.” Toward the end of the lecture, having turned from his theory of pictures to the question of the war, Douglass argues for a solution to the conflict by getting at the root of the problem: “What is the remedy? I answer, have done, forever, with the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man. . . . Lay the ax at the root of the tree—and hurl the accursed slave system in to the pit from whence it came” (FDP, 3:469). This is one of several key points in the lecture when, seemingly shifting attention from his own “fantasy” of pictures and the metaphorical issue of their property, to the more literal problem of slavery and its forms, Douglass in fact reiterates that the two issues, as systems of representation, intersect at a crucial level of power. Like the slave system and its own visible technologies that link enslavement with physiognomy, the power of photography can also be used coercively. This other system of representation, Douglass implies, can and has served to promote the fantasy that a man can be turned into the captive “property” of his image, “a slave in form,” as he would put it in his Narrative (A, 65). Before looking more closely at how Douglass imagines that power in this lecture, I want to elaborate the context in which Douglass links the ambivalent power of photography to racialized formations of self and identity. In American Archives, a study of the role of the nineteenth-century photographic archive in the formation of American subjectivity, Shawn Michelle Smith further elucidates the implications of race in the representational functioning of the photographic medium. For Smith, photography functions crucially as a discursive process and

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

147

technology for representing selfhood, a medium that is employed actively to shape and construct the (racialized) American identities it claimed merely to reflect. Citing Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans as a key example of this “ritual” of photographic identity formation, Smith shows how the “photographic archive generated and maintained essentialized discourses of interior character, and trained observers in how to read the body for the signs of a knowable interiority.” This notion of the photographic archive and its discursive power draws upon the influential work of Allan Sekula. In “The Body and the Archive,” Sekula surveys the range of late-nineteenthcentury photographic typology, its uses as a “physiognomic system of domination,” and its origins in earlier manifestations of physiognomic culture such as the works of Brady and Marcus Root. Sekula understands photography and the “workings of photographic portraiture” to be an ambivalent or “double system,” a “system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively,” establishing bourgeois identity and possessive individualism by delimiting “the terrain of the other”: “Every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.”13 Focusing her attention on earlier manifestations of the photographic archive in America, as are we, Smith locates the otherness of race as the crucial “objectifying inverse” lurking in every middle-class portrait. As both Smith and Sekula show, what makes photography a “physiognomic system” in practice and in principle, whether early in the century or late, is the mediation that produces photographic meaning, despite its claims to the contrary. Sekula describes the metonymic power unsettling the metaphor of photographic truth in this way: “Within the [photographic] archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential. The suggestion of past uses coexists with a plenitude of possibilities.”14 Thus the photographic presentation of character is always literally ambivalent, residual in its representational potential. As we have seen from the beginning, this dual identity is evident in photography’s language: the medium’s descriptions of identity are also inscriptions, its expressions are impressions, its metaphorical “types” always a matter and means of an underlying metonymy of the type of representation at hand. 13. Smith, American Archives, 4; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 63, 6–7. 14. Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 117.

148

Mediating American Autobiography

There must be no more provocative demonstration of the repressive inverse of the photographic ritual of self-presentation than the example we find in the faces and forms of the so-called Zealy daguerreotypes. Taken in March 1850, within months of the publication of Brady’s Gallery, these fifteen daguerrean images represent various portraitlike views of seven South Carolina slaves. I use the word portraitlike to suggest something of their ambivalent status as images. They are daguerreotypes in the apparent form of studio portraits, the most prevalent use of the medium at the time. But the sitters in the images are largely naked, and stare out, or off to the side, not as unique (bourgeois) subjects of identity but as scientific types. The captions further remind us of that which the stark impropriety of the images declares, that these (the images, like their subjects) are pieces of property, cultural specimens of the other: “Jem, Gulla, belonging to F. N. Green.” As Brian Wallis recounts the origin of these “at once familiar and utterly strange” images, the portraits were taken by the South Carolina daguerreotypist J. T. Zealy, but commissioned by the natural historian, famous scientist, Swiss-born, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz.15 Agassiz sought visible proof for his theory of the separate creation of races and, more to the point, for his presumption of the inferiority of Africans. These images, then, at least as commissioned and circulated, reflected an ideology of polygenesis—multiple creations accounting for the hierarchy of races, white over black most specifically—expounded by the so-called American School of Ethnology. Agassiz, along with figures like the comparative anatomist Samuel Morton (Crania Americana, 1839; Crania Aegyptiaca, 1844) and the ethnographers J. C. Nott and George Gliddon (Types of Mankind, 1854), was an influential proponent of this composite of science and racism.16 Douglass, in the 1854 commencement lecture in which he critiques this school of ethnology and its claims, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered,” identifies the proslavery implications of this science: “There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden [sic], Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery

15. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 47, 40. 16. For background on the American School of Ethnology and the influence of this racial science, see George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, and Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

149

propagating system” (FDP, 2:507). The 1861 “Pictures and Progress” lecture furthers the critique in bringing it home to Agassiz’s Boston. The Zealy daguerreotypes vividly link both Agassiz and his science with the slavery-propagating system of which they were, as Douglass suggests in his critique, an indubitable part. These images, then, are both familiar and strange because they are portrait images taken in the service of a typological logic and scientific racialism that denies the very presence and aura of human identity that such images—in other parts of the American gallery—ordinarily support. These are stereotypes masked in the form of daguerreotypes, photographic “skins” taken with a vengeance. Alan Trachtenberg best identifies the unsettling force of this vengeance in his compelling reading of the Zealy daguerreotypes. Noting that the images appear strangely conventional and familiar, even down to the “gold-plated overmat and wooden case typical of the commercial artifact,” Trachtenberg teases out the crucial difference. “However, the persons portrayed here are standing naked: not ‘representative’ in Brady’s sense of an imagined and desired America, but examples or specimens of a ‘type’—a type, moreover, of complete otherness.”17 The crucial difference manifest in the images is the difference that matters in America in 1850, or in 1861, for that matter: the visible (and thereby legible) face of racial difference. From Agassiz’s point of view, these images reflect and present the evidence of that difference—transparently, self-evidently, objectively. From Douglass’s point of view, however, such images of racial difference are not transparent, not mere presentations of racial character, precisely because they are representational. The difference portrayed is not inherent to the “Negro” or the slave, in other words, only to the multiple forms and faces of their portrayal. Douglass expressed this very understanding of the crucial role visual representation plays in constituting racial identity as early as 1849, a year before the Zealy images were made. In his review of A Tribute for the Negro, Douglass cautions, “Negroes can never have impartial portraits, at the hands of white artists” because of their presumptive theories “respecting the distinctive features of negro physiognomy” and the resulting “temptation to make the likeness of the Negro, rather than of the man.”18 In the case of the Zealy daguerreotypes, we see that physiognomic theory and representational practice join the service of racial theory and 17. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 54. 18. Douglass, “A Tribute for the Negro,” 380.

150

Mediating American Autobiography

scientific practice. In his lecture on such practices of the American School of Ethnology, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” (1854), Douglass further critiques this temptation, understanding that at stake is not merely the potential to get the “likeness of the Negro” wrong, but the potential to use that “likeness” coercively and deceptively, “to read the negro out of the human family,” as he disarmingly points to the root of the matter: “The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. . . . By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman” (FDP, 2:507). For Agassiz and the slavery-supporting discourse he furthers, the Zealy images are visible proof in the service of the reading of “inherent character.” For Douglass, the circular logic of this inscription (masked as merely description) is most evident in the kind of portraits, like the Zealy daguerreotypes, that the slave system relies on: portraits that suggest that slaves appear nothing like men and women (appear), images that portray bodies fit only for slavery. Identifying the workings of ethnology as a physiognomic system, Douglass reveals the extent to which this system and its reading of racial history relies on the slippery and suggestive notions of “likeness” and “resemblance” and “character,” mediated through current “types” of visual representation and reproduction: If, for instance, a phrenologist or naturalist undertakes to represent in portraits, the difference between the two races—the Negro and the European—he will invariably present the highest type of the European, and the lowest type of the negro. . . . If the very best type of the European is always presented, I insist that justice, in all such works, demands that the very best type of the negro should also be taken. The importance of this criticism may not be apparent to all;—to the black man it is very apparent. He sees the injustice and writhes under its sting. (FDP, 2:510, 514)

The typology and difference that this ethnological system enforces in its readings relies on the different types of pictures that ethnology, quite extensively in its texts, reproduces. For example, in the preface to Types of Mankind, Nott and Gliddon reprint Agassiz’s “Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the Different Types of Man,” accompanying it with a tableau of visual types drawn by hand (see fig. 8). Though not attributed to Agassiz

Figure 8. Illustration from Types of Mankind, 1854, by J. C. Nott and George Gliddon, where the caption reads: “Tableau to accompany Prof. Agassiz’s ‘Sketch’”; the artist is unattributed. (Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

152

Mediating American Autobiography

himself, the visual depiction justifies the verbal sketching of differences, and does so in a graphic manner that, so Douglass asserts, should be apparent to all. Douglass’s critique of the American School of Ethnology reminds us that type is a verb as well as a noun, not just a legible product of someone’s (metaphorical) character or appearance, but a process for reproducing and making legible, in a more metonymic sense, characters and appearances in texts: type suggests both impression and expression, both marking and kind. Trachtenberg explains that type is not only common to the language of early photographic processes, it is crucial to the medium’s very conception: “The common suffix ‘type’ signified that photographs were pictures impressed upon a surface, as in printing. Their difference [from other kinds of pictures] is a difference of means, not substance—not an ontological but an instrumental difference.”19 If types of Europeans or Africans are readable as self-evident markers of identity, as ethnology claims, Douglass argues that it is because the types are made and taken. As in daguerreotypes, for example: impressions are made and then read as, ascribed to, expressions of inherent character. Agassiz employs the daguerreotype to deny slaves the status of the European, to read them out of the human family: they are merely types, without individuality, emptied of interiority. Douglass belies the injustice of such ethnological practices in his critiques by collapsing the portrayal back into its representational type, by relating the always-potential “stereotype” back to the means of its representation. It is significant, then, that Douglass’s critique of these representational practices also surfaces in the “Pictures and Progress” lecture. The “Notts and Gliddens” and others of “our so called learned naturalists, archeologists and Ethnologists” make a brief appearance so that Douglass can highlight, specifically, the pictorial implications and blind spots of their theory: they “have professed some difficulty in settling upon a fixed, certain, and definite line separating the lowest man from the highest animal,” Douglass explains; “to all such I commend the fact that man is everywhere, a picture making animal” (FDP, 3:459). “Pictures and Progress,” we might now say, in its focus on the mechanics of man’s picture-making “power,” is as much about the means of racial justice as “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” is about the means of representational justice. And 19. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 15.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

153

it is with this understanding of the influence of (racial) pictures that we might not only link Douglass with Agassiz and the Zealy daguerreotypes, but further think of his critical reading of ethnology and the racial politics it shares with slavery in terms of how he considers and reads photography. The Zealy images suggest a context for the kind of awareness that Douglass displays in “Pictures and Progress” concerning photography’s characteristic doubleness, its potential as a representational process both to form and deface its subject, to be a medium at once liberating and conservative, serene and stern, just and unjust. Douglass may not have seen or heard of these particular images from 1850, but he had certainly seen the likes of them. These photographic considerations help us to see that in the 1854 lecture, and again in 1861, Douglass proposes a way to read critically and subversively—and quite literally—the likes (and likenesses) of them. In this reading of photography and its technological difference, Douglass locates a means to revise the tendentious rhetoric of ethnology in terms of its own most typical portrayals. Let me re-cite Douglass from “Pictures and Progress”: “The stern serenity of our photographic processes, in tracing the features, and forms of men, might deter some of us from operation, but for that most kind natural Providence, by which, most men easily see in themselves points of beauty and excellence, which wholly ellude [sic] the observation of all others” (FDP, 3:455). This is yet another framing of photography’s ambivalence and double consciousness; the meaning of a photograph cannot escape the means and motivations of its portrayal. Douglass uses this understanding of what Sekula calls “photographic meaning” to interrogate the types of portraiture and to focus on the means behind ethnology’s claims of immediacy, transparent character, selfevident difference. In the 1865 version of “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass discusses the “counterfeit presentments” that all men, savage and civilized, share in the various forms of their appearances.20 Visual representations like photographs or paintings thus give the lie 20. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” 15. Marcus Root uses the same term, counterfeit presentment (placed in quotation marks), in The Camera and the Pencil, 43. He does so to name the representation of the human face that the portrait offers as a counter or complement to the “living original.” Characteristically, Root raises the implication that every photographic representation, by nature, counterfeits, but then goes on to deny the implications of the mediated immediacy he has raised.

154

Mediating American Autobiography

to claims of essential (and transparent) difference readable in faces. There is no “presentment,” Douglass makes clear, and no “negro physiognomy” in particular, that exists apart from the hands of its representation, that is, how any appearance is made and, linked to this, potentially counterfeited. The same representational medium that allows an Agassiz and his cohorts to read the black person out of the human family enables a Frederick Douglass, reversing and thus revealing the powerful fantasy of ethnological portrayal, to read him back in.

Pictures in Process The dynamic and critical potential of that counterreading lies at the heart of “Pictures and Progress.” Or, to use Douglass’s metaphor, it is a reading that gets to the “root” of the problem facing all moral progress, most pertinently the problem America was facing in slavery and the Civil War. For Douglass, the key to understanding the power of pictures and to harnessing such power in the service of progress is not to read pictures by themselves. Instead, he suggests, we need to read pictures and their abundance—if we are to read and use them critically—in relation to the faculty and power of their making. “But it is not of such pictures that I am here to speak exclusively.” Douglass further shifts attention in the lecture from his initial focus on pictures and their photographic forms to something he calls “thought pictures”: “I am at liberty to touch the element out of which our pictures spring.” Douglass names that element the “picture making faculty of man” and conceives of this faculty “to be a key to the great mystery of life and progress”: “The process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness, into the objective form, considered in all its range, is in truth the highest attribute of man’s nature. All that is really peculiar to humanity—in contradistinction from all other animals proceeds from this one faculty or power” (FDP, 3:459, 461). Thus Douglass shifts the focus of his consideration from the range of the daguerrean apparatus and its pictures to the broader range and philosophical question of how such pictures can be thought, and what kind of thought process they reflect. In the later version of this lecture, Douglass signals this shift from pictures to what he calls “thought pictures” by pointing out, “But my discourse has more to do with the philosophy of art than with art

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

155

itself, with the source, range and influence, than with its facts.”21 In “The Claims of the Negro,” Douglass echoes Emerson’s “American Scholar” when he argues that “the vital question of the age” he will address, “the relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country,” requires both action and thought, and therefore, “the scholars of America will have to take an important and controlling part” (FDP, 2:500). In his 1861 “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass continues in the Emersonian vein, taking action in thought. That philosophical turn, no doubt unfamiliar to his Boston audience expecting (again) the embodied representative of slavery, makes this lecture, to my mind, crucial to every reading of Douglass’s work and to larger, still troubling questions of his representativeness. Rather than merely countering the prevailing and coercive, ideological images of race and slavery—precisely the sort we find at the hands of white artists and scientists like Zealy and Agassiz—Douglass turns, more radically, to a theory of the discursive power that those pictures share with any picture. Instead of Emerson’s famous “Man Thinking,” Douglass proposes to focus, as it were, on the critical potential of Man Picturing. In thus offering a theory or philosophy of pictures and their influence, rather than merely observing the facts of their appearances, Douglass’s lecture might best be understood as an essay in iconology. By iconology I mean, as W. J. T. Mitchell defines the term, that Douglass pursues the idea of images as such. The focus, in other words, is less on an iconography of current pictures and their photographic proliferations, and more concerned with the “discursive horizon” of those pictures and, as we have already seen, the peculiar biographical and ideological implications of their proliferating signs. In the terms Mitchell offers in Iconology, photography functions for Douglass as a “mediating” or “dialectical image,” a “provocative” (borrowing the latter term from Plato), “an imperfect picture or likeness that provokes reflection.” Douglass’s depiction of photography’s “ambivalent metaphysics” provokes (even as it employs) that kind of critical reflection. His imaginative focus on the medium and on picture making generally participates in what Mitchell calls the “idea of imagery”; Mitchell notes the “way in which images (and ideas) double themselves: the way we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration.”22 21. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” (1865), 12. 22. Mitchell, Iconology, 93, 5.

156

Mediating American Autobiography

Trachtenberg’s counterreading of the Zealy daguerreotypes and their discursive horizon offers an example of this kind of iconology at work. “The illustrations are trapped within a system of representation as firmly as the sitters are trapped within a system of chattel slavery. And they powerfully inform us of our own entrapment.”23 Douglass’s philosophy of pictures anticipates that kind of rereading of the racialized images of American identity, the potential enslavement through visual representation and escape through a visual literacy that uses the master’s tools. But there is something more at issue here than adding a neglected visual literacy to Douglass’s rhetorical repertoire. Douglass posits a theory of the “picture making faculty” and its mediating power as the element out of which all progress and reform, and any critical reading, spring. Returning in the revised version of “Pictures and Progress” to the claim of man’s unique power to image his own subjectivity, Douglass explains: The process by which man is able to possit [sic] his own subjective nature outside of himself giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personality so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation is at bottom of all effort and the germinating principle of all reform and all progress. . . . It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress—for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism. It is by looking upon this picture and upon that which enables us to point out the defects of the one and the perfections of the other.24

Notice, then, how this lecture about pictures and progress is, at bottom, a lecture about progress as a picture; furthermore, notice how progress is achieved, as Douglass sees it, through the recognition of its dialectical and dynamic process; and finally—the lecture performing something of this dialectical movement itself—notice how Douglass realizes that critical process and the force of its contrasts visibly, by associating it with the process (the representational, dynamic progress) of pictures: every picture, Douglass insists, is a picture in progress. And thus pictures in progress, for Douglass, constitute the dynamic and still developing picture of all progress. “Great nature 23. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 56. 24. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” (1865), 18.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

157

herself—whether viewed in connection or apart from man, is in its manifold operations, a picture of progress and a constant rebuke to moral stagnation of conservatism” (FDP, 3:471). In this sense, “thought pictures” are the very ground of the progressive and dynamic nature of life and thought itself. Thought pictures: think of it as both a noun phrase and a predicate, a product and a process; a metaphor of thought and, more crucially, as Douglass suggests here, a metonym of thinking that is part of the very process it pictures. I want to close this section with two final examples from “Pictures and Progress” that reflect Douglass’s critical theory of pictures at work and elucidate what I mean in suggesting Douglass’s metonymic (not just metaphorical) interest in the medium of photography. The first we have already cited, that Douglass locates the “key to the great mystery of life and progress” in man’s picture-making processes: the “process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness, into the objective form.” To call Douglass’s theory iconological is to recognize that the “power” behind any of these pictures is dynamic and dialectical, that it lies in the composition and process with which the picture is both made and received, fixed and (by the very nature of image reproduction) displaced. At issue, we understand, is a process in which the meaning of pictures is contingent upon the various forms of their making and multiplication, the mechanical and discursive forms of their reproduction. The critical power of pictures, Douglass argues, emanates from the contest and contrast inherent in the process of that ongoing movement, that dynamic circulation and progression: the contrast between fact and form, real and ideal, or as Mitchell will identify the key to such representational binaries, between image and text. Douglass’s focus on the inversion of subjective consciousness into objective form is another such example. This representation of the “picture making faculty” would seem to echo the very language of photographic self-presentation that we find prominent, for example, in Mathew Brady’s or Marcus Root’s efforts to read American subjectivity into the surfaces of photographic forms, or in the case of Agassiz, to remove subjectivity from those same forms. I take Douglass’s verb in his phrasing “to invert his own subjective consciousness” to signal both his association with, and critical difference from, these other, more familiar rituals and conventions of photographic self-presentation. Douglass’s theory represents an inversion or undoing of those same conventions, even as it gives emphasis to picture making as a process of inverting. Rather than

158

Mediating American Autobiography

converting subjectivity and interiority into objective form, thus perpetuating identity by conserving it (as photographer Marcus Root suggests), Douglass posits this picture-making power as one in which the objective forms of identity stand in inverse relation to the subjectivity they would represent. Subjectivity may be given objective form, but that conservative (and alternately coercive) potential to posit identity, Douglass suggests, is tied to its own dynamic status as a process of making. “For the habit we adopt, the master we obey in making our subjective nature objective, giving it form, colour, space, action and utterance, is the all important thing to ourselves and our surroundings” (FDP, 3:461). That master is a system of representation that photographic pictures participate in but also—as deployed in this lecture—critically reproduce. Photographic poses can serve to represent subjectivity in objective form, but only with the potential to reveal the “objectivity” of those forms as inherently subjective, as a representational process, rather than a product, of identity. Whereas that type of subjectivity is evident in the Zealy daguerreotypes, but repressed by the claims of objective science applied to them, Douglass’s theory locates this inversive potential of picture making at the very source of man’s imaginative life. This dynamic “picture of progress” returns us to the “all engrossing character of the war”—from which, we recognize, Douglass never departed. Attending to the material progress of pictures, and “photographic processes” in particular, Douglass has been developing a picture theory by which to read not only the character of nature’s manifold operations, but what he calls “the moral chemistry of the universe.” Douglass reads in that “moral chemistry” the fundamental cause of the war: The cause is deeper down than sections, slaveholders or abolitionists. These are but the hands of the clock. The moving machinery is behind the face. The machinery moves not because of the hands, but the hands because of the machinery. To make the hands go right you must make the machinery go right. The trouble is fundamental. . . . We have attempted to maintain a union in defiance of the moral chemistry of the universe. (FDP, 3:465)

The trouble, we could add, is representational. And the critical point of this particular image of the clock and its hidden machinery, this telling picture of progress, no less than the whole point of the lecture

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

159

that precedes and prepares us for this image, is to understand the relation between the fundamental and the representational. The problem of slavery is also crucially a problem of the face and the readings that its representations continue to support; for Douglass, of course, many of those readings and portrayals are at the hands of tendentious artists and theories. Douglass’s image, then, suggests the relevant context of physiognomy and its photographic manifestations with regard to the great problem and constitutional crisis of his day: the war and the representational conflicts it embodies. In Douglass’s clock we have, once again, an image that is both metaphorical and metonymic: his thought on reading the fundamental cause of the war is pictured in the very process of its picturing. The photographic implications in Douglass’s image of the clock are slight—though perhaps no more slight than the visions of war the image manages to convey. The “chemistry” and “machinery” behind the “face” of this all-engrossing image (of slavery, the war, America’s constitution, the universe as such) are connotations by no means limited to photography. Nor is the “development” Douglass goes on to discuss, another name for the chemistry and material process at work behind, and inseparable from, nature’s picture of progress, specifically photographic. “But on the other hand how glorious is nature in action,” Douglass declares, echoing Thoreau’s passages on nature’s chemistry: “We get but an outside view, and while still amazed and curious. On goes the great mystery of mysteries—Creating, unfolding, expanding, renewing, changing perpetually, putting on new forms, new colours . . . unending scenes of freshness and beauty” (FDP, 3:472). But perhaps it is precisely to the point that this lecture that begins with explicit reference to photography and oblique reference to the war and slavery, inverts its focus once again. For photographic pictures, we have seen, are part of the complex of the problem. The truly progressive and critical force of these or any pictures, their great mystery, we are to understand, springs not solely from the accuracy of the likeness or resemblance they represent, but in their ability to mediate likeness and resemblance, to reproduce resemblance repeatedly and imperfectly, tendentiously and dynamically. Douglass insists that these pictures of slavery’s progress, delivered amidst the bloody images of slavery and the war, if they are to be recognized for what they truly represent, must be linked to the picture-making process that goes on largely outside and beneath our more familiar view.

160

Mediating American Autobiography

A Type of His Countrymen In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to bring Douglass’s own iconology to bear on several notable pictures in slavery (and progress) that he reproduces in his autobiographical writing. What pictures? To begin with, there are the frontispiece portraits with which each of Douglass’s three autobiographies opens, images that are frequently left out of republications of these texts: the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself has a portrait that was most likely engraved from a painting; the 1855 revision and expansion of that text, My Bondage and My Freedom, includes a portrait of Douglass engraved from a daguerreotype; and finally, the 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: Written by Himself initiates the final work of his self-representations with yet another likeness of the author, engraved from a photograph.25 To a certain extent, these engravings are entirely conventional. I have already cited Douglass’s recognition of the conspicuous role such likenesses play in biographical representation, and of their necessity in the age of photographic reproduction, when he noted that “the picture must be in the book, or the book be considered incomplete” (FDP, 3:455). These same images used in slave narratives, of course, also suggest something of a subversion of those authorial conventions, by the visible likeness they represent: Douglass, a black author, an “American slave” doing what no slave can do by law or convention, writing and representing himself. The 1855 frontispiece, like the text it faces, is perhaps the most telling example of the autobiographer’s complex participation in, and inversion of, what we earlier considered as the American ritual of “photographic self-representation.” Taken within five years of Brady’s Gallery and Zealy’s slave daguerreotypes, this daguerrean image of the author, signed (like each of the frontispieces) “Frederick Douglass,” offers its readers visible proof of what this story is about: the making of a slave into a self-representative man. In the introduction to this same volume, James M’Cune Smith adverts the reader to this significance of the autobiography and its author: “And the secret of his power, what is it? He is a Representative American man—a 25. The Library of America edition (1994), which republishes all three works, does include each frontispiece; reprints of the 1845 Narrative frequently fail to include its frontispiece.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

161

type of his countrymen” (A, 132). Douglass’s image appears to signal the author’s entry into the gallery of representative American men, his transformation from typical American slave to representative American author, from enslaved object to autobiographical subject. This is of a piece with the transformation that the signature underneath the image, like the verbal text of the narrative itself, at once describes and performs; we learn what it means, in the context of American slavery, for Douglass both to have a name of his own and to know how to write it. This significant relation between the author’s name and the author’s image is notably reproduced on the cover of the Library of America edition of Douglass’s three autobiographies. A reproduction of an 1847 daguerreotype image of Douglass hovers above his singular last name, like the images and names of others in the series, including his most immediate contemporaries, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Douglass’s entry into the “library” of American authors is signaled by the recognition that his distinctive image shares with his name. As a means of that recognition, the 1855 image of the author functions in the representational work crucial to these autobiographical “self-portraits.” It is part of the “textual freedom,” as William Andrews puts it, of “Douglass’s performing self.” For Andrews, freedom is not simply the content or subject of the story, but the story’s very objective: “Freedom becomes the crucial property and quality of a text—not just what it refers to, but how it signifies.” The point I want to emphasize, and continue to work through in the pages that follow, is that the kind of critical, visual literacy that Douglass emphasizes in “The Claims of the Negro” and theorizes in “Pictures and Progress,” indeed, insists upon as the basis of all progress, needs to be applied to readings of Douglass’s autobiographical performance and the rhetorical, literary mastery his performance evokes. This visual literacy has heretofore been observed only implicitly by criticism, if not (like the frontispieces in many reprints) neglected entirely.26 26. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 104, 134. In addition to Andrews’s important work regarding this literary mastery, there is Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his focus on Douglass’s rhetorical practices in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self, as well as the emphasis Gregory Jay gives to understanding and historicizing the deconstructive potential of Douglass’s rhetorical production: “As a speaking subject, Douglass constantly trades on the shock value of his eloquent literacy, on the irony of his appearance and speech” (America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History, 275).

162

Mediating American Autobiography

Let me point briefly to a recent example. Peter Dorsey insightfully examines the rhetorical work of metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. Along the way, he addresses a point that has become prominent in Douglass criticism, commenting on “Douglass’s revision of the Narrative into the stylistically more complex My Bondage and My Freedom.” Significantly, Dorsey suggests the greater achievement of the revised version by way of its frontispiece image and title page: This change is illustrated by the frontispieces and title pages of the two works. In the earlier version, a pallid, somewhat wistful Douglass, with crossed hands and a disappearing body, faces a spare title page that includes the words “written by himself”. The later work shows a darker, more physically powerful Douglass, with hands slightly clenched, opposite a dense title page. . . . This contrast signals Douglass’s growing awareness of the performativity of his self-representations and maps his bolder claim to conventional sources of authority (and authorship) in antebellum culture. Directed toward existing sites of power, Douglass’s new self-portrait helped construct the public identity essential to the increasingly political role he had adopted.27

“Douglass’s new self-portrait”: Dorsey’s analysis focuses primarily on the literary connotations of self-portrait, that abiding metaphor of autobiography. But I credit him with implying, at the very least, that there is a material context for this metaphor in the case of Douglass, and that the collapsing of verbal and visual connotations of selfpresentation, of metaphorical (verbal) images and literal (visual) pictures, is more than merely metaphorical. Thus, while Dorsey insightfully focuses on the key role that Douglass’s rhetorical “reproduction of images” plays in his performance and transformation of selfhood, I want to give more thought to the material—and as I will continue to show, the photographic—processes of that performative reproducibility: its sights of power, as we might say with “Pictures and Progress” in mind, recalling the composite, mediating character of this—and as Douglass suggests, of any—composition. Focusing specifically on the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, read in relation to the 1845 Narrative that it revises and sometimes quite literally reproduces, I want to follow Douglass in reading and reconsidering 27. Peter Dorsey, “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” 445–46.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

163

what we might call the “composite character” of his well-known images of self and slavery.28 The 1855 frontispiece image does more than refer to its subject, Douglass the author. In showing us how the text represents that subject, Douglass’s authority and (racial) presence made visible, the image further suggests the complexity of his authority and performance. In matters of racial representation, as Douglass suggests as early as his 1849 review of A Tribute for the Negro, and again in the 1854 critique of American ethnology, claims toward authority have everything to do with how the visible characteristics of race are read and represented. “The importance of this criticism may not be apparent to all,” as he argues in his “Claims of the Negro”; “—to the black man it is very apparent” (FDP, 2:514). One of the key differences between the 1845 Narrative and its revised version published ten years later concerns this very issue of how Douglass differently represents his apparent authority and the workings of what Andrews aptly identifies as “textual freedom.” Dorsey suggests that Douglass’s awareness of autobiographical performativity grows between the two versions, a growth perhaps best illustrated by the visible differences between the two frontispiece images. But even more immediately than Douglass’s consciousness, the context in which the autobiographical performances are given changes significantly in those ten years. Andrews understands the irony that the “textual freedom” of the 1845 Narrative was complicit with Douglass’s own subservience to the conventions of abolitionism and the claims and control of its leader, William Lloyd Garrison. Breaking with Garrison shortly before publishing the second version, Douglass “gained a perspective,” Andrews argues, “that allowed him to see signs of 28. In focusing on My Bondage and My Freedom, both by itself and in relation to the earlier Narrative, I am following critics such as Dorsey, Andrews, Eric Sundquist, and Priscilla Wald, who read the second of the three autobiographies, as I have already suggested, as the most authoritative and complex of the autobiographical works. Sundquist implies that the third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and its “iconographic black American success story” is less deserving of critical attention, noting that “if the Life and Times begins to appear tarnished by repetition and a mild smugness . . . My Bondage and My Freedom remains vividly, energetically alive with a sense of struggle and hope” (To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, 85, 86). Though I similarly exclude Life and Times from my focus, the issue of Douglass’s challenge to iconographic stories that I locate in his “thought pictures” and will apply to My Bondage and My Freedom could well repay further study and rethinking of his final autobiography.

164

Mediating American Autobiography

‘oppression’ in the very ‘form’ of the fugitive slave narrative that he had written in 1845.” James Olney best indicates the irony of the abolitionist control of slave narratives in identifying the “master plan for slave narratives”: “The lives of the narrators are never, or almost never, there for themselves and for their own intrinsic, unique interest but nearly always in their capacity as illustrations of what slavery is really like. Thus in one sense the narrative lives of the ex-slaves were as much possessed and used by the abolitionists as their actual lives had been by slaveholders.”29 In the 1855 rewriting of his introduction to abolitionism and his initiation as a slave narrator, Douglass reveals this irony of (self-)possession to be an ideological tension between facts and philosophy, between the demands for objectivity and the desires for subjectivity. In this revision Douglass thus challenges the Garrisonian legacy of which he had himself been (until recently) an important part. But more immediately, Douglass confronts the abolitionist iconography that legacy represents and amplifies. I agree with Priscilla Wald, who observes Douglass’s discomfort with this “iconography” and perceptively reads, in both the 1845 Narrative and the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, indications of his resistance to this positioning of the “slave as representative symbol” used by abolitionists. But I also use the word iconography more deliberately in recognizing the primacy of the visual in conceptions of slavery and the slave narrative. As W. J. T. Mitchell has shown, the kind of metaphor that Olney uses to describe the abolitionist imperative, “illustrations of what slavery is really like,” like the kind we find in the title of George Bourne’s 1834 abolitionist text Picture of Slavery in the United States of America, “typifies the dominance of visual, graphic metalanguages to describe slave narrative as assemblages of ‘scenes’ and ‘sketches.’”30 Such visual metalanguage is certainly operative in Ephraim Peabody’s 1849 article “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” which includes a review of Douglass’s Narrative. Peabody maintains, “We place these volumes without hesitation among the most remarkable productions of the age,—remarkable as being pictures of slavery by the slave, remarkable as disclosing under a new light the mixed elements of American civilization, and not less remarkable as a vivid exhibition of 29. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 217; James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” 51. 30. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, 90–91; Mitchell, Picture Theory, 185.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

165

the force and working of the native love of freedom in the individual mind.” Douglass’s frontispieces similarly serve in this exhibition of the slave, though the images are, like the narratives themselves, never transparent or unmediated “pictures of slavery by the slave.” As Olney reminds us, the frontispiece engraving was one of the key rhetorical conventions of the slave narrative and the abolitionist imperative, employed to emphasize the facticity of slavery and the slave’s existence. “Photographs, portraits, signatures, authenticating letters all make the same claim: ‘This man exists.’ Only then can the narrative begin.”31 The picture of the slave must be in the book, in other words, or the antislavery book would be considered incomplete. These “most remarkable productions of the age,” as Peabody names the slave narrative, rely on the reproducibility of the texts; but just as crucially in that age, the texts rely on the reproducibility and the recognizability of the typical images of slavery’s character. Such “pictures of slavery,” both verbal and visual, are called upon to depict the true “character” and “nature” of slavery. But at the same time, ironically, these images are employed to control the very imaginative, and as Douglass would emphasize, elusive potential of any picture. In his authenticating editorial preface to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, Garrison guarantees emphatically that readers will find “nothing drawn from the imagination,” but only the depiction of “SLAVERY AS IT IS” (A, 7). In My Bondage and My Freedom, that imperative is updated by the unsigned “Editor’s Preface,” which assures the reader that “his attention is not invited to a work of ART, but to a work of FACTS” (A, 105). Ten years later, this prefatory assurance may seem less imperious than Garrison’s, but it is written along the same binary lines: the narrative depictions that follow are facts, not philosophy; mechanical, not aesthetic or imaginative. Bourne’s Picture of Slavery includes several images reproduced from woodcuts, graphically complementing the particular scene of slavery described by the text; these images reinforce the overall “graphical accuracy of the picture,” as Bourne imagines his project.32 In other words, the “graphic” picture of slavery offered by this abolitionist text thoroughly conflates the verbal and visual senses of the word. Slavery’s graphic nature is most accurately depicted through the texts that most closely reproduce its visible 31. Ephraim Peabody, “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” 24; Olney, “I Was Born,” 52. 32. George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America, 7.

166

Mediating American Autobiography

markings. Nothing is to be drawn from the slave’s imagination, but rather drawn and reproduced (like the woodcuts) as an actual image of slavery—drawn upon the slave’s body and in the suggestive coloring of his face. Photographic technology would even more readily and cheaply serve the mechanical, objective logic of this representational imperative of abolitionism—much as it would for ethnology. But such conventions of “photographic truth” also serve that imperative ambivalently, given the medium’s potential to be viewed, depending on the writer, as alternately artistic or mechanical. In a prominent version of that ambivalence, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s lengthy article published in Quarterly Review in 1857, we recognize the potential of that ambivalence to turn to irony when applied to the “task” of abolitionist-sponsored autobiography. For Eastlake, photography is altogether too mechanical to be considered “Art,” and therefore would satisfy abolitionists. But the reason the medium cannot rise to the level of art is, in Eastlake’s phrasing, quite telling: it requires “mere manual correctness, and mere manual slavery, without any employment of the artistic feeling.”33 Given the insistence on facts instead of art, we can say that Douglass is introduced as an autobiographical speaker much as Eastlake reads the “manual slavery” of photographic depiction. Working under Garrison, Douglass is not only introduced to the abolitionist iconography of slavery he will represent, he is introduced as it; Douglass functions much like a photograph of slavery, an objective picture not of his subjectivity, but of slavery’s subjection. “I was a ‘graduate from the peculiar institution,’ Mr. Collins used to say, when introducing me, ‘with my diploma written on my back!’” (A, 365). Douglass is thus positioned not to offer a text about slavery, the text of his story, but rather to present himself as a visible text of slavery: to offer himself up as an example of the kind of text that slavery inscribes graphically on the body of the slave. In the logic of this factual, iconographic imperative, the fugitive narrator does not draw upon his own memory as an autobiographical subject; rather, he is drawn upon, bodily re-marked and recognized as an (autobiographical) object of slavery. Douglass, through the marks on his back, represents an image of slavery by being an actual image from slavery: like a photograph, and like the scars, Douglass is offered as an index of his origin. As Douglass declares in an 1842 speech, “My back is scarred by the 33. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” 64.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

167

lash—that I could show you, I would, I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul” (FDP, 1:16). Douglass’s soul may not be visible, but metonymically speaking, the system that wounds it remains for him all too visible. As Jared Gardner observes in Master Plots, the image of the slave’s scarred back and inscribed body is prominent in slave narratives and abolitionist discourse. Such images are telling examples, Gardner asserts, of the “seemingly inextricable relationship of race and writing in antebellum America.” Moreover, as Marcus Wood shows in detailing the prominence of such images of torture in visual representations of slavery, the inscribed body of the slave suggests the inextricability of race and visual (not just verbal) technologies of representation.34 The most famous specimen of this familiar iconography, produced in the decade following the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, would further disclose this visually graphic text of slavery and abolitionism, image and writing, by calling upon that other remarkable production of the age, photography. The so-called scourged-back photograph of an escaped slave named Gordon taken in 1863 was widely circulated in carte-de-visite form (the same type of photograph Holmes called the “sentimental greenbacks of society”) as well as reproduced as an engraving in Harper’s Weekly. This image and its remarkable circulation suggest that by 1855 the kind of abolitionism Douglass confronts trades upon the iconographic character of slavery and the typicality of the slave by further reproducing a peculiarly photographic quality of slavery’s text. “It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. Stowe cannot approach,” remarked Henry Ward Beecher’s New York Independent, suggesting that the photographic image “should be multiplied by the 100,000,” “because it tells the story to the eye.”35 The scourged-back photograph suggests a textual quality of slavery because at issue, as Gardner emphasizes, is how the system is represented and inscribed (here by antislavery interests) on the body of the slave: it is a system that is “intimately bound up in the technologies of 34. Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787–1845, 160; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865, 219. 35. Cited in Kathleen Collins, “The Scourged Back,” 45. As Marcus Wood shows, the image reproduced in Harper’s Weekly was accompanied by a verbal description captioned “A Typical Negro,” representing Gordon’s status not just as a victim of slavery but as a kind of scientific specimen for Northern abolitionists, Blind Memory, 268.

168

Mediating American Autobiography

race” and perpetuated in graphic forms—in diplomas on backs and in the legibility of what Douglass called the slave’s “tell tale face.”36 To consider this textuality of antislavery further in photographic terms is to shed light on the root of the issue: the visibility and the reproducibility of the system and its metonymic markings. What matters for the story that these pictures of slavery tell is not just what the image represents, but how (and how readily) the image reproduces the story of those bodies posed for the eye. Photographic images participate in the iconographic conventions of the antislavery text no less than they participate, as we have seen with Agassiz, in the reading practices of proslavery ethnology. This speaks to an ambivalence inherent in photography, to the shifting potential of the medium (returning to Scott McQuire’s reading) to point “on the one hand towards the sovereignty of the individual, and on the other to the possibility of being subjected to the rule of a normalizing discourse.” Douglass’s 1855 frontispiece, reproduced from a daguerreotype, also participates in this ambivalence of the photographic image. The subject’s right hand, clenched into a fist, suggests the sternness of his authority, an image of Douglass’s representative, “majestic wrath” noted by his audiences and implicitly repeated in the remarkable series of photographic images that he would take throughout his lifetime.37 But as we saw with Emerson’s observation of our photographic unhandsomeness, Douglass’s imaged hand, at the same time, suggests something of the subject’s resistance to the potential of the representation, its potential to fix him as a fact, to pin him down to the narrative of an other—the visible type of race and slavery. This “ambivalence” readable in the image (what Douglass calls “stern serenity”) represents, in part, the dual identity of the representational process of photography. Like Robert Cornelius’s first por36. Gardner, Master Plots, 161. 37. A book published by the National Portrait Gallery, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick S. Voss, not only includes many of these now-familiar images of Douglass, but implies that the endurance of his historical legacy in some form intersects with the endurance of his image. The title phrase is taken from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s remarks on first seeing Douglass at an abolitionist convention in the 1840s (reprinted as the text’s epigraph): “He stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath, as with wit, satire, and indignation he graphically described the bitterness of slavery and the humiliation of subjection to those who . . . were inferior to himself.”

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

169

trait, Douglass’s image conveys not just a representation of the subject of the photograph, but a representation of the very reproduction at hand. Douglass’s stern hand is an image of his expressive authority, then, in part because it is an impression of the process through which the image was first taken (as a daguerreotype) and then further reproduced as an engraving in the book. To confront lengthy exposure times, as we have seen, daguerrean sitters like Douglass had to assume a mask of rigidity and “stern serenity” in order not to blur the resulting image. And thus the expression becomes, potentially, a mere photographic (stereotypical) impression: the portrait of a mask instead of a man. In line with his understanding of the processes of photographic meaning and mediation that we find in “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass’s 1855 frontispiece functions critically as a thought picture. It is a conventional expression of authority, of self-image, but at the same time, an expression of its underlying, and potentially undermining, impressionability: a picture inseparable from its mediation and circulation, always part of a picture-making process. That process, we have seen, means that the objective, “graphical accuracy” of the picture, for example, the “picture of slavery,” exists alongside its potential elusiveness: facts and philosophy, objectivity and subjectivity, technology and identity remain in dynamic tension with each other. Douglass’s philosophy of pictures and progress reminds us that such mechanics, most evident in the 1850s in the photograph’s potential to capture and enslave a man through the “fixed fact” of its form, are never merely that. Though most likely not photographic in origin, the 1845 frontispiece image would seem to represent, even more dramatically, a similar view onto its own pictorial conditions: the picture in the process of its making or—as though a sketch of a photograph coming to light—its emergence from latency. To argue, then, that Douglass resists the mere mechanics and “manual slavery” of the abolitionist iconography ascribed for and partially on him is to recognize that he does so not by opposing such photographic pictures so much as by reproducing their photographic character.38 38. I am informed by Ed Folsom’s reading of the “constructed nature” of Douglass’s 1845 frontispiece image in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Douglass’s Frontispiece Engravings,” 58. Westerbeck speculates that the 1845 frontispiece engraving might have been based on a daguerreotype now lost, “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,” 148.

170

Mediating American Autobiography

Composite Character By reproducing photography, I mean two things: that Douglass reads the medium and that he, however subtly, writes from that understanding with a critically reproductive difference. This is a difference that Douglass locates in the dynamic of the medium’s own reproducibility, its circulation not just as a product in an economy of image representation, but as an image of the very process of representation it (partially) embodies. Consider one of the more explicit examples we can find in Douglass’s writing, outside of “Pictures and Progress” and the frontispiece portraits, of photography’s figurative potential on display. In his lone work of fiction, the historical novella “The Heroic Slave,” published in 1853, we find Douglass turning to the metaphor of daguerrean memory. According to the story, Mr. Listwell, an abolitionist in spirit, takes in the fugitive slave Madison Washington, the story’s protagonist, when he remembers having seen him five years earlier in Virginia (in the story’s opening scene) as he declared his resolution to be free. Washington, concerned that he has failed “to conceal what I supposed to be the manner of a fugitive slave,” asks Listwell how he recognized him as a fugitive. Ever since he witnessed the scene, Listwell discloses, “your face seemed to be daguerreotyped on my memory.” But Listwell’s precise memory of Washington, his visual apprehension and fixing of the slave’s fugitive identity, is complicated, if not resisted, by the way Douglass’s narrator prefaces the story in the opening frame. There, the reader is introduced not to Washington nor the character readable in his face, but to the very question of how and whether he can be read and apprehended. Thus, expanding the visual register of Listwell’s daguerrean metaphor, Douglass offers an alternative view of the potential to offer complete or fixed representations, daguerrean or otherwise. “Glimpses of this great character are all that can now be presented,” the narrator tells us; “he is seen by the quivering flash of angry lightning, and he again disappears covered with mystery. . . . Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers.”39 Douglass’s story aims to reproduce for the reader the hero’s fugitivity; to do so the author turns to the complications of photographic memory. 39. Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” 226, 220–21.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

171

Douglass’s use of the daguerreotype in “The Heroic Slave,” a small but telling example, suggests that he not only locates a critical potential of the medium (its “marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities”) in his writing about photography, as in “Pictures and Progress,” but in his writing with it. I want to turn now to a crucial example of this kind of re-visioning at work in the text of My Bondage and My Freedom, one in which the photographic implications are more subtle than we find in “The Heroic Slave” or the “Pictures and Progress” lecture, but in that subtlety all the more telling of the way Douglass, in this text and in his autobiographical project as a whole, comes before his readers. One of the earliest signals of Douglass’s re-vision of his Narrative comes in the increased attention he gives in the opening pages of My Bondage and My Freedom to his mother. There, Douglass expands upon the scant mention she receives in the first version, and we learn that her absence from his life had everything to do with slavery. In 1855, Douglass revises that absence not only by restoring his mother to a place of significance in his life and “parentage” (reserved in 1845 for his grandmother and, ambivalently, his white father), but also by further elucidating the significance of her enforced absence. In Narrative, Douglass memorably, and coldly, remarks, “I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (A, 16). Ten years later, Douglass gives more attention to the conditions of that estrangement and elaborates upon his memorable ambivalence toward her: I do not remember to have seen my mother after this occurrence. Death soon ended the little communication that had existed between us; and with it, I believe, a life—judging from her weary, sad, downcast countenance and mute demeanor—full of heart-felt sorrow. I was not allowed to visit her during any part of her long illness; nor did I see her for a long time before she was taken ill and died. The heartless and ghastly form of slavery rises between mother and child, even at the bed of death. . . . Scenes of sacred tenderness, around the death-bed, never forgotten, and which often arrest the vicious and confirm the virtuous during life, must be looked for among the free, though they sometimes occur among the slaves. It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in

172

Mediating American Autobiography

life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of hers treasured up. (A, 155)

This passage about his mother’s strange “presence”—her absence while she was alive, her presence felt in memory after she is dead— works along similar lines of presenting to the reader what is absent to the slave. We can think of this passage itself as an example of the “scenes of sacred tenderness” that, as Douglass argues, are denied the slave. With such memorial scenes of sacred and domestic tenderness, Douglass engages a conventional rhetoric of sentiment familiar to the slave-narrative genre and manifested most powerfully in the same decade in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In fact, Sarah Meer argues convincingly that Douglass’s passage not only echoes Stowe, but may have been written, as a revision of the 1845 version, in direct response to Stowe. The visual resonances of Douglass’s memory of his mother suggest one of the sentimental characteristics that his passage shares with Stowe. We have already seen it vis-à-vis Listwell in “The Heroic Slave”: the rhetoric of daguerrean memory and description. Early in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe sets out to describe her heroic slave, understanding that “we must daguerreotype for our readers” Tom’s face and “African features.” Stowe thus uses the idea of daguerreotyping (note that she is analogizing her description to the verb, not the noun) in one of its primary, sentimental uses: not just to describe (her) character, but to situate Tom, for her readers, within a familiar discourse of memory and affection, “to focus familial affect,” as Karen Sanchez-Eppler describes the relation between early photography and sentimental culture. For SanchezEppler, the paradigmatic instance of that relation comes in the form of the postmortem photograph, the daguerreotype of the dear and departed. Douglass thus offers us something of a daguerreotype of his mother in the face “imaged” on his memory.40 That we should read this image in terms of a more specific photographic register of memory and its afterlife is even clearer in the passage that immediately precedes and prepares us for it. “My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct,” Douglass 40. Sarah Meer, “Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” 91–92; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 21; Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Then When We Clutch Hardest,” 70.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

173

notes, asserting from another angle the complexity and ambiguity of the distinct presence of her absence in his life: “Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features.” And then, as in the passage that follows it, Douglass inverts the expectation of the focus. Douglass may set out, like Stowe, to daguerreotype his mother for his readers, but the object lesson is that such daguerrean memory is precisely what he does not have. He continues: “There is in ‘Prichard’s Natural History of Man,’ the head of a figure—on page 157—the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones” (A, 152). That suppose gets to the point of this passage: what Douglass is left with is not the memory of his mother fixed and reasserted by her photographic pose, but a kind of uncanny and “ghastly” perversion of that convention, his supposing of her: an image not of his mother, but of the “form of slavery” that rises between mother and child, and remains in his convoluted memory of her. This scene offers an image, then, not to secure presence and intimacy in the face of bodily absence, as a daguerreotype might, but an image that embodies the mother’s absence. Douglass’s passage aims to make that more grievous absence, and its conditions, visibly present to us. What can we make of this passage in Douglass’s visual memory? “The image is mute,” Douglass emphasizes, but what might it nevertheless tell us about how Douglass envisions, and here partially revisions, his autobiography? Peter Walker, in his section on Douglass in Moral Choices, was one of the first critics to note the convolutions of Douglass’s picturing of his mother. In particular, Walker remarks on Douglass’s unlikely comparison of his mother’s features to the image he finds in Prichard’s Natural History of Man, the ethnological study by the influential British natural historian J. C. Prichard, a work Douglass most likely encountered during his visit to Britain sometime in the 1840s. The image found on page 157, it turns out, is Prichard’s example of ancient Egyptian physiognomy. The illustration includes the heads of two figures, both male and presumably (in the context of Prichard’s natural history and the discourse of Egyptology he cites) both white: “that of a royal prince, copied from the very ancient paintings in the tomb of Pehrai at Eletheias; and also the face of Rameses VII.” Walker thus comments on the uncanny implications of

174

Mediating American Autobiography

the passage: “So for most of his life Frederick Douglass apparently found his black mother in the form of a princely man who, as far as the picture showed, may have been white.” We can certainly agree with Henry Louis Gates Jr., who, repeating Walker’s reading of the passage, suggests that “the ironies are legion.”41 The difficult question, of course, is how to read the force of that irony. Consider the reading Deborah McDowell offers in an essay of some note both for Douglass studies and for African American autobiography generally, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition.” McDowell cites the Prichard passage and reads its gender and racial convolutions as a sign of the overall politics of gender at work in his autobiography. Douglass’s “voyeuristic relation to the violence against slave women,” McDowell argues, is on display in such passages, a “symbolic complicity” in which the text “becomes implicated in the very situation of exploitation that it seeks to expose.” For McDowell, Douglass does not just represent the mute image of his mother, he reproduces the muting and thus repeats uncritically the “cultural and oppositional relation of the masculine to the feminine, the relation between seer and seen, agent and victim” that takes place in slavery and abolitionism alike. In other words, Douglass stands as both “a witness and participant,” as he will himself characterize his relation to the “terrible spectacle” of the Aunt Hester whipping he experiences as a child and represents early in his Narrative. “I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. . . . It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant” (A, 18). The young slave’s witnessing represented by such scenes, as McDowell sees it, is complicit in, and ultimately undermined by, the author’s participation in, and re-presentation of, the scenes. “Put another way,” McDowell suggests, “black women’s backs become the parchment on which Douglass narrates his linear progression from bondage to freedom.”42 What should we make of this witnessing turned into unwitting participation? For McDowell, the images of the whipping of Aunt Hester (changed to Esther in 1855) and of Douglass’s mute mother serve in 41. Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in NineteenthCentury American Abolition, 254; Gates, Figures in Black, 122. 42. Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” 50, 48, 51, 48.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

175

the autobiographical narratives much like the image of Gordon’s scourged back serves abolitionism or the Zealy images serve Agassiz and ultimately slavery. Such images reproduce the graphic—and for McDowell, pornographic—nature of the slavery they would critique. I do not dispute the comparison, nor the emphasis that McDowell gives to reading such complicities of slavery and antislavery more crucially—and I think insightfully—in terms of gender. Douglass, as we have already seen, does reproduce the troubling iconography of slavery in his narratives; these are reproductions of his own participation in—and like the diploma on his back, participation as—scenes of slavery. But McDowell misses the critical force of that reproduction of slavery’s representational work, its iconography and exhibition, that Douglass brings to bear in the 1855 text. Priscilla Wald elucidates that criticism when, taking into account the ironic slippage of the Prichard passage and its allusion, she proposes an alternative reading to McDowell’s. “Yet it is also possible,” she argues, “that Douglass means to depict just how mediated his experience of her has been. The image of a possibly white man superimposed upon his memory of his mother offers insight into her, and by implication his, inadequate representation within the (white) natural history of man—and into their exclusion from full personhood.”43 At issue, it seems to me, is that very implication of mediation and inadequate representation attending this passage in Douglass’s representation of memory. In his introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, James M’Cune Smith also points us to this more critical force of the Prichard image and its larger implications. Reminding us that the most immediate context for the allusion is the racial science of ethnology, Smith explains: “The head alluded to is copied from the statue of Ramses the Great, an Egyptian king of the nineteenth dynasty. The authors of the ‘Types of Mankind’ give a side view of the same on page 148, remarking that the profile, ‘like Napoleon’s, is superbly European!’ The nearness of its resemblance to Mr. Douglass’ mother, rests upon the evidence of his memory, and judging from his almost marvelous feats of recollection of forms and outlines recorded in this book, this testimony may be admitted.” On the one hand, Smith extends the complications of Douglass’s allusion to the Prichard image and its legion of ironies: the same image of Ramses, found in the influential text of polygenesis Types of Mankind, by Nott and Gliddon, is said to 43. Wald, Constituting Americans, 95.

176

Mediating American Autobiography

resemble a European. But more importantly, Smith locates the subversive force of this irony by emphasizing the ethnological context for the passage. The images, in the hands of Nott and Gliddon and other racial scientists of the day, offer self-evident and unambiguous proof of the clear difference between white and black, and more specifically, between Egyptian and African; while in other hands, these same images complicate that presumption of distinct, visible difference. “The Egyptians, like the Americans, were a mixed race, with some negro blood circling around the throne, as well as in the mud hovels,” M’Cune Smith argues, directly and explicitly challenging the “recent writers on Ethnology” (A, 136–37). We might also recall that in his own critique of that ethnology, the 1854 “Claims of the Negro” lecture, Douglass explicitly distinguishes Prichard’s work from the distorted portrayals of the “negro” found most egregiously in Types of Mankind (FDP, 2:510). Linking Douglass’s “Prichard” image with his thoroughly visual critique of ethnology and its claims, M’Cune Smith reminds us that the issue for Douglass concerns not merely what is pictured or represented, but how. And the key difference, in this regard, between how “pictures of negroes and Europeans” are differently represented in Prichard as opposed to Nott and Gliddon concerns the picture’s revelation (or occlusion) of something Douglass calls “composite character.” This is Douglass’s version of Prichard’s monogenism, a view of racial and ethnic amalgamation applied specifically to America and what Douglass would, in a later essay, call “our composite nationality.”44 But this is more than an argument that recognizes the inevitable and beneficial mixture of America’s national composition; it is, more radically, an argument that seeks to return our focus, once again, to the representational connotations and visual constructions—the compositions—of America’s character. In “The Claims of the Negro,” Douglass provides an incredible example of this refocusing of our attention on the problem of representational justice. Douglass asserts that the denial of resemblance and “affinity between the negro and 44. Douglass uses the term composite character in “The Claims of the Negro” in reference to his and M’Cune Smith’s arguments regarding the composite nature of civilization, maintaining that “our own great nation, so distinguished for industry and enterprise, is largely indebted to its composite character” (FDP, 2:522). In a later address, “Our Composite Nationality” (1869), Douglass reiterates the composite character of America with more specific regard to recent issues of immigration, specifically Chinese (FDP, 4:240–59).

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

177

the Egyptian,” a foundational claim (and problem) for the American School of Ethnology (the problem being, as Douglass puts it, that Egypt is in Africa), could just as well be applied and used to “deny the affinity of the Americans to the Englishman.” Taking up that assertion, Douglass proposes a revised example of racial iconography suitable for the ethnologist. “He might make out as many points of difference, in the case of the one as in that of the other. Especially could this be done, if, like ethnologists, in given cases, only typical specimens were resorted to.” Thus reversing the focus and force of the sliding scale of typical specimens to which ethnology resorts, Douglass goes on to imagine a different racial iconography for the familiar appearance of “American character”: The lean, slender American, pale and swarthy, if exposed to the sun, wears a very different appearance to the full, round Englishman, of clear, blonde complexion. One may trace the progress of this difference in the common portraits of the American Presidents. Just study those faces, beginning with WASHINGTON; and as you come thro’ the JEFFERSONS, the ADAMSES, and the MADISONS, you will find an increasing bony and wiry appearance about those portraits, & a greater remove from that serene amplitude which characterizes the countenances of the earlier Presidents. I may be mistaken, but I think this is a correct index of the change going on in the nation at large,—converting Englishmen, Germans, Irishmen, and Frenchmen into Americans, and causing them to lose, in a common American character, all traces of their former distinctive national peculiarities. (FDP, 2:514–15)

Jared Gardner aptly refers to this remarkable ethnological revision as “Douglass’s own ‘Crania Americana,’” recalling the title of the influential ethnological study by Samuel Morton. As Gardner argues, Douglass revises and subverts the representational “technologies of difference” that American ethnology, as we have seen, depends upon to propagate the “value” of its texts and theories: the inscription of racial difference in the very lines and visible pages of its assertions. For Gardner, this subversion is at the crux of what he calls Douglass’s “rewriting of American race,” a revision aimed at informing better readers of the power of the texts and fictions of American (racial) character: “In laying his own claim to writing, Douglass shows how fragile and arbitrary are the powers that depend so strongly on a careful distinction between who writes and who is written

178

Mediating American Autobiography

upon.”45 As we have seen, Douglass focuses equally on the role of visual representation. I would thus extend Gardner’s point by arguing that Douglass is more specifically imagining and critically revisioning in this example the visual technologies of difference so important to the portrayals of ethnology and its iconographic readings of racial identity. In fact, to that end of subversion, Douglass subtly reverses the conventional reading of what portraits of American character typically represent. Here, progress and difference are not represented in portraits, but traced and indexed by them. The crucial difference lies in recognizing how each portrayal characterizes such change and conversion, how progress is processed and composed. The process of composing the portrait of American character does not emulate, according to Douglass; it reproduces. In this same light, the quasi-photographic image to which Douglass alludes and strangely compares his mother, the head of a departed figure, is more than a reproduction of his own racial ambivalence. It is a critical image of the role that such mediations and ambivalent reproductions—precisely as images, as likenesses and resemblances—play in the racial representations that antislavery, not unlike ethnology, shares with slavery. It is another important passage in representational justice, by way of Douglass’s representational critique: where the re-vision lies not just in what the picturing refers to, but, as William Andrews remarks of “Douglass’s performing self,” how it signifies. Such reproductions of slavery’s iconographic system, then, are not merely pictures of slavery, but critically reflexive pictures of slavery. They serve as explorations of the picture-making process that slavery or ethnology depends upon in its racial representations and largely hides from view. Whether strictly photographic or not, we can say of Douglass’s representation of the Prichard image and the differences it traces what Trachtenberg suggests about Agassiz’s daguerreotypes: the ironies of the image arise not so much despite the original intentions of the picture or its making, but because of them.46 McDowell’s reading of Douglass’s image of his mother—and by extension, Douglass’s images of slavery and self—forecloses the critical force of the irony that Douglass asks us to consider, the irony that arises because of the picture’s composition. Arguing that we need to turn our “critical gaze” to Douglass’s participation in slavery’s (and 45. Gardner, Master Plots, 181, 170. 46. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 56.

Frederick Douglass, Photographically Considered

179

abolitionism’s) visual economy, as I also understand we must, she nevertheless denies Douglass and his witnessing an implicit and dynamic, critical gaze of its own. Douglass’s portrayal of his memory, by way of this elusive portrait of his mother that seems to resist its own photographic conventions, reveals the lack of impartiality it repeats. There are no such things, Douglass makes clear, as unconventional or unmediated images that speak for or by themselves— certainly not in the thoroughly mediated experience of the “Negro.” What we find in these scenes of memory is not simply witnessing undermined by the participation it is complicit in, but a witnessing that critiques those complications of memory by foregrounding their means. Douglass represents the partiality of the witnessing and memory he shares with his two interrelated subjects: slavery and autobiography, bondage and freedom. Douglass insists on this kind of representational justice and critique, as we have seen. But McDowell’s focus on this and other images in the text—and she is not alone in this—repeats the problem of iconography that Douglass confronts. The image is taken for granted as an image, as telling its story to the eye transparently, immediately, self-evidently. Despite her focus on the visual complications of this passage, McDowell seems guilty of what I have called, following Laura Wexler, photographic anekphrasis. The photographic philosophy of “Pictures and Progress” and the critical remediations of “The Claims of the Negro” encourage us to see a different story in the making: a picture not claiming “graphical accuracy,” but more crucially, a picture written about such claims. The “composite character” of Douglass’s Prichard passage—a text about an image, an image alluding to a text—might be considered better as a version of what Douglass calls in his autobiography “passwords.” “We had several words, expressive of things, important to us, which we understood,” Douglass explains in the chapter in My Bondage and My Freedom that describes the failed “run-away plot” that precedes his eventual escape, “but which, even if distinctly heard by an outsider, would convey no certain meaning. I have reasons for suppressing these pass-words, which the reader will easily divine.” These “pass-words” for Douglass could function repressively and subversively, alternately revealing and concealing what he calls the slave’s “tell tale face.” The telling tale of a face implies the reading of slavery and its physiognomic workings that Douglass himself, writing this text, like the fugitive he writes about, both suppresses and visibly reproduces. “They watch, therefore, with skilled and practiced eyes,

180

Mediating American Autobiography

and have learned to read, with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of the slave, through his sable face,” Douglass remarks of the slaveholder, who is wary of such plots and “looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution of justice” (A, 309, 307). Ironically, Douglass places the reader of his slave narrative in the position of the slaveholder, seeking “to read, with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of the slave.” At the end of his Narrative ten years earlier, having refused to detail the facts of his escape from slavery, Douglass confronted his reader with the painful conditions he had faced unexpectedly upon reaching the North. “To understand it,” Douglass asserted, “one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances.” Placing the reader in the slave’s position as well, the position of the “toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave,” Douglass replaced claims for accuracy with a call for imagination (A, 90). For Douglass, justice and understanding emerge through such imaginative acts of empathy and inversion. Douglass thus gives a “deeper shade” to his own “picture” of the signs and faces of slavery and racial identity in nineteenth-century America. This composite depiction of race and representation, informed by Douglass’s understanding of man’s “picture making faculty” and by the lessons of “our photographic processes,” reveals the subtle shades of mediation. As Douglass demonstrates, this mediation enables differences between the merely typical and the representative type, between the slave and the man, to be reinforced in some readings and invites those very differences to be reconsidered in others.

5

- Specimen Daze Whitman’s Photobiography

As I have always said, there’s an element, margin, play, of uncertainty in every photo: it may be a bit out of heaven or a breath from hell. . . . The best of them come by hazard—the casting of a die. —Walt Whitman, in With Walt Whitman in Camden

In his autobiographical remediation of the American slave, Frederick Douglass is both a witness to, and canny participant in, the emerging uses of photography in the making of an author. “The picture must be in the book,” he notes in “Pictures and Progress” concerning visual representations of authors enhanced by photographic reproduction, “or the book be considered incomplete” (FDP, 3:455). In nineteenth-century American writing, there is no more spectacular example than Walt Whitman’s developments upon this relation between the author’s image and the personal identity of his book. From his beginnings as an author, Whitman would turn to photography, both in image and in word, to convey, as we saw in his review of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, the autobiographical “inner being” of his book. In his ongoing and lifelong revisions of that book, Whitman would continue to turn to photographic reproductions “taken from life” in an effort to offer his reader not just illustrations of the life, but “markedly personal” connections to it. As Whitman explains in a reader’s note at the end of his Complete Poems and Prose published in 1888: “I have wanted to leave something markedly personal. I have 181

182

Mediating American Autobiography

put my name with pen-and-ink with my own hand in the present volume. And from engraved or photo’d portraits taken from life, I have selected some, of different stages . . . and bequeath them at a venture to you, reader, with my love.” The photographic images reiterate the metonymy of Whitman’s poetic venture; Whitman imagines a reader not holding the book so much as touching the world from which the book emerges. The verbal and visual images mediate the contact of the reader’s hands with the writer’s attempt to put “a Person, a human being, (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America),” as Whitman phrases it in “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” “freely, fully and truly on record.” The photographic qualities of this “Personal Book,” as Whitman characterizes the writing in the note to the 1888 Complete Poems and Prose, make the entire work “probably a sort of autobiography; an element I have not attempted to specially restrain or erase” (PW, 2:734, 731, 734). Douglass, of course, is not so free as Whitman to put himself “fully and truly on record,” not free to erase or restrain an autobiography that was already removed or restricted by others. Douglass’s photographic re-visioning of his life, as I showed in the last chapter, focuses critically on the incomplete or distorted record that the fugitive slave narrator must bequeath to his reader, much as it has been bequeathed to him by slavery and ethnology. Though Douglass does, in the case of his 1855 frontispiece portrait, put the photographic image to work in his text much as Whitman does in that same year, his photographic record is more modest compared to some 130 portraits that Whitman had taken in his lifetime and the numerous reproductions from those portraits that he included in his books. Whitman was the most photographed American writer of the century and was the writer who most freely and explicitly embraced the visual technology as a figure for the encompassing personality of his writing. Unlike the fugitive character of Douglass’s composite autobiography, marked by ironies and absences, Whitman’s “book” appears to be complete in its photographic authority, in the free range of the author’s roving eye. Writing of Whitman’s “faith in the power of photography to absorb experience and hold it fast,” David S. Reynolds views the photograph “as an essential metaphor behind his democratic aesthetic.”1 Like photographs preserved in an album, Whitman’s “sort of autobi1. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, 282–83, 285.

Whitman’s Photobiography

183

ography” makes visible and knowable to his readers all that he has observed and experienced firsthand. This view of Whitman’s complete and contained autobiographical poetics, the photo album of his life’s work, makes sense for a poet who personally inserted photographic prints into his books and claimed, “In these Leaves everything is literally photographed. Nothing is poetized.”2 The poetry reads as a sort of autobiography because the autobiography reads as a sort of photography. To borrow the word from Whitman, readers have long known that his work “smacks” of the photographic technology he witnessed and celebrated as it emerged before his very eyes—what could be new under this sun? My contention in this chapter is that critics have been correct in observing the autobiographical interest in photography that Whitman displays, but they have been more limited in reading the creative implications of photography back into his autobiography. As Whitman would say of Lincoln’s portrait, there is something else there. To understand Whitman’s capacious photographic memory, we need to think through, and beyond, the metaphor of the photograph in Whitman’s work, the photograph absorbing and fixing the world in its view. We need to give more consideration to the “errant metonymy” of photography’s reproduction process: not just what the photograph represents, but how it reproduces.3 In doing so, we gain a fuller picture of the writer’s interest in the visual medium as well as a better understanding of the “sort of autobiography” that Whitman conceived his writing medium to be. In concluding that Whitman would “not write about photography so much as he would write with and from photography,” Ed Folsom insightfully expands the recognition of Whitman’s photographic 2. Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6:21. 3. As I have previously noted, Judith Roof discusses the “errant metonymy” of photography in Reproductions of Reproduction, 41. In addition to David Reynolds, I would point to Miles Orvell’s important reading of “Whitman’s transformed eye” as an example of where the critical insight regarding Whitman’s photographic poetics is perceptive but also limited in focusing on the metaphor of the photographic camera, not (as I have sought to do) the metonymy of the photographic process. Orvell contends, “In fact, during Whitman’s formative years—the 1840s—the camera was just being introduced to America and was an immediate popular sensation. . . . and it became, I would argue, a crucial metaphor and model for the poet’s own creative processes, standing for the peculiarly modern apprehension of reality” (The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940, 5–6). It is, in fact, not the camera that is new to the 1840s, but the process of photochemical reproduction.

184

Mediating American Autobiography

poetics. Folsom reveals a writer thoroughly interested in the chemistry and latency of photographic images, in a photographic process that offers corresponding lessons for identity’s unfolding process and life’s shifting “clutter of reality”—a reality Whitman would figure, memorably, as a compost pile.4 Coming from that photographic compost, Whitman’s work “smacks” of the writer’s interest not just in photographs but in an underlying photographic metonymy—just as photographs chemically and compositionally smack of their origins. Building upon this implication of a more dynamic and uncertain photographic memory in his thought and writing, I refocus critical attention on the peculiar, representational character of Whitman’s autobiographical writing that the author himself identifies (as I observe in Chapter 1) as “strange developments.” I read photography as a suggestive figure in Whitman for the unfinished and incomplete composition of his “sort of autobiography”—and most specifically, for the actual autobiography he publishes in 1882, Specimen Days. In doing so, I pay attention to Whitman’s engagement with a photographic process that challenges conventional notions of the static and self-evident photograph—and the self-evidence of the identity contained therein. Rather, the “play” that Whitman reads in every photo, as he remarks to Horace Traubel, and recognizes as part of photography’s reproduction process, renders a photographic confusion that he takes full advantage of (as we will see) in reprinting photos for his books. Like Douglass, though for different reasons, Whitman is also subject to the fugitivity of photographic selfevidence. “There are a dozen of me afloat,” Whitman complains to Traubel, sifting through portraits cluttering his Camden floor: “I don’t know which Walt Whitman I am.”5 Of course, in sorting through the representational chaos of his life’s work, Whitman could just as well be referring to the various “Walt Whitmans” reproduced in the words of the books and manuscripts. This photographic lesson in identity’s ongoing reproduction—a process that links the metonymy of the technology to that of the writing—should remind us that Whitman’s own conception of the “sort of autobiography” that underlies his book emphasizes the confusion and incompleteness of the project. Whitman would refer to his Civil War memoranda as necessarily “convulsive” and would characterize 4. Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 176, 119. 5. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:108.

Whitman’s Photobiography

185

Specimen Days, the eventual home for those memoranda, as fragmentary and wayward: “May-be, if I don’t do anything else,” Whitman suggests in the book’s opening frame, “I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed” (PW, 1:1). As we will observe in reading through Specimen Days, Whitman does not merely anticipate or deflect criticism of the work’s lack of cohesion or completion. In its wayward metonymies, the autobiography offers an authentic specimen of the writer’s life—the life of a writer invested in the very metonymy of the specimen. There is, I understand, a photographic logic to this autobiographical waywardness; Whitman’s photographic memory values the authenticity of the contexts it seeks to reproduce in writing over the authoritativeness of its representations. To elaborate upon the photographic metonymy that informs Whitman’s notion of the autobiographical specimen, I compare and contrast the representational confusion of his war memoranda with the memorial project of Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866). For Gardner, photographs offer transparent and immediate truths of the war—despite the traces of mediation (and some sleight of hand) that his book reveals. For Whitman, in contrast, photographic mediation reiterates the conditions that make the war’s essential confusion unrepresentable; such representation is most authentic in failing to get the “real war” wholly into the books. This “convulsiveness” of Whitman’s war memoranda, suggesting partially what it fails to represent fully, is extended to the postwar sections of Specimen Days written in Whitman’s late years in Camden; it may well account for the irony that this book, the actual prose autobiography produced by this most autobiographical of America’s poets, has received scant critical attention.6 Convulsiveness marks a tension between the process and product of photography (and autobiography); as we will see, it often renders a photographic poetics in 6. Citing Whitman’s assertion that the book is spontaneous and wayward, Linck C. Johnson remarks that “the few critics who have discussed his narrative have echoed this judgement.” I agree with—and am echoing myself—Johnson’s suggestion that the “formlessness” of the work, noted by all, is “more apparent than real,” “The Design of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days,” 3. More recent readings of the autobiography have attempted to contextualize this apparent formlessness in terms of conversion narrative (Joseph Fichtelberg, The Complex Image: Faith and Method in American Autobiography), prophetic autobiography (Nicholas Everett, “Autobiography as Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days”), and the generic ambivalence of transcendental autobiography (Lawrence Buell, “Autobiography in the American Renaissance”).

186

Mediating American Autobiography

Whitman that contradicts the very conventions of the photograph that the poet would seem to embrace in his “literally photographed” Leaves. But it is through this same “uncertainty” of the photo, marked in such contradictions, that the author, like the photographic image, can reach the reader.

Parts of the Actual Distraction Further characterizing the dissonant picture that the fragmentary Specimen Days renders of his life and times, Whitman reflected in a notebook entry soon after the book was published in 1882, “Its cohesion and singleness of purpose [is] not so evident at first glance.” Whitman’s visual figure of the “glance” also appears in his assessment of the central part of Specimen Days, the section that remains its most compelling, if also its strangest, feature. As he writes to Sylvester Baxter of the newly published book, “[It] dwells long in its own peculiar way on the Secession War—gives glimpses of that event’s strange interiors, especially the Army Hospitals—in fact makes the resuscitating and putting on record the emotional aspect of the war of 1861–’65 one of its principal features.”7 In fact, such “glimpses” and other variations of this figure for partial, incomplete, or (using Whitman’s term) fluctuating vision recall the principal figure employed throughout this section of war memoranda that Whitman reproduces, nearly verbatim, from his earlier book Memoranda during the War (1875). Copying directly (he insists) from blood-stained notebooks that he kept while serving as a nurse in the hospitals, Whitman provides in this section what he calls “a glimpse of war’s hell-scenes.” For example, he records in the entry titled “A Night Battle, Over A Week Since” that the event “afforded countless strange and fearful pictures.” Or, more to the point, especially since Whitman would not have seen the battle firsthand, but only through his view of the aftermath he encountered in the hospital, he records his attempt to put that event on record: “There was part of the late battle at Chancellorsville . . . I would like to give just a glimpse of—(a moment’s look in a terrible storm at sea—of which a few suggestions are enough, and full details impossible)” (PW, 1:45). Glimpse thus reminds us that the war was, at 7. Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, 3:661; Whitman to Sylvester Baxter, October 8, 1882, in The Correspondence, 3:308.

Whitman’s Photobiography

187

least as Whitman remembered it, a prominently visual experience— “things seen through my eyes and what my vision brings,” as Whitman put it in an early proposal for the book that would become Memoranda.8 But the word glimpse also suggests that Whitman’s primary concern in representing these memories of the war is as reflexive as it is reflective; the focus remains largely on the matter of his own part in the representation. Pictures and glimpses suggest why “full details are impossible” to the extent that they foreground their own suggestiveness, their own ability, that is, to mediate a history that cannot be immediate. A few suggestions are precisely enough (in other words) to tell the story that cannot be told. “Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—whoe’er can write the story?” Whitman asks rhetorically in “Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier”: “Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain the bravest soldiers. Our manliest—our boys—our hardy darlings; no picture gives them” (PW, 1:49). Writing the story of this question, Whitman thus names the soldiers fittingly, in the cenotaph, the “unnamed remains” suggested by his title. There is an ambivalence to the very project of these memoranda, therefore, one that Whitman expresses most remarkably in the title that concludes this war-memoranda section of the autobiography. “Such was the war,” Whitman explains in “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books.” “It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written . . . perhaps must not and should not be. The preceding notes may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and into those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey’d to the future.” Such is Whitman’s peculiar representation of the war and his place in it: a history written about the history that can never be fully written. If Whitman’s “stray glimpses,” here, suggest a topos of ineffability familiar to representations of war, I would argue that they cannot be merely that. At issue in these memoranda—and, it is important to keep in mind, in Whitman’s reprinting of them in Specimen Days, two decades after the war—is not only an ambivalence of authorial vision but also the foregrounding of that vision’s ambiguity. Foregrounding his own—and every other writer’s—inability to remember and convey this war fully or finally, Whitman offers the understanding that the “real war” cannot be known apart from its representational pieces, the parts that serve to represent the whole: the specimen. Whitman pushes 8. Whitman to James Redpath, October 21, 1863, in The Correspondence, 1:171.

188

Mediating American Autobiography

this understanding of the foreground of the war to its metonymic extreme in another famous claim from his memoranda that he repositions into the opening footnote of Specimen Days: “I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by after the war, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty.” The bloodstains and blotches reveal the contingent associations that attach to the writing to the extent that they also render that writing and the real meaning of its associations unreadable: the story behind the bloodstains simultaneously can and cannot be told. The stains and the memoranda read together—as they can only be read, according to Whitman—constitute the specimens of Whitman’s vision of the war. The stains and pieces, of the text and of its subject, quite literally tell the story. Describing what could well be the incidence of one of those stains, Whitman glimpses an officer about to die: “He had been getting along pretty well till night before last, when a sudden hemorrhage that could not be stopt came upon him, and today it still continues at intervals. Notice the waterpail by the side of the bed, with a quantity of blood and bloody pieces of muslin, nearly full; that tells the story” (PW, 1:117, 2, 64).9 This key word of Whitman’s war writing and of the autobiography overall, specimen, thus serves a double function. In the logic of Whitman’s favored metonymy, specimen pages best represent the type of war they portray by reproducing the traits—literally, the drawn-out pieces—of the physical specimens that the war produces, the details and distractions that Whitman witnessed in the hospital interiors. Such a text remembers by gesturing to what can no longer be re-membered, like the amputated limbs Whitman would confront outside the hospitals and in his writing. Whitman’s use of visual metaphors in these memoranda suggests the visual connotation of specimen that is crucial to the project of his writing. Specimen cases, whether reproduced in writing or seen firsthand in hospitals, are primarily visual representations, as the etymology of the word specimen (from the Latin specere: to look at or behold) would suggest: a part or 9. My reading of the ambivalence of Whitman’s memoranda project draws upon Katherine Kinney’s argument that Whitman displays in his war prose a “powerful ambivalence about the textualizing of the war’s causalities,” “Making Capital: War, Labor, and Whitman in Washington, D.C.,” 177.

Whitman’s Photobiography

189

extract that gives a visible trace of the whole. For Whitman, such a notion of specimen representation remains the only way to read the real war, which will never get in the books. This is to read the war in the stray glimpses and mediated expressions of its various “strange analogies,” as Whitman suggests in another remarkable passage from these memoranda, “The Weather.—Does it Sympathize with These Times?” (PW, 1:94). This is Whitman’s other war, not the “real war,” but the experience of the war’s reality in relation to the experience of reading and remembering it. Whitman would use one such analogy in conversation with Traubel years later: “My experiences on the field have shown me that the writers catch very little of the real atmosphere of a battle. . . . It is like trying to photograph a tempest.”10 To sympathize with the war and its times is thus to recognize, indeed, to see (as would be apparent in the blurred photograph of a storm) the problem of the war’s comprehension. I would like to make much of this particular photographic analogy and offer it as an insightful way to read the ambivalence and (following Whitman) the strangeness that marks Whitman’s “vision” and version of the war. I realize, however, that the “pictures” and “glimpses” of war to which Whitman refers throughout the memoranda are by no means limited to the figures of photographic vision. I recognize, more importantly, that no explicit form of the photographic medium, either in word or in image, appears in this war-memoranda section of the autobiography. So far as I know, Whitman never considered publishing alongside his memoranda any of the many photographic representations of the war that would have been available in 1875 and again in 1882. But I also recognize that such specimens of the Civil War reproduced by photographers such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, no less than the specimens reproduced by “the writers,” greatly informed the war that got into the books. If such photographs, as Whitman’s simile reminds us, were yet another available “strange analogy” for the war, I would also argue that the process of photography gives Whitman an analogy from which to write a history of a war that perhaps must not and should not be written. Similarly, writing figuratively with photography for Whitman can mean, at the very same time, writing literally, and even apparently, without it. From his earliest attempts to confront the interiors of the war in his prose, the specimen cases that (fail to) tell the story, Whitman would 10. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:53.

190

Mediating American Autobiography

write with a speculative vision of photography in mind. In the spring of 1862, only months before he left New York for Washington and the hospital drama of the war, Whitman wrote a series of articles published pseudonymously in the New York Leader; four of the seven articles focused on the Broadway Hospital and the author’s impressions of its sick wards, interiors that included the first war specimens that he would encounter. The series is suggestively titled “City Photographs,” suggestive because there are no actual photographs included in the articles, as the print technology of the time could not allow them; nor does the writer anywhere else refer directly to the medium or to the meaning of the title. Instead, we find Whitman taking up the conventional metaphor of writing as a “sketch” and developing upon it with an implicit and more ambiguous conception of writing in terms of photography—as a sketch, perhaps like a photograph, that “only aims to skim over the surface.”11 We can observe in “City Photographs,” then, conceived as some kind of photographic prose, aspects of Whitman’s retrospective writing that will become crucial in their later, more developed form. For example, the form of the writing itself: the articles are composed of brief, two- or three-paragraph passages headed by subtitles, indeed, a form noticeably similar to the one that gives Specimen Days its appearance of confusion and fragmentation. With subtitles functioning like captions, the paragraphs, one might speculate, represent the “city photographs” that are not literally there. But whether or not we are meant to read such “photographs” in the prose, Whitman more crucially links photographic representation in these pieces to the problem of remembering and recording what he has encountered in these “hospital scenes.” At the end of the first article, Whitman remembers and describes such scenes in terms of memories that come as phantoms: After I have passed through them of late, especially in the South Building, which is now filled with soldiers, I have many hours afterwards, in far different scenes, had the pale faces, the look of death, the appealing eyes, come curiously of a sudden, plainly before me. The worser cases lying quite helpless in their cots—others, just able to get up, sitting weak and dispirited in their chairs— I have seen them thus, even through all the gayety of the street or a jovial supper-party.12 11. Whitman, “City Photographs,” 29. 12. Ibid.

Whitman’s Photobiography

191

In Washington, of course, Whitman would more directly address these hospital cases. But he would come to write about them in his war memoranda with what I take to be a similar photographic eye. In “City Photographs,” in reading the shadowy outlines of the soldiers’ faces, we come to recognize that Whitman uses the photograph not only as an implicit figure of writing—how he sketches the scene—but more significantly, as a figure for the uncanny face of representation that photography brought to light in the nineteenth century. Whitman would witness this uncanniness himself in the galleries and describe it in his review in 1846 of John Plumbe’s daguerreotype gallery on Broadway as “the impression of an immense Phantom concourse . . . a new world—a peopled world, though mute as the grave.” In this earlier guise, the daguerreotype, Whitman confronts a species of photography’s double consciousness, its ability to represent a human face so precisely that it makes the representation appear phantasmatic, giving “an uncanny sense,” Alan Trachtenberg observes, “of something both already dead and still alive.”13 Whitman may also be responding to that other uncanny character of the daguerrean image we have discussed previously, its potential fluctuation, depending on the angle of viewing, between negative and positive. Fifteen years after his visit to Plumbe’s Gallery, the pale faces of war would be reproduced in the guise of Civil War photographs, bringing home the war’s look of death “curiously of a sudden, plainly.” It is no coincidence, then, that Whitman implicitly associates the ambivalence of photography’s “Phantom concourse” with the issue of death and most specifically, with the problem of remembering the aftermath of the war. As Oliver Wendell Holmes would observe a year after the publication of “City Photographs,” revisiting the field of Antietam via the “terrible mementoes” of a series of photographs, “The field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes of fearful interest”: “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views,” Holmes continues in his Atlantic Monthly essay “Doings of the Sunbeam,” “that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated 13. Trachtenberg, “Photography,” 25. Whitman’s comment on Plumbe’s gallery is quoted here as well.

192

Mediating American Autobiography

remains of the dead they too vividly represented.”14 For Holmes, the photographs uncannily reproduce not the war so much as the more troubling problem of its “sordid scene”; the war that Holmes would repress or bury comes in what remains of it, the aftermath represented by the bodies and then again by the photographs. Here, the “field of photography,” in its power to record and vividly recall a scene, is as strange and fearful as the stained battlefield it represents. Whitman describes his own version of this strange suggestiveness of mediation, though he does so specifically in terms of revisiting and reviewing the war through the lines of his memoranda. In the opening paragraph of Memoranda during the War, Whitman recounts: Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history. . . . Out of them arise active and breathing forms. They summon up, even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits, or whose dust and bones have been since removed to the National Cemeteries of the land.15

The field of war photography for Holmes is like the field of war memoranda for Whitman; both forms of representation are uncanny in that they appear to embody and repeat (and not merely replace) the remains from the battlefield, “active and breathing forms.” Unlike Holmes, however, Whitman does not bury his glimpses of what he terms “war’s hell-scenes,” but rather resuscitates them in the memoranda of his notebooks. The form of the writing thus analogizes and summons up the uncanny forms of the war; the “sort of fascinating sight” that Whitman repeatedly faces in his war survives in the scene of his writing, the visibly unsettled manner of his text. In Specimen Days, nearing the end of the Civil War section, Whitman names that textual condition “convulsiveness”: As I have look’d over the proof-sheets of the preceding pages, I have once or twice fear’d that my diary would prove, at best, but a 14. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 11–12. 15. Whitman, Walt Whitman’s Memoranda during the War [and] Death of Abraham Lincoln, 3.

Whitman’s Photobiography

193

batch of convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so. They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times. The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness. (PW, 1:112; Whitman’s emphasis)

Whitman, here, confronts the represented forms of the war that unsettle Holmes, photographs in hand; in his memoranda of the war, that is, he continues to look somewhat fearfully into the “appealing eyes” of the war, and its look of death “come[s] curiously” before him. But he does so also wanting that distraction of memory to remain in the text itself. Convulsiveness means that the war and its history, “the war itself,” cannot be distinguished from the various “proof-sheets” (specimens) of its representation. That convulsiveness of war memory is, therefore, best suggested by means of “convulsively written reminiscences.” The italicization of the operative word, convulsiveness, may well suggest that Whitman envisions some emphatic and visible, textual counterpart to the “excitement” and “distraction” of the war. Let the convulsiveness of this very representation, Whitman implies, describe the real identity of the war by inscribing its (the writing’s) own relation to it. In Reading American Photographs, Trachtenberg considers the important relation between photography and comprehension of the Civil War, particularly as mediated by the photographic albums of war made famous by Brady and Gardner. Trachtenberg argues persuasively, “In their fragmentary presentation of the war, their individual vividness at the expense of a blurred vision of the whole, the photographs may have conveyed a subliminal message of inexpressible interiors—not the stuff of romantic myth or heroic legend.”16 Photographic images thus had the potential to show the convulsiveness of the war, to be “but parts of the actual distraction.” To hear Whitman in Trachtenberg’s “inexpressible interiors” suggests, perhaps, that Whitman’s written version of the war has informed our own comprehension of it as much as the photographic vision may have informed his. Following the influential example of Alexander 16. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 77. Reminding us that Whitman’s actual battlefield experience was “virtually nonexistent,” Folsom argues that Whitman “learned to see that aspect of the war through the photographic representations of Gardner, Brady, and the other photographers who followed the troops” (Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 111).

194

Mediating American Autobiography

Gardner’s photographic sketching, then, we might also read Whitman’s memoranda, these leaves that can curiously and suddenly summon the war, as a sort of photographic sketchbook. Of course, we might just as well read Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866) as a memorandum of the war, given the importance of the verbal sketching located in the extensive captions that face each photograph. Either way, Gardner’s text provides an insightful example by which to read the photographic perspective of Whitman’s “convulsiveness.” In the penultimate passage of the war section titled “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” Whitman confronts us with perhaps his most vivid representation of this perspective. In summing up the countless “dead in this war,” Whitman, as we should expect by now, first asks us to see them by referring to them as “the dead in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south” (PW, 1:114). This opening sentence continues as it begins, disrupted and fragmented, for more than a page; in fact, it ends without completion, as a sentence fragment. With such noticeable textual discontinuity, Whitman seems to ask the reader to imagine and to notice the clutter of bodies “strewing the fields” in the very lines and clutter of his text, or at least to recognize some relation between the two kinds of disruption, verbal and visual. Whitman writes with and from a perspective of fragmentation that the view of so many dead bodies brings suddenly before the eyes. In the same opening passage of Memoranda where he recalls the “active and breathing forms” contained in the hospital notebooks, Whitman continues: “Vivid as life, they recall and identify the long Hospital Wards, with their myriad-varied scenes of day or night—the graphic incidents of field or camp . . . the convulsive memories, (let but a word, a broken sentence, serve to recall them).” The graphic incidents of the war, Whitman suggests, are best represented in the figural light and heat of their origin, an origin indexed, as with a photograph, in the process of its composition. Such is the war’s photography, whether recorded by Gardner or Whitman: both men reproduce the “photographic incidents” of the war, where fragmented views, whether verbal or visual, are always part of the actual distraction.17 17. Whitman, Memoranda during the War, 4. I take the term photographic incidents from Gardner’s first advertisement, in 1863, where he offers what he calls “Photographic Incidents of the War”; the advertisement is reproduced in Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889, 231.

Whitman’s Photobiography

195

In that light, the entire passage “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up” might be read as a prosaic version of one of the most famous and unsettling photographs from the Civil War, “A Harvest of Death,” included in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. At one point in this incredible fragment, Whitman metaphorically identifies the death wrought by various diseases as “the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers,” an organic figure he reiterates at its conclusion: “—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)” (PW, 1:115). Whether or not Whitman’s passage can be said to echo the photograph’s title, the familiar organic figure underlying both suggests, for Timothy Sweet, a link between the “organicist poetics” of Whitman’s war writing and “an analogous visual organicism” mobilized by Civil War photographers. Sweet shows how a text like Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War—and indeed, a picture such as “A Harvest of Death” included in it—works to “heal or hide” the very wounds and disruption it would seem to reveal. As Sweet argues, the rhetorical nature of Gardner’s project is perhaps most evident in the extended captions that face each photograph, describing these scenes that supposedly speak for themselves. Thus Gardner claims in the preface to the book that (according to him) requires no preface: “In presenting the Photographic Sketch Book of the War to the attention of the public, it is designed that it shall speak for itself. . . . Verbal representations of such places, or scenes, may or may not have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.”18 For Gardner, the photographic incidents of the war speak for themselves because they are unmediated presentations, presentments rather than representations. But what in Whitman’s verbal memoranda of the war speaks for itself? The answer, as we have seen, is that for Whitman there is no “war itself” apart from its convulsiveness, a convulsion of real and represented that Gardner’s own “verbal representations” ironically interdict. Sweet’s reading of Gardner is compelling, but he is incorrect, it seems to me, to link Whitman’s war writing, specifically the prose of Memoranda and Specimen Days, to the rhetoric of such a photographic 18. Sweet, Traces of War, 78, 120–21; Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, n.p.

196

Mediating American Autobiography

project. Though it would seem that in distinguishing Whitman’s “convulsiveness” from Gardner’s project, I am undercutting the very analogy between Whitman’s prose and photography that I have been suggesting, I would argue instead that the contrast reveals something crucial about Whitman’s photographic perspective. The difference is a matter not of the photographic medium per se, but rather of its verbal and visual use. For Gardner, as I have suggested, that perspective is marked in the attempt to contain the unsettling debris and dead of battle by way of offering, as Trachtenberg argues of the Civil War photo album, a textual “perspective on the discordance.” In the caption that faces “A Harvest of Death,” for example, Gardner describes the horrors that the picture exposes—“shattered bodies” and “the litter of the battle-field”—but contains the implications of that exposure by giving us the photograph’s moral: “Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.” If such a picture were truly a “photographic presentment,” as Gardner claims, it would not be able to convey such a moral, or any moral; it is only as a re-presentation that conveyance is possible, a potential, of course, that Gardner thoroughly puts to use.19 The dreadful details in the “presentment” of the photographic image, apparently, cannot speak for themselves. (We also learn from the caption directly beneath the image that Gardner’s “authority” with regard to the photograph is not, strictly speaking, singular. As with many images in the book, this one was taken by a field photographer and later developed in the studio by Gardner: “Negative by T. H. O’Sullivan / Positive by A. Gardner,” this other caption reads.) As is the case with Talbot in his book, Gardner reveals that the natural immediacy of photography requires a good deal of mediation to harvest. 19. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 97; Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book, plate 36. A provocative case of Gardner’s re-presentation of these “presentments” can be found in comparing how he reads and captions “A Harvest of Death” with how he reads the photograph that follows, “Field Where General Reynolds Fell.” They both are from the battlefield of Gettysburg, and they appear to present similar views. In Gardner’s reading, however, the images present different morals primarily because (as he asserts) the first is of Confederate dead, the second of Union dead. Thus the “blank horror of war” becomes, in this second “presentment,” replaced by the Union soldiers’ “calm and resigned expression, as though they had passed away in the act of prayer.” For further discussion of this comparison, see Sweet, Traces of War, 128–29.

Whitman’s Photobiography

197

This critique of Gardner’s claims is not to suggest that for Whitman there is no moral of the war, nor that the rhetoric of Whitman’s Unionist sympathies should be wholly distinguished from Gardner’s. I would suggest, however, that with Whitman the moral of the picture of the war can be contrasted usefully with Gardner’s. Indeed, Whitman’s moral speaks to the addition of the word picture to Gardner’s reading of the clear and present “moral of the war.” At its best, Gardner’s text, for Whitman, might “furnish a few stray glimpses” of the details of the real war, “never to be fully convey’d to the future.” That is the moral of Whitman’s picture: there is no real war, horrible or fascinating as it is, that can be clearly, fully, finally pictured; there is no representative part of the actual distraction that is not itself a matter of distraction. Thus, to return to “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” we see that for Whitman the “harvest of death” does not imply a full restoration because the crop of dead remains distilled throughout the land. It is death that remains “in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn,” an uncanny presence reinforced by the vision of “countless graves” with which the passage ends, or rather, fails to end completely: “We see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word UNKNOWN.” In fact, Whitman’s passage ends by unsettling, as we have seen from the beginning, rather than by asserting the accuracy of any commemorative record, as he asks, “But what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?” (PW, 1:115; Whitman’s emphasis).20 Any attempt to “sum up” the “dead in this war,” we are to understand, will not put them to rest, because commemoration comes by way of their “visible, material” summoning. With a passage like “The Million Dead” before us, we see Whitman’s vision of “the real war” written in relation to a photography that would critique the very notion of “photographic presentment.” For Whitman, this is what it means to photograph a tempest: to attempt to portray or to capture fully the identity of a subject—be it person or event—whose representative character remains somewhat latent. Thus for Whitman there is “no good portrait of Lincoln” because all the attempted portraits fail to capture the expression of 20. Significantly, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book ends with the photograph of a visible material monument, “Dedication of Monument on Bull Run BattleField, June 1865.”

198

Mediating American Autobiography

his face. But for Whitman, that is less a failure of any particular representation and more an essential failure of every representation that speaks to the real identity of the man, his character that can never be fully conveyed or made apparent. Thus in another “portrait” of Abraham Lincoln given amidst his war memoranda, Whitman observes, “I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. . . . None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there” (PW, 1:100, 61). Once again, pictures from the war convulse for Whitman into the foregrounded picture of their representation. This telling problem of portraiture forms a crucial part of Whitman’s “medium world” of the war, where he finds and would show (as he tells Emerson in a letter in 1863) “deep things, unreckoned,” “a world full of its separate action, play, suggestiveness—surely a medium world.”21 For Whitman, Lincoln’s latent, characteristic expression, like the “latent personal character” (PW, 1:116) of the war itself, is best read in the recognition that there is always “something else there.” This is a view of latency and mediation that Whitman associates with representations of Lincoln and the war and, as I am arguing, with the process of photography. In the conversation with Traubel in which Whitman faces the potential and confusion of photographic portraiture (“a dozen of me afloat”), Whitman goes on to use such implications of photography to read the problem of biographical representation, a problem that remains for him crucial to his picture of the war. “Now, there’s Abraham Lincoln,” he adds immediately in this discussion of both verbal and visual “portraits”; “people get to know his traits, his habits of life, some of his characteristics set off in the most positive relief. . . . Yet I know that the hero is after all greater than any idealization. Undoubtedly—just as the man is greater than his portrait—the landscape than the picture of it—the fact than anything we can say about the fact.” But once again, this fugitive characteristic of a man or a landscape or a fact like the Civil War means precisely that its real identity cannot be separated from the traces of its representations. As Whitman concludes, “It is hard to extract a man’s real self—any man—from such a chaotic mass—from such historic debris.”22 There is no trait of a real self, in other words, that can 21. Whitman to Emerson, January 17, 1863, in The Correspondence, 1:68–69. 22. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:108.

Whitman’s Photobiography

199

be separated from the history of its portrayal; similarly, there is no portrait without extract, and thus, Whitman understands, no extract, no specimen, that is not already a part of the actual distraction. Photography shares in this “chaotic mass” to the extent that the process of the medium is always latent in the represented product; the positive print never stands by itself, rather, always stands in relation to the negative from which it is reproduced, the negative that is itself already a trace of the referent. That reproducibility allows the photograph to be conveyed to the future, but never fully or finally. To return to Whitman’s photographic analogy, “like trying to photograph a tempest,” we should further recognize that Whitman has in mind not photographs but the process of photographic reproduction, its infinitive. Photography, in this reading, functions less as an analogy for a particular kind of representation and more as an analogy for how Whitman envisions the convulsive nature of representation as such; Whitman’s to photograph, we should also recognize, analogizes not the war but the attempts of “the writers” to catch it. That recognition of photography for Whitman, not so evident though it may be to our first glance, remains an image of why photographs can never speak for themselves and why the real war will never get in the books. The absence of actual photographs adjoining Whitman’s glimpses of the war may be faithful, in the end, both to the “medium world” of his memoranda and to the photography that would figure it.

An Immensely Negative Book The associations that Whitman insists upon for his war memoranda, following his own photographic analogy, might be pictured best in this way. In the very image of the word convulsiveness that Whitman employs to describe both the war and his representation of it, one imagines the distracted hand of the writer, as if in photographing that tempest, the hand shakes and the plate in the camera records his every move. This analogy can be extended to the various passages in Specimen Days that follow the war, pages in which the focus shifts from the memoranda of war to the memoranda of Whitman’s postwar paralysis and recovery. If the tempests of war are no longer at issue in this second half of the book, the atmosphere of representation—and specifically, the latent character of the photograph— remain crucial to Whitman’s unfolding of the book’s “sort of

200

Mediating American Autobiography

autobiography.” Even as he focuses more directly on himself in these pages, we will see that Whitman nevertheless continues to develop what he will call “the mystery of identity” through the suggestiveness and play of photography’s medium world (PW, 1:236). In the “Interregnum Paragraph” that immediately follows “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” Whitman previews the sudden shift in scenery from Washington and the interiors of the war to his “restoration” in the open air of Timber Creek. “If the notes of that outdoor life,” Whitman declares of the memoranda that will follow, “could only prove as glowing to you, reader dear, as the experience itself was to me. Doubtless in the course of the following, the fact of invalidism will crop out, (I call myself a half-Paralytic these days, and reverently bless the Lord it is no worse,) between some of the lines” (PW, 1:119). Though the actual “field and atmosphere” of the autobiography change abruptly, what remains consistent is the metonymic perspective that is crucial to the war memoranda, and indeed, as Whitman suggests from the start, basic to the whole of the book. “I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering,” Whitman concludes his opening footnote to Specimen Days, “first, from that eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all Nature, authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen interiors, personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen’d, wondrous time” (PW, 1:3). Thus, even in the outdoor air of Timber Creek, we can expect to confront the “specimen interiors” of Whitman’s autobiographical vision, reading this gathering of leaves—yet another “livraison”—in which the very looseness of the text and pages best reflect the “strange, unloosen’d, wondrous” nature of the man and the myriads of his time. In these remarkable “nature notes” that comprise much of the second half of the autobiography, reprinted, we are told, from memoranda “pencilled” on the spot, Whitman thus represents not “Nature” by itself but the autobiographical nature of his writing. The perspective here remains a matter of “convulsiveness,” a vision of representation and its relation to the real (here the real Walt; previously, the real war) that continues to conflate the author’s production of a book with the process of his life: “Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere—,” Whitman explains in the footnote that explains the “nature” of his “new themes,” “after what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty pages—temporary episodes, thank heaven!—I

Whitman’s Photobiography

201

restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.” “Who knows,” he continues, reasserting the desire of his signature metonymic impulse, “(I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now ensuing may carry ray or sun, or smell of grass or corn . . . to serve as cooling breeze, or Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse” (PW, 1:120). We find on record in this restorative section, then, what is noticeable throughout the autobiography, regardless of the scene: how Whitman envisions and perpetuates the personal life and character of his text, composting “Nature’s aroma” and chemistry in the field and atmosphere of his composition. In this explanatory note, Whitman seems to refer to a progression of actual events in his life: his paralysis in 1873 (which he associated with the strains of the war), migration to Camden, restoration at Timber Creek. However, the language equally suggests that it is Whitman’s autobiography (his “self-will’d record”), as much as Whitman himself, that is in need of recovery: “I restore my book.” Much like Oliver Wendell Holmes looking over the photographic incidents of Antietam, Whitman continues to face the remains of a past in the active and breathing forms conveyed in the lines of his writing. In a letter to William D. O’Connor written shortly after Specimen Days was first published, Whitman further suggests the “nature” of this vision and what we might call, following Whitman, its latent pulse and potential. “Well, S.D. is a rapid skimming over the pond surface of my life, thoughts, experiences, that way—the real altogether untouch’d, but the flat pebble making a few dips as it flies & flits along—enough at least to give some living touches and contactpoints—I was quite willing to make an immensely negative book.”23 By Whitman’s own metaphor, the nature he observes and records in New Jersey reflects the nature of his autobiographical identity; the pond suggests the life whose actual depth can never be completely told. This review of Specimen Days seems consistent with the understanding we have explored in relation to the war prose; the figural and literal vision of the text, its distracting glimpses, are enough to give a few suggestions of the real that can never fully get in the books. The author’s approach, we recall from “City Photographs,” merely “aims to skim over the surface.” Whitman’s judgment that Specimen 23. Whitman to William D. O’Connor, November 12, 1882, in The Correspondence, 3:315 (Whitman’s emphasis).

202

Mediating American Autobiography

Days as a whole is “immensely negative” thus remarks upon the book’s perspective of autobiographical convulsiveness: what the portrayal successfully fails to show. A principal connotation of the word negative common in the nineteenth century is certainly operating here: “characterized by the absence, instead of the presence, of distinguishing features.”24 For Whitman, as we have seen, it is the strange relation between absence and presence, like the remains of a soldier, that best tells the story. At the same time, we can hear in Whitman’s negative that other, visual connotation operative in the middle range of the nineteenth century, “characterized by a reversal of the lights and shadows of the actual object, scene.” The Oxford English Dictionary provides two examples of the photographic usage of the word negative, the first from William Henry Fox Talbot’s “Specimen Patent” (1841) for his discovery of the negative–positive process of photographic development: “The portrait . . . is a negative one, and from this a positive copy may be obtained”; the second, in which the photographic connotation is already figural, employed by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1858): “Books are the negative pictures of thought.” Whitman’s negative suggests similarly that his book is the negative picture of his thought and vision, the very experience and life it represents. The book does not give us that life, but rather, copies and prints from it. “I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee,” Whitman says of the inspiring utterance of a brook near which he writes, “receive, copy, print from thee” (PW, 1:121). “Immensely negative” thus suggests a latent potential of autobiographical reproduction—how identity may be skimmed over and contacted while at the same time altogether untouched—by drawing upon the photographic relation between a negative and its positive print. As we have seen, in The Pencil of Nature and elsewhere, Talbot consistently views the new process of photographic representation and reproduction as a form of natural autobiography, as providing “curious self-representations” in which the subject of a photograph pictures itself, and does so through a peculiar process of changing from negative to positive. Continuing to develop an “immensely negative book” in these “notes” of his experiences in nature, then, Whitman writes from this understanding of the “nature” of photographic representation and the latent reproducibility that is, for Talbot and others, another form of nature’s chemistry. 24. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. negative.

Whitman’s Photobiography

203

Whitman’s outdoor notes dwell in the interior of that potential. “To make much of negatives,” as Whitman claims in the “Interregnum Paragraph” he will do—“The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies”—is to develop the insight and trick of the photographic process within the composition of his autobiography (PW, 1:119). In that book, it is always in Whitman’s nature to represent himself by reproducing himself. A particular scene set amidst these outdoor memoranda—a “scene” that includes the one actual photograph that Whitman reproduced in most copies of Specimen Days as originally published—provides us with a crucial image for Whitman’s trick for making much of negatives.25 Taken sometime in the late 1870s by W. Curtis Taylor in Philadelphia, this photograph, the infamous “butterfly picture,” reveals Whitman reposing in what appears to be the open air, staring intently (and off to the side of the picture, in profile) at a butterfly perched on his left hand (see fig. 9). This portrait is reproduced on the page following the conclusion of the passage “Straw-Color’d and Other Psyches,” where we find Whitman, a convalescent pilgrim at Timber Creek, noticing the “flashing” and “flit[ting] to and fro” of butterflies or “psyches” “over the glistening bronze of the pondsurface.” In fact, this final sentence of the section appears directly across from the “real” Whitman’s hand in the picture: “I have one big and handsome moth down here, knows and comes to me, likes me to hold him up on my extended hand” (PW, 1:179). We now know that this portrait is artificial, the natural look is posed, not merely because it was taken in a studio (which is slightly evident in the background), but because, as was discovered long after Whitman’s death, the butterfly is cardboard, a photographer’s prop. Recently rediscovered in the archives of the Library of Congress, this prop is now viewable online, in all its artificial glory, through the Library of Congress’s digital archive, American Memory. But even before this trick was revealed, the primary question elicited by the photograph was how to read the subject’s pose. William Roscoe Thayer, one of many to whom Whitman insisted on the authenticity 25. Joel Myerson indicates that in addition to the butterfly photograph that was inserted in most copies of Specimen Days, other copies of the text prepared in a large-paper format included three pictures of Whitman (he does not specify which ones) and a picture each of his mother and father, “Whitman: Bibliography as Biography,” 26.

204

Mediating American Autobiography

Figure 9. Walt Whitman with a cardboard butterfly on his hand. Included in Specimen Days. (Photograph by W. Curtis Taylor in Philadelphia, ca. 1877. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

of the portrait, wonders in a 1919 reminiscence of Whitman “why Walt should be clad in a thick cardigan jacket on any day when butterflies would have been disporting themselves in the fields, I have never been able to explain. Was this one of the petty artifices by which Walt carried out his pose?”26 Thayer’s confusion is confirmed by the placement of this photograph in Specimen Days, since the adjacent passage describes Whitman (with no mention of the cardigan the 26. Thayer is cited in Esther Shepard, Walt Whitman’s Pose, 251–52. The history of this picture is also discussed in the image gallery of the digital Walt Whitman Archive.

Whitman’s Photobiography

205

photograph shows) sitting by the pond on a warm August day. Both text and image are autobiographical, but which is the authentic depiction? Reproduced next to the text to which it would seem to relate, like real to copy, this photograph raises that question and would appear to undermine the authenticity of either “portrait” by revealing the artifice of representation prominent in both. Read in a photographic context, this question and confusion concerning Whitman’s “psyche” suggest that his textual use of trick photography is an artifice more real than petty. Describing photography in the late nineteenth century as an “artifice of realism,” Miles Orvell reminds us that the prominent practices of Victorian art photography such as pictorialism embraced rhetorical effect and sought “to develop a practice that understood the photographic representation to be a type of reality.” The question of a given representation, Orvell suggests, shifts in this context from what is real and “truthful” to what is more and less “convincing.” It is the “approximation of the image to reality,” the relation between real and copy, that is viewed as most convincing. Thus Orvell reads this “synthesis of the extremes of artifice and mimesis” in a relevant example, Napoleon Sarony’s “Butterfly”: much like the butterfly’s own capacity for deceptive mimesis, perhaps, Sarony’s photograph reproduces the “literal representation of an imaginary conception.”27 The artifice of Whitman’s portrait— that is to say, the relation between the verbal and visual portraits as employed in this section of Specimen Days—portrays a similar understanding. Whitman’s curious self-representation reveals its own position between the literal and figural; amidst the verbal print of the scene, it can be read as a type of the real. What would seem to be most crucial to that portrayal, then, is a certain (or indeed, uncertain) allegorical conception of the author that the picture conveys. For Whitman, that conception depends on how and when the image is represented literally, textually, more so than what the image literally represents. The more suggestive trick of the picture, in this regard, is not the butterfly prop, but the fact that Whitman in the “original” print is facing left, and in this printing used in the autobiography, he is facing right, which is to say, from Whitman’s point of view, more imaginatively looking out from the book and the page and into the reader’s world. In the context of another textual use of photography, the profile portrait that he positions on the title page 27. Orvell, The Real Thing, 85, 81.

206

Mediating American Autobiography

Figure 10. Title page from Walt Whitman’s Complete Poems and Prose, 1888. (Photograph by Charles Spieler in Philadelphia, ca. 1881. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

of his Complete Poems and Prose several years later, Whitman would call such a profile “the looking out: the face away from the book” (see fig. 10). For Whitman, this autobiographical “outlook” of the profile beneficially, if also ironically, alienates the familiarity of the author’s face; as Ed Folsom argues, the outlook thus invites “the reader to follow his gaze out into the world, not to rest within either the book or the self.”28 For the reader not to rest within either the book or the self is to recognize that the textual Whitman has an identity that is as 28. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:460; Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 151.

Whitman’s Photobiography

207

latent and unfinished as the photographic process that informs the realistic artifice of the butterfly picture: photographs, like the butterflies flitting upon the surface of the pond, evolve through episodic development. The “play” and provocative uncertainty that Whitman reads in every photo, and makes much of in this instance, derives, most crucially, from the creative potential of photo reproduction, the play and movement of the photographic process that allows the reality of an image to be approximated and continuously revised. In the conversation with Traubel concerning the “uncertainty in every photo,” Whitman continues in his recognition of the suggestiveness of the medium by proposing “to get some new reproduction of the butterfly picture”: “I wonder if the process men can reverse the picture? Set it looking right where now it looks left? I want to have it done, for my own purposes. . . . I like the process pictures, at their best. They seem to utter a new thing in art.”29 Whitman’s process men and process pictures refer to the photochemical development of photography—all that darkroom work that George Eastman’s Kodak, within a decade, would almost entirely remove from view. As I have been arguing throughout this study, this process is inherent to the photograph—it is its “indexical sine qua non,” to recall Carol Armstrong—in two related steps: the recording and processing of a latent image on a photographic surface (thus forming the negative of the image taken); as well as the development of a print from that negative, reproducing (and also reversing) the process. In the case of the butterfly picture as found in Specimen Days, Whitman makes much of two technological developments in the photo-reproduction process: reversing the “original” image as well as printing the photograph directly in the book, a development very recent to the early 1880s. To my knowledge, the butterfly photograph is the first among photographs in Whitman’s books to be printed directly onto the page of the book, facing the text, rather than glued (tipped) in separately, which he did with photographs, for example, as late as Two Rivulets (1876). This technology would be further developed later in the 1880s, with the introduction of the halftone process by which photographs could be reproduced along with printed type.30 29. Whitman, quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 9:35–36. 30. For histories of these technological developments, see Taft, Photography and the American Scene.

208

Mediating American Autobiography

Uttering a new thing in the technology of art, Whitman’s use of the photographic process in the context of his writing also returns us to an old thing in his art of autobiography. This autobiographical significance of Whitman’s photographic pose comes into focus when we recall that for most copies of Specimen Days, this visual representation of himself with the butterfly on his hand is the image that Whitman selects to give a (literal) picture of himself. As a reproduction of the author, the photograph therefore emphasizes that we read in the text of this autobiography a type of Whitman, in both senses of the word, a specimen of his identity conveyed in this specimen of his “appearance” in print. The curious self-representation of this portrait gives us the reproduced as opposed to the real Walt—the only “Walt Whitman,” in fact, we have ever known. The “process picture,” in this instance, might therefore be read doubly as an allegorical image of its own developed identity, the photograph’s and Whitman’s. The posing reveals how Whitman’s autobiographical representation proceeds as and with the strange temporality of the photograph, a pictorial representation that moves “away from itself in order to be what it is”: “Like the photograph that tells us what is no longer before us,” Eduardo Cadava comments, linking photography to a conception of allegory that would certainly include Whitman’s vision of an autobiography that cannot be extracted from its historic debris, “truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longer present.”31 Whitman’s self-portrait—I mean the complex relation between the image and the text—might be considered similarly allegorical in nature to the extent that it resists the kind of symbolic identification that Gardner’s photographic “presentments” presumed and manipulated. Once again displacing the notion of full representation and comprehension, Whitman foregrounds the latent character of his own portraiture, revealing the “negative” potential that the photograph (and Whitman’s reprinting of it) makes much of; in this instance also, there is something else there. The subject of the butterfly photograph, in other words, is not somewhere in the autobiography so much as it is autobiography, this one and every other: Whitman’s thirty-year construction and development of an autobiography in his texts, his “self-will’d record.” The image portrays not an autobiographical referent so much as the process of autobiographical reference and reproduction that the text, like the photograph, both employs and conveys. 31. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, 22.

Whitman’s Photobiography

209

The visual portrait develops only more literally what is latent in the verbal portraiture that surrounds it: the artist in the photographic studio of his autobiography. The book is a reproduction of the author who has spent the last thirty years reproducing himself in books. This allegorical play of the butterfly portrait is even more suggestive given the fact that as early as the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had used as margin decoration an engraving of a butterfly similarly perched on an extended finger. And in fact, a similar engraving is found embossed on the spine of Specimen Days.32 Whether or not a “handsome moth” actually landed on Whitman’s hand at Timber Creek, we recognize that the butterfly is, more crucially, a textual icon in Whitman, a “specimen” of Walt Whitman the author. If this recognition undermines the presumed truth of the photograph and its position in this nature section of the autobiography—a portrait showing Whitman outdoors at Timber Creek—it does suggest this significance: the identity in the photograph, like the identity of the Whitman represented in the autobiography proper, is the textual identity of an author who is and was, from first to last, an autobiographer. Whitman further employs that iconicity when in the 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass he returns to the same butterfly portrait, placing the image opposite the title page, but this time using a reproduction by the “process men” that has reversed his position so that he now faces left and thus is looking out from the book. So placed, the image becomes a sort of backward glance on the various auto/biographical media, visual and verbal, that Whitman previews on the title page across from it: “stamping and sprinkling all with portraits and facial photos, such as they actually were, taken from life, different stages.”33 The difference between these various types and stamps of Whitman, visual and verbal, we are to understand, is the difference of means that each represents: the mediating difference that each photo reproduces and that Whitman uses to convey his metonymic venture to the reader. This is a book that lets a reader touch the author’s hand. Thus Specimen Days, by way of the butterfly photo and the suggestive play of its versions, provides us with a “specimen” of the subtle 32. Whitman calls attention to this association in the letter to Baxter (October 8, 1882) previously cited: “The volume is issued in precisely the same style as ‘Leaves of Grass’—same cloth binding, same butterfly on the back, same size, &c.,” Whitman, The Correspondence, 3:308. 33. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: With Sands at Seventy, and A Backward Glance o’er Traveled Roads, n.p.

210

Mediating American Autobiography

and suggestive interaction of visual and textual representation that Whitman employs throughout the various editions of his markedly personal writing and initiates most famously with the 1855 Leaves of Grass frontispiece. That posed image, we recall Whitman’s own suggestion, represents the book’s autobiographical soul. A contemporary review of Specimen Days in the Critic (January 13, 1883) concludes, by way of the butterfly photograph, with a similar focus. “Every sort of thing is crammed into it,” the reviewer suggests, “and the manager is the big, good-natured, shrewd and large-souled poet, whose photograph shows him lounging in smoking-jacket and broad felt hat, gazing at his hand, on which a delicate butterfly, with expanded wings, forms a contrast to the thick fingers and heavy ploughman’s wrist.”34 The reproduction pictures the soul of the autobiography’s ongoing process.

Photobiography In the end, that photographic soul suggests the “latent personal character” of this autobiography as well as the source of its critical confusion. “So draw near their end these garrulous notes,” Whitman remarks in the penultimate passage of Specimen Days; he continues, concerning his attempt to give “some authentic glints, specimen-days of my life”: “There have doubtless occurr’d some repetitions, jotting all down in the loosest sort of chronological order, and here printing from my impromptu notes, hardly even the seasons group’d together, or anything corrected—so afraid of dropping what smack of outdoors or sun or starlight might cling to the lines, I dared not try to meddle with or smooth them” (PW, 1:293). Whitman reiterates, here, the speculation that the autobiography’s “cohesion and singleness of purpose” is “not so evident at first glance,” and of course, that its incohesiveness and incompleteness is. At the same time, once again emphasizing the visually speculative nature of the work, Whitman’s metaphor of light clinging to his lines suggests another photographic analogy for the writing. The “smack” of a given subject, like light clinging to the emulsion on a photographic negative or paper print, allows the best versions of its identity to be imaged, approximated, reproduced, conveyed. Thus, the character and identity of the author’s specimen days are best represented in pieces, in “eidolons” that flash, like a photographed subject, 34. “Walt Whitman’s New Book.”

Whitman’s Photobiography

211

between their appearance and disappearance. Specimen interiors from the author’s life, in other words, are best reflected in the curious and fascinating sight of their specimen daze: “something flashing out and fluctuating like tuft-flames or eidolons, from all” (PW, 2:732). Toward the close of Specimen Days, Whitman provides an account of that “something flashing out and fluctuating” in the form of a recollection of his recent experience (in 1880) viewing Niagara Falls. Whitman opens the section titled “Seeing Niagara to Advantage”: For really seizing a great picture or book, or piece of music, or architecture, or grand scenery—or perhaps for the first time even the common sunshine, or landscape, or may be even the mystery of identity, most curious mystery of all—there comes some lucky five minutes of a man’s life, set amid a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, and bringing in a brief flash the culmination of years of reading and travel and thought. The present case about two o’clock this afternoon, gave me Niagara, its superb severity of action and color and majestic grouping, in one short, indescribable show. (PW, 1:236)

Whitman’s expansive introduction to this particular experience makes it clear that, much more than a singular memory of the great cataract, North America’s most famous site, Whitman is remembering the very landscape and contour of his memory and its circumstances. Whitman’s “brief flash” is jointly, or more accurately, contingently the experience of Niagara and its unfolding in memory. As Emerson will do in the lecture “Memory,” we could just as well turn to a photographic figure to characterize Whitman’s picturing of this contingency of memory: the recording of the image on the mind’s “iodized plate” and its subsequent development and reappearance as a picture. As Emerson puts it, “Of all the million images that are imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate in the moment when we want it.”35 Whitman’s “flash” is also this extended moment of memory’s picturing, that is to say, the experience seized (the vision or “picture”) in conjunction with the process of its alternating disappearance and remembrance. As Whitman further characterizes the result of his “brief flash” and its continuing development: “Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture—a remembrance always afterwards” (PW, 1:236). 35. Emerson, Complete Works, 12:93.

212

Mediating American Autobiography

In this experience of “seeing Niagara,” Whitman’s juxtaposition of memory’s impression and photography’s flash of reproduction should not be surprising. By 1880, Niagara Falls was already the most photographed site in North America, and more suggestively, a site frequently described in terms of its photographic potential. We need only glance at F. H. Johnson’s 1868 Guide to Niagara Falls and Its Scenery, for example, to recognize that Niagara serves not just as a place for taking photographs but also as an analogy for the very process of memory made photographic. Johnson points out, under the title “First Impression of Strangers”: “The longer the visitor tarries, the more he enjoys and appreciates; the impression is indelibly stamped upon his memory, and for years infixed there, as with the imprint of a sunbeam.” This photographic character of Niagara was also suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a decade earlier, at the close of his first article on photography, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”: “The time is perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering.” Holmes turns from this prescient image of what will become, as we have seen, the photographic incidents of the war that he will confront personally, to the image of Niagara Falls: “The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured.”36 Reiterating Holmes’s language of the visual (“flash of light”) and temporal (“sudden and brief”) shock of recognition that constitutes remembrance, Whitman takes the analogy between memory and its photographic imprinting even further. Niagara is not just “selfpictured,” as Holmes suggests, returning to the autobiographical implications of photography with which he begins that article (“the mirror with a memory”). More than a memorial image, Niagara becomes, for Whitman, an image of autobiographical memory, part of the process of his memory’s self-picturing. In the close of his brief passage, Whitman implicates the “flash” of recording and remembering Niagara’s picture within the very process of remembering in which this passage and the book engages. Niagara’s impression and “remembrance always after36. F. H. Johnson, Guide to Niagara Falls and Its Scenery, Including All the Points of Interest Both on the American and Canadian Side (Buffalo, 1868), 25; Holmes, “Stereoscope,” 748.

Whitman’s Photobiography

213

wards” become the trajectory of the very autobiography we are reading, memory’s afterimages and afterwords. “Such are the things, indeed, I lay away with my life’s rare and blessed bits of hours, reminiscent, past,” Whitman muses before recounting and resuming in brief the specimen moments and visual landscape of the life that the book has described, from boyhood on Long Island to the Civil War (“nightviews, I remember, on the field, after battles in Virginia”) to his western trip recounted only pages before (“the peculiar sentiment of moonlight and stars over the great Plains”), to this particular memory he is in the process of recording. “With these, I say, I henceforth place that view, that afternoon, that combination complete, that five minutes’ perfect absorption of Niagara—not the great majestic gem alone by itself, but set complete in all its varied, full, indispensable surroundings” (PW, 1:236–37). If Holmes’s Niagara records the autobiographical potential of photography, Whitman’s placing of views into his book of memory suggests the reverse, a photographic potential of autobiography. What remains crucial to how we might read this vision of Whitman’s photographic autobiography, the lines “flashing out and fluctuating like tuft-flames or eidolons,” is the understanding that such lines are not written merely with photographs in mind (or with photographs in the text, as the case may be), but more suggestively, written as a sort of photography. Whitman’s interest in the medium lies not with the image as (presumably) fixed forever in a photograph, but with what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls that photograph’s “latent soul”: “There is a potential image in it,” Holmes observes of the negative in the process of its development, “a latent soul, which will presently appear before its judge.”37 For Whitman, the potential of that process is latent in every auto/biographical representation, every formulation and judgment of identity, for two related reasons: because there is no real identity separate from the forms of its unfoldings, and because there is no unfolding, no process of development, that can ever be fully present or wholly contained. “Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality,” Whitman declares in a Collect piece of the future of American history and, therefore, of the future of his own past; “only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen” (PW, 2:486). In “Democratic Vistas,” the piece that opens the Collect, development remains the key word for Whitman’s characterization of the “future 37. Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 5.

214

Mediating American Autobiography

personality of America” and its democratic identity—America’s autobiography, as it were—that the essay cannot precisely represent, but can only begin to imagine. That identity, Whitman asserts, “resides altogether in the future,” and even the history of the word democracy itself, Whitman supposes, “remains unwritten” (PW, 2:390, 393). In this light, Whitman turns to the crucial but peculiar role that the “image-making faculty” will play in this development of America’s latent, democratic future. “The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though it may be suggested, cannot be defined,” Whitman characterizes the “process” by which America’s “specimen of literature or art” will develop the nation’s identity. “Observing, rapport, and with intuition, the shows and forms presented by Nature . . . and, above all, from those developments either in Nature or human personality in which power, (dearest of all to the sense of the artist,) transacts itself—out of these, and seizing what is in them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine magic of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious removes, indirections, in literature and art.” Emerson’s representative poet comes to mind, but we are also reminded that it is not the conventional poet, who merely holds the glass up to nature. Rather, it is the poet of Emerson’s “magnetic tenaciousness of an image,” the poet whose representativeness lies in the power of his image reproducibility. In fact, as if to provide us with that very reminder, Whitman adds the following parenthetical characterization of “the image-making faculty” and its developments: “(No useless attempt to repeat the material creation, by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by mortal mental means)” (PW, 2:419). This parenthetical description is its own example of the kind of curiously indirect “analogies” that Whitman imagines the “esthetic worker” to project. The line offers us a photographic analogy in reverse; or rather, an analogy that suggests the potential of photographic reproducibility to inform the “process pictures” that Whitman likes so much, in contrast to an aura of photographic exactness and precision that is conventionally associated with the daguerreotype and that (by the 1870s) Whitman associates with photography’s past. To convey the “process” he is imagining, Whitman provides a photographic analogy that challenges the convention of representational mimesis, repeating the “exact likeness” of the subject. Whitman’s analogy conveys that challenge negatively, turning attention back to the negative that makes the photograph a means to a future as much as a matter of the past.

Whitman’s Photobiography

215

It is along these same lines of the future developing out of what is past or what remains latent in the present that Whitman “reviews” (in the opening of “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads”) the autobiographical nature of his “leaves” by suggesting that the “certain unfoldings” of their “own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions” can never be fully intended. These are the same “lines” I cited at the end of Chapter 1: “These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations, with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments” (PW, 2:712). For Whitman, the condition of such development means that it is hard to extract a man’s real self from the warp and debris of his historical experiences, just as it is hard to separate the photographic portrait from the negative by which it is printed. Both types of representation suggest a confluence of identity and its forms, of “mostly unconscious intentions” and the recollection of “experience afterwards”; both autobiography and photography reflect a process of composition (and decomposition) that is, at least in Whitman’s theory, unending. In light of that process, Whitman’s Specimen Days must be read in second and third glances (to return to his own reading of the work) because it must be read against the grain of autobiography’s complete self-picture and the conventional function of autobiographical portrayal. More than an album of portraits of the author and his era, portraits whose exact likeness might be likened to photographs, Whitman conceives an autobiography faithful to the episodes of its author’s contingent, textual evolution: a photography of autobiography, a photobiography. For Whitman, autobiography develops from the inseparable difference between the self and the real forms of its representation, the “I” (auto) of genuine identity always remembered, and therefore partially displaced, by the light (photo) of its graphic conveyance: “not the great majestic gem alone by itself, but set complete in all its varied, full, indispensable surroundings.” Whitman’s vision of the “picture” and (also from the “Niagara” passage) “brief flash” of memory conveyed in the forms of its representations suggests a photography of autobiography to the extent that “complete” remembrance can never be, by itself, complete. The picture is complete “always afterwards”; it is complete, then, only in its ability to remain incomplete, in its potential to suggest, and never fully close off, a temporal relation between a past, its absence in the present, and the latent character of its future development.

216

Mediating American Autobiography

If that is a potential suggested by photography, for Whitman it also implies the autobiographical potential of his writing; it suggests, in fact, the very nature of what he calls his work’s “suggestiveness.” “The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand at last, is the word Suggestiveness,” Whitman continues in “A Backward Glance” of his work’s personal character, recognizing, once again, the necessarily wayward vision of his authorial intentions: “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight” (PW, 2:724–25). Here, the “personality” of Whitman’s writing, the suggestiveness of its autobiographical identity, comes in the movement between the present of the author’s “theme or thought” and the future of its re-presentation and remediation in reading, the “atmosphere of the theme or thought” through which the author makes contact and is conveyed. Whitman similarly applies this scheme of unfinished representation and ongoing reading to the character of Specimen Days, anticipating in a notebook entry soon after its publication the critical readings it would go on to receive: “After reading the pages of Specimen Days do you object that they are a great jumble, everything scattered, disjointed, bound together without coherence, without order or system? My answer would be, So much the better do they reflect the life they are intended to stand for.”38 Like the photographic tempests of Whitman’s convulsive war writings, standing for the distraction they would represent, Whitman’s autobiographical reflections and impressions “stand at last” only to the extent that they also never stand completely or finally. “Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing,” Whitman points out in Democratic Vistas, giving another turn to this potential of his writing’s “suggestiveness,” “but the reader of the book does” (PW, 2:425). Not the autobiography (book or author), then, but the character of its latent potential—what will have become evident through second and third readings. Specimens of the author’s identity, these fluctuating eidolons and their complex reproduction in “the book” represent the Whitman whose final development remains in the hands of his future readers.

38. Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, 3:661.

- Epilogue Future Readers

Electronic or not, our tools are prostheses for acting at a distance. It is exactly that distance that makes reflection possible. —Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web

Whitman’s notion of the “suggestiveness” or “convulsiveness” of his life’s work confronts his readers with significant distraction and confusion. His representations of the various roads he traveled in America in the nineteenth century convey this confusion. Whitman wanted not to separate content from context, not to remove metaphors of self and history from the material means and metonymies of their conveyance. In this sense, as I argued in the previous chapter, Whitman experimented with a photographic literacy in which a process of reproduction remains not just evident in the product but also still active in its potential. Developing upon this lesson of the “process pictures” in his writing, Whitman conceived his autobiography as a textual specimen, an authentic part of the writer’s experience and a preliminary version of the text that it is in the process of becoming. Whitman glimpsed this experimental nature of his unfinished writing, we might say, much as Robert Cornelius peered into the photographic plate of his camera. Both stances resisted the conventions of authority and immediacy we have often associated with autobiography and photography; both inventors evoked through their reproductions the strange tense of the future perfect, wondering what will have become of the experiment. In different terms and through different manifestations, this vision of the past’s future literacy is implicit in the photographic metonymy that this study has begun to trace in nineteenth-century American 217

218

Mediating American Autobiography

autobiography. Emerson’s recognition of the “fragment of me,” to return to his philosophy described in “Experience” with which I began, reiterates the potential (and perhaps also the trauma) of Whitman’s convulsiveness: the fragment that constitutes the self by linking it to the past and future readings it translates, which is to say, following Emerson’s own figure of the image and its magnetic tenaciousness, the readings it mediates. This is the “strange process” of reading that I take Emerson to anticipate and evoke as early as his writing of “The American Scholar” (“one must be an inventor to read well”) and as prominently as his reference to Shakespeare’s photographic genius. For Thoreau, reading the past and future in the inscriptions that mark the earth, this imagination is located in the uncanny literacy of the trace: the print of nature whose authenticity, precisely in remaining “indifferent” to the kind of monumental representation housed in museums, and in reiterating its absence, demands the type of ongoing reading and observation to which Thoreau, for his part, dedicated his life’s work. “As for museums, I think it is better to let Nature take care of our antiquities,” Thoreau opines regarding such footprints and mind-prints; he elaborates that argument in understanding a similar paradox at work in the nature of photography (JT, 12:92–93). For Douglass, with his focus on the representational character of slavery and race, this reproducibility of reading enacts the critical, revisionary potential he reads in the process of photographic pictures and writes into the pages of his ongoing autobiography. In Douglass’s hands, the composites of such “strange developments” are not just a method of the book (his complicated picturing of his mother’s image, for example), they are in key places the very focus and subject of the composition: let the reader be posed in my position. I write to you (now) largely through the distant contact of digital code. Inflected through the technological lenses of the digital world that dominate our vision and language today, the nineteenth-century shifts I have been tracking by way of photography, from the metaphors of autobiographical mirroring to the contingencies and contradictions of original reproducibility, might also bring to mind the World Wide Web and other versions of our latest dead metaphors: digital literacy and electronic text. One of the more compelling ways, it seems to me, that critics have begun to read and evaluate (not just celebrate) the implications of our newest technologies of literacy and memory and textuality—specifically their manifestation in the dynamic pages of the

Epilogue

219

Web—is to emphasize the metonymy in this newest form of mediation. In The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, William J. Mitchell understands the digital imaging and hypermediacy prevalent in the media of “our postmodern era” in just these terms: “A medium that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and that emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object will be seen by many as no bad thing.” In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin propose a similar view of the new aesthetics of hypermediacy and its proliferations on the Web, arguing that “the viewer experiences hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze.” Citing Norman Bryson’s distinction between the logic of the glance and the gaze, they continue, “The aesthetic of the glance also makes the viewer aware of the process rather than just the product—both the process of creation and the process of viewing . . . [thus conveying] the feeling that we are witnessing, and in a way participating in, the process of its own construction.” But Bolter and Grusin equally emphasize that the newness of hypermediated glances is no new thing; it is as old as the claims for the gaze of immediacy that such hypermediacy, paradoxically, supports. We have seen this paradox at work in the claims for photographic communication that emerged around the medium in its infancy—and, of course, the paradox predates photography. A crucial line in Jerome McGann’s compelling argument for the “radiant textuality” of emerging digital literary scholarship reminds us that books have always been hypertextual, multimedia composites of visual and verbal codes, have always been rich, technologically enhanced, graphic distractions. Such distractions, McGann asserts, provoke self-reflection “in imaginative work, where the medium is always the message, whatever else may be the subjects of the work.”1 In view of the attention I have given to the poetics of process and radiant textuality emphasized through an earlier manifestation of “new” mediation, photography’s metonymic logic of the glance, it should not surprise us in the least to find Whitman, or any of the other writers of this study, springing forth from the hypermediated pages of the text we now call the World Wide Web. Among the 1. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 8; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 54; McGann, Radiant Textuality, 184, 181.

220

Mediating American Autobiography

numerous offerings, today’s readers can glean information from sites offering electronic versions of an author’s writing and range among numerous links to additional resources, scholarly and otherwise: from “RWE.org” to the “Thoreau Reader,” from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site to the expansive Walt Whitman Archive. One Web site that has captured my attention, and continues to hold it, is the Walt Whitman home page at American Memory, the digital archive established by the Library of Congress. The page, titled “Poet at Work: Walt Whitman Notebooks 1850s-1860s,” offers access, through the mediation of digital imaging and reproduction, to four of Whitman’s notebooks that were recovered in 1995 after a fifty-year absence. Included in that disappearance and recovery was Whitman’s infamous cardboard butterfly, discussed in Chapter 5. The site provides a closeup image of the butterfly prop—revealing it to be not just a prop, but a multicolored text. The home page, in fact, juxtaposes, as its central icon, an image of the butterfly portrait (Whitman with the butterfly on his hand) with an image of Whitman’s notebook writing overlaying the cardboard butterfly. The allegory of Whitman’s “psyche” has migrated from photograph to page to book spine, and now to the electronic pages of the Web. At first glance, such hypermediated imaging and representation might seem to take us far—and perhaps too far—from the concerns of this study. Not just historically, of course, but technologically. That is to say, the late twentieth-century invention of digital imaging and hypertextual representation is a different matter altogether from the nineteenth-century technology of photography. Most basically, the “truth” of photography’s celebrated, photochemical indexicality is replaced by the approximations and manipulations of a digital, electronic, and arbitrary code. As Mitchell puts it succinctly in his title, digital imaging is “post-photographic.” As many have suggested even further, such digital mediation announces, in its potential to manipulate “visual truth,” the death knell of photography itself. In this regard, I recognize that this latest manifestation of Whitman and his work is a strange place to end, that the Whitman home page and its digital archive of images and reproductions, it would seem, are not further “strange developments” anticipated by the poet’s nineteenthcentury photographic imagination so much as the end of the line. Am I concluding this reading, then, by doing what critical readings can least afford to do, forecasting the potential irrelevance of my argument for the future?

Epilogue

221

Let me join Whitman in taking that risk. Though the relevance of the relation between Whitman (or Douglass or Thoreau or Emerson) and this new, digital web of verbal and visual textuality is matter for another study, there is, nonetheless, a crucial relevance of the relation between the implications of reproducibility and process that characterize this newest medium of representation and the older technologies of writing (autobiography) and photography that have been my concern in this study. In the “Poet at Work” site at American Memory, that relationship is marked in the initial image of Whitman with the butterfly. The picture may be a digitized image, as manipulable and arbitrary as the digital code upon which the page itself depends; but, more accurately, it is a digital reproduction of the photographic image that Whitman takes and reproduces within Specimen Days. More accurately, still, it is a digital reproduction of an image that is itself not just a reproduction, but (as Whitman understood it) an image for and about reproducibility: what he called a “process picture.” Whitman’s butterfly image, situated in this digital site, should suggest to us that the distinctions between the arbitrary “manipulations” of digital reproduction and the “truth” of photographic representation are too easily made. This is not just because many digital images are reproductions themselves of photographic images (like Whitman’s portrait), but also because all photographic images are themselves, as photochemical reproductions, manipulations of what they represent—like Whitman’s butterfly portrait. To remind us that visual manipulation and dissembling is not new or unique to the techniques of digital imaging, Mitchell cites and reproduces this very same image. Bolter and Grusin take the reminder even further, understanding that such hypermediacy is not just anticipated by certain photographic techniques and deceptions, but characteristic of photographic reproduction as such. “How could exposing photographic film to light, developing the negative in a chemical bath, and transferring the result to paper ever constitute an unaltered image?”2 This rhetorical question suggests to me that the “miraculous nature” of photography (to echo Oliver Wendell Holmes once again), the mediation that we still tend to forget in its “everyday matter,” might have something to teach us about our latest everyday matter, 2. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 196–98; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 109. Regarding the links between analog and digital photography, see also Geoffrey Batchen, who argues in “Photogenics” that digital imaging is informed and anticipated by the indexical reproducibility that characterizes photography.

222

Mediating American Autobiography

the newest technology of automaticity that does everything while we “just push the button” on the mouse or the keyboard. The definition of mediation that John Durham Peters locates in nineteenth-century communication, the unforeseen horizons of broadcast dissemination, evokes both Whitman’s interest in manipulating (handling) his print texts for unknown readers and the Web’s penchant for delivering intimate anonymity: “Media mean the multiplication of singular beings for the use of strangers.”3 To speculate upon what photography might show us with regard to this current and future home of mediated memory and identity is to reiterate the potential literacy that we find, already, in photography’s past. In the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin was one of the earliest and most prescient readers of the future of photography’s past. As is now well known, Benjamin identified a crucial shift that technological reproducibility effects in the nineteenth century, most markedly with photography: “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.” This study has focused on the initial, midnineteenth-century manifestations of this shift resulting from the photographic negative. The future project that I am imagining would continue to trace out the further shifts and developments of literacy, photographic and otherwise, that Benjamin also anticipates. In other, less-cited passages from Benjamin’s influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” we can also imagine a “new” aesthetics of digital literacy taking shape. “Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway.” Benjamin explains what he calls “process reproduction”: “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. . . . The reader gains access to authorship.”4 Of course, we could also read this imagined future of a literary technology, the reader turning into a writer, back into the imaginative situation that Whitman toward the end of the nineteenth century figures as a process of photographic development, the reader doing his part with the author’s negatives. 3. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 134. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 224, 220, 232.

Epilogue

223

Let me conclude, then, by suggesting that the literary implications of such photographic developments remain at work in these latest pages of Whitman’s autobiographical “venture” to his reader. Photography’s “miraculous nature,” what Benjamin calls “process reproduction,” may no longer be operative, or at least not exclusively operative, in the electronic eidolons that the digital text remediates for readers of these authors. But in reproducing the multiple means of Whitman’s representations, his notebooks, his photographs, his props, the Library of Congress site offers access to his authorship in a way that continues to foreground the potential (and problem) that photography shares with his writing. This is true on a greater scale in the Whitman digital archive developed and edited by Whitman scholars Ed Folsom and Ken Price. As Folsom and Price suggest, the digital archive is not a tool to access versions of the writing so much as a tool developed from the logic and technology of the writing. Noting that electronic editions can offer themselves typically as “work in progress rather than as a finished product,” they argue that the digital archive “is the perfect medium for an author who was always revising and reordering and rethinking his work.”5 For Benjamin, such mediation is the potential of photographic literacy as such: not just the history or identity we can read in a photograph, but the history or identity of a photograph as itself a temporalized process of reading, representation by way of future development. “The past has deposited in it images which one could compare to those captured by a light-sensitive plate,” Benjamin reflects in a draft to his late essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “‘Only the future has developers at its disposal which are strong enough to allow the image to come to light in all its details.’ . . . ‘To read what was never written,’ says Hofmannsthal. The reader to be thought of here is the true historian.”6 Every archive of memory, if it is to be communicated, awaits the composition and contact of its future readers. In the “Poet at Work” site at American Memory, that future reading of the past, its coming to light, remains evident in the “work” that the images of the notebooks and the author reproduce. Here, too, the 5. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work, 145. 6. This passage from Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften (1:1238) is translated and cited in Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, 86–87. In my reading of Benjamin, specifically his linking of literacy to the temporality of photographic reproducibility, I am informed by Cadava.

224

Mediating American Autobiography

reader is left to do his or her part, moving from page to page. With that access to Whitman’s writing—perhaps the first views of Whitman’s actual notebooks—we are brought closer to the author and the situations and scenes of his work, the same notebooks and war memoranda and scraps of which Whitman makes so much. All the while, that intimate access to Whitman’s “original” work and image expands the distance from the original, just as the photographic process began to do a century and a half before American Memory was online. Am I closer to Whitman’s convulsive “hand” through these mediated images or, clicking my way by and between these scans and reproductions, more distant than I have ever been? My senses tell me it is, like all mediation, a matter of both. The editors of the Whitman digital archive, which provides extensive reproductions of Whitman’s poetry manuscripts, emphasize that the digital medium is perfect, in this regard, for not clarifying the clutter of Whitman’s life in words (as the print edition of Whitman’s Collected Writings attempted and has inevitably failed to do); rather, it is more effective in bringing a reproducible Whitman more fully before the reader in the variety of manuscripts, photographic portraits, and print pages it can reproduce electronically.7 As such, these digital archives reiterate a technological (and metonymic) reproducibility found already in Whitman’s work (printing, bookmaking, picture reproduction, writing) that is true to the logic of hypertext, but also true to Whitman: digital versions of Whitman cannot complete, finally, what the writer himself left unfinished.8 Despite that clutter of hypermediacy, and because of it, the digital archive—like photographic images that would connect Whitman to his readers—offers twenty-first-century daguerreotypes of the author’s inner being. At best, Whitman’s “parts of the actual distraction” continue to be conveyed in two senses of this newer medium, and in the two senses of his word distraction: the confusion is both represented and reproduced, both surveyed and sampled. The “dissonance” of Whitman’s question 7. Folsom and Price, in the appendix of Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, contrast the digital archive and its premises with that of the print edition of Collected Writings. 8. For more on this logic of hypertext, see George P. Landow’s notion of the active “wreader” that hypertextuality demands, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization, 302. In addition to the work of the Whitman digital archive, I would also point to recent scholarship on Emily Dickinson, particularly to Martha Nell Smith and the work of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, that makes a similar case for the writerly characteristics of digital text as a fitting medium for Dickinson’s resistances to the limitations of print textuality.

Epilogue

225

of photographic identity with which we began this study—Is the difference evolutional or episodical?—has not been resolved by digital technology, only marvelously reconfigured. Though now digitally coded and broadcast through a web of wires and the flickering of electronic signals, the complexities of the potential and problematic of photographic memory remain. Like Emerson’s impressionable genius, Thoreau’s self-registering traces, or Douglass’s composites of self and other, the photographic soul of Whitman’s work, of Whitman at work, remains to be seen here: glancing and skimming the surface, awaiting the distant contact of its future readers, and flickering still.

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Anderson, Douglas. “The Textual Reproductions of Frederick Douglass.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 27, no. 1 (1997): 57–87. Andrews, William L. “My Bondage and My Freedom and the American Literary Renaissance of the 1850s.” In Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William Andrews, 133–47. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. ———. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Arac, Jonathan. “F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, 90–112. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Banta, Melissa. A Curious and Ingenious Art: Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

227

228

Bibliography

———. “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age.” In Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squires, 9–23. New York: New Press, 1999. ———. “Photogenics.” History of Photography 22, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 18–26. Benesch, Klaus. Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 199–216. New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–51. New York: Schocken, 1969. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. “The Ritual of American Autobiography: Edwards, Franklin, Thoreau.” Revue Francaise D’Etudes Americaines 14 (May 1982): 139–49. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Bourne, George. Picture of Slavery in the United States of America. Middletown, CT: Hunt, 1834. Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Brunet, Francois. “La Vraie Peinture Republicaine.” In Jardins d’hiver: Litterature et Photographie, ed. Marie-D. Garnier, 79–95. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Superieure, 1997. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan, 1983. Buell, Lawrence. “Autobiography in the American Renaissance.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin, 47–69. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s “Journal.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 1841. Reprint, ed. John Chester Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. Cavell, Stanley. “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe).” In In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, 105–30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Bibliography

229

———. “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘Fate.’” In Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, 12–40. Cambridge, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1994. ———. “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience.’” In This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, 77–118. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989. ———. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. ———. “What Photography Calls Thinking.” Raritan 4, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 1–21. ———. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Clarke, Graham. Walt Whitman: The Poem as Private History. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Collins, Kathleen. “The Scourged Back.” History of Photography 9 (January– March 1985): 43–45. Couser, Thomas. Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Cox, James. “Autobiography and America.” In Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground, 11–32. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Crawford, William. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan and Morgan, 1979. Daguerre, Louis J. M. “Daguerreotype.” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 11–13. New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980. ———. An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama. London: 1839. Davidov, Judith Fryer. Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Davidson, Cathy. “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990): 667–701. Davy, Humphry. “A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry.” 1802. In Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, ed. Johanna M. Smith, 211–21. New York: Bedford, 2000. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67–82. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Dorsey, Peter. “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.” PMLA 111, no. 3 (May 1996): 435–50.

230

Bibliography

Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Library of America, 1994. ———. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Ed. John W. Blassingame et al. 7 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–. ———. “The Heroic Slave.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 220–47. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999. ———. “Pictures and Progress.” 1865. Ms. Speech File, reel 18, frames 142–54. Library of Congress. ———. “A Tribute for the Negro.” Review of A Tribute for the Negro, by Wilson Armistead. In Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Foner, 379–84. New York: International, 1950. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ———. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth. “Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 39–68. New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 6 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971–. ———. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Centenary Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904. ———. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Ed. Joseph Slater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. ———. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. ———. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1995. Everett, Nicholas. “Autobiography as Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days.” In Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw, 217–34. Hants, UK: Scolar, 1996. Ewen, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Bibliography

231

Fichtelberg, Joseph. The Complex Image: Faith and Method in American Autobiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Folsom, Ed. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Douglass’s Frontispiece Engravings.” In Approaches to Teaching “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” ed. James C. Hall, 55–65. New York: MLA, 1999. ———. “‘This Heart’s Geography’s Map’: The Photographs of Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4 (Fall/Winter 1986–1987): 1–76. ———. Walt Whitman’s Native Representations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth M. Price. Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. New York: Blackwell, 2005. Frank, Adam. “Emily Dickinson and Photography.” Emily Dickinson Journal 10, no. 2 (2001): 1–21. Frederickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Gardner, Alexander. Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. 1866. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1959. Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787–1845. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black.” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129–55. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gleason, Herbert W. Thoreau Country: Photographs and Text Selections from the Works of H. D. Thoreau. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1975. Gunning, Tom. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” In Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro, 42–71. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. ———. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, 15–45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Gustafson, Thomas. Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hill, Levi. A Treatise on Daguerreotype. New York: 1850.

232

Bibliography

Hirsch, Marianne. The Familial Gaze. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. ———, ed. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hirsch, Robert. Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Doings of the Sunbeam.” Atlantic Monthly (July 1863): 1–15. ———. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. ———. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Monthly (June 1859): 738–48. ———. “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture: With a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic.” Atlantic Monthly (July 1861): 13–29. Hubbard, Melanie. “‘Turn it, a little’: The Influence of the Daguerreotype and the Stereograph on Emily Dickinson’s Use of Manuscript Variants.” Mosaic 38, no. 1 (March 2005): 115–32. “Iodine and Its Compounds.” The Photographic Art-Journal. 1, no. 3 (March 1851): 142–45. James, Christopher. The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Albany: Delmar, 2001. Jay, Bill. Cyanide and Spirits: An Inside-Out View of Early Photography. Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1991. Jay, Gregory. America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Johnson, Linck C. “The Design of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days.” Walt Whitman Review 21, no. 1 (March 1975): 3–14. Kane, Henry Bugbee. Thoreau’s Walden: A Photographic Register. New York: Knopf, 1946. Kinney, Katherine. “Making Capital: War, Labor, and Whitman in Washington, D.C.” In Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, 174–89. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 87–118. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. ———. “Photography in the Service of Surrealism.” In L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, 15–42. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985. ———. “Tracing Nadar.” October 5 (Summer 1978): 29–47.

Bibliography

233

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Lester, C. Edwards, ed. The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, containing the portraits and biographical sketches of twenty-four of the most eminent citizens of the American Republic, since the death of Washington. From daguerreotypes by Brady—engraved by D’Avignon. New York: 1850. Loeffelholz, Mary. “‘Question of Monuments’: Emerson, Dickinson, and American Renaissance Portraiture.” Modern Language Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 1998): 445–69. Lopez, Michael. Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Marien, Mary Warner. Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Martin, Waldo E., Jr. “Images of Frederick Douglass in the AfroAmerican Mind: The Recent Black Freedom Struggle.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist, 271–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Maynard, Patrick. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition.” In African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William L. Andrews, 36–58. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. McQuire, Scott. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera. London: Sage, 1998. Meer, Sarah. “Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.” In The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells, 89–97. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995. Miller, Nancy K. “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 1–27. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

234

Bibliography

———. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Morris, Wright. Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory. New York: Aperture, 1989. Morse, Samuel F. B. “The Daguerreotipe.” New-York Observer 17, no. 16 (April 20, 1839): 62. Myerson, Joel. “Whitman: Bibliography as Biography.” In Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, ed. Ed Folsom, 19–29. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Newhall, Beaumont. The Daguerreotype in America. New York: Dover, 1976. Nott, J. C., and George R. Gliddon. Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1854. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” Callaloo 7, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 46–73. ———. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Orvell, Miles. American Photography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Peabody, Ephraim. “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves.” In Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William Andrews, 24–27. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Peck, H. Daniel. Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” the “Journal,” and “Walden.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pfister, Harold Francis. Facing the Light: Historic American Portrait Daguerreotypes. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1978. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Daguerreotype.” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 37–38. New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980. Porter, Eliot. “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” New York: Ballantine, 1967. Prichard, James Cowles. The Natural History of Man. London: H. Bailliere, 1843. Reichlin, Elinor. “Faces of Slavery.” American Heritage 28, no. 4 (June 1977): 4–11.

Bibliography

235

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ———. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Ripley, Peter. “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass.” Southern Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 5–29. Roof, Judith. Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change. New York: Routledge, 1996. Root, Marcus. The Camera and the Pencil; or, The Heliographic Art. 1864. Reprint, Pawlet, VT: Helios, 1971. Rudisill, Richard. Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “Then When We Clutch Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image.” In Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, 64–85. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Sayre, Robert F. “Autobiography and the Making of America.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, 146–68. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Schaaf, Larry. Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Schirmeister, Pamela. Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Sekora, John. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo 10, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 482–515. ———. “‘Mr. Editor, If You Please’: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and the End of the Abolitionist Imprint.” Callaloo 17, no. 2 (1994): 608–26. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. ———. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning.” In Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, 84–109. London: Macmillan, 1982.

236

Bibliography

———. “Reading an Archive.” In Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis, 114–27. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Shepard, Esther. Walt Whitman’s Pose. New York: Harcourt, 1936. Smith, Shawn Michelle. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Sobieszek, Robert. Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850–2000. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Stapp, William F. Robert Cornelius: Portraits from the Dawn of Photography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1983. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Bantam, 1981. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Taft, Robert. Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889. New York: Dover, 1938. Talbot, William Henry Fox. “Early Researches in Photography.” 1878. In Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Mike Weaver, 45–55. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993. ———. The Pencil of Nature. 1844–1846. In Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Mike Weaver, 75–103. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993. ———. “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing.” 1839. In Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg, 36–48. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. Thoreau, Henry David. Early Essays and Miscellanies. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. ———. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. ———. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and F. B. Sanborn. 20 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Towler, John. The Silver Sunbeam: A Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing. 1864. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Morgan and Morgan, 1969. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique.” In The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke, 173–92. London: Reaktion Books, 1992. ———. “Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype.” In The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebra-

Bibliography

237

tion, ed. John Wood, 60–73. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. ———. “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword.” In Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss, 16–47. New York: Abrams, 1991. ———. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Noonday-Hill, 1989. ———. “Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables.” American Literary History, 9, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 460–81. Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols, 1906–1996. Vols. 1–3, reprint, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1964. Vol. 4, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953. Vols. 5–7, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Vols. 8–9, Oregon House, CA: W. L. Bentley, 1996. Virga, Vincent. Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States. New York: Knopf, 1997. Voss, Frederick S. Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1995. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Walker, Peter F. Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Wallis, Brian. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes.” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 39–61. Walls, Laura Dassow. “Romancing the Real: Thoreau’s Technology of Inscription.” In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, ed. William E. Cain, 123–51. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. “Walt Whitman’s New Book.” Review of Specimen Days and Collect. Critic 3 (January 13, 1883): 3. Werner, Marta L. “‘The Soul’s Distinct Connection—’: Emily Dickinson, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century American Culture.” The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman and American Culture, coor. by Kenneth M. Price and Martha Nell Smith. http://www.classroomelectric.org/ volume3/werner/. West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

238

Bibliography

Westerbeck, Colin L. “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment.” Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 145–61. Wexler, Laura. “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye.” In The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch, 248–75. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. Whitman, Walt. “City Photographs.” In Walt Whitman and the Civil War, ed. Charles Glicksberg, 24–62. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1963. ———. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1961–1967. ———. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. Vol. 3 of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1978. ———. Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965. ———. “Leaves of Grass—An Extraordinary Book.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle 15 (September 1855): 2. ———. Leaves of Grass: With Sands at Seventy, and A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads. Philadelphia: Ferguson Brothers, 1889. ———. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1984. ———. “Poet at Work: Walt Whitman Notebooks 1850s-1860s.” Library of Congress, American Memory, http://www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/ collections/whitman/. ———. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1963–1964. ———. The Walt Whitman Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. http://www.whitmanarchive.org. ———. Walt Whitman’s Memoranda during the War [and] Death of Abraham Lincoln. 1875. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Williams, Susan. Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Wilson, Eric. Emerson’s Sublime Science. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. New York: Routledge, 2000. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Index

Abolitionism: and Douglass, 158, 163, 164, 167, 168n37, 170, 179; Douglass’s abolitionist speeches, 7, 20, 132–33, 144n11; and Garrison, 163–66; and photography, 165–67, 169, 175; and slave narratives, 7, 131, 164–67. See also Slavery Abrams, M. H., 82–83 Actinism, 108, 122–24. See also Photography Adams, Timothy Dow, 4 Afterimage, 78, 213 Agassiz, Louis, 20, 148–55, 157, 168, 175, 178 Altered Egos (Couser), 45 American Archives (Smith), 17, 146–47 American Memory project, Library of Congress, 21, 41, 203, 220–25 American Renaissance, 4, 6, 44, 58, 60n50. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Thoreau, Henry David; Whitman, Walt American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 7, 13–14, 59 “American Scholar” (Emerson), 61, 155, 218 American School of Ethnology, 135, 148–54, 163, 177 Amphitypes, 33, 55–61 Andrews, William, 161, 163–64, 178 Anekphrasis, photographic, 133–34, 135, 179 “Anti-Slavery Movement, The” (Douglass), 144n11 Apple Computer, 2 Armstrong, Carol, 35–36, 107, 108, 116, 116–17n23, 124, 207

Armstrong, Nancy, 30, 106 “Art” (Emerson), 69–71, 73, 75, 81 “Art and Criticism” (Emerson), 92n26, 95n29 Atlantic Monthly, 27–31, 33–38, 120, 138–41, 191–92, 212 Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Gilmore), 18, 49–52, 55 Autobiography: assumptions on, 45; as communication media, 9; convulsiveness of, 199, 202; Couser on, 45; de Man’s deconstructive criticism of, 46–47; Eakin on, as relational, 59, 60; Eakin on doubly mediated self of, 47, 48, 50; Egan’s refracted-mirror metaphor of, 47–48, 50; Gilmore on autobiographics, 18, 49–52, 55; juxtaposition of photographic and autobiographical mediation, 1–9, 58–61; as literary mediation, 45–52; as metaphors of self, 46–47; metonymic character of, 16, 49–57; and otherness, 48–49, 58–59; photographic implications of, 41–55; photographs in generally, 48–49; of photography, 17–18, 23–55; Sayre on, as characteristic form of American expression, 5, 43–44; selfimage of, as composite image, 55–56; self-portrait as metaphor of, 162. See also specific authors “Autobiography as De-Facement” (de Man), 46, 48 “Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads, A” (Whitman), 56–57, 182, 215, 216

239

240 Barthes, Roland: on autobiography, 48; Camera Lucida by, 31–32, 48; on Cornelius daguerreotype, 25; on invention of photography, 25, 31, 102, 108; on metonymic condition of photography, 31–32; on otherness and photography, 33; on photochemistry versus painting, 25, 31, 102, 108; on photographic presence, 15; on sovereign contingency of photograph and its pure deictic language, 72n10; on studium and punctum of photography, 116, 116–17n23; Talbot compared with, 116–17n23 Batchen, Geoffrey, 102n6, 124, 221n2 Baxter, Sylvester, 186, 209n32 Beecher, Henry Ward, 167 Benesch, Klaus, 51 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 222, 223 Betts, Sylvester M., 133n3 Billington, James H., 41 Blassingame, John, 132–33 “Body and the Archive, The” (Sekula), 147 Bolter, Jay David, 8n9, 51–52, 106, 219, 221 Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, 66 Bourne, George, 164, 165 Brady, Mathew: and American subjectivity, 157; Civil War photography by, 189, 193; Gallery of Illustrious Americans by, 16, 19, 88, 93–94, 142, 147, 160; and representativeness, 88, 93–94, 149 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1 Bryson, Norman, 30, 70, 72, 219 Buell, Lawrence, 5, 7, 185n6 “Butterfly” (Sarony), 205 Butterfly portrait of Whitman, 203–10, 220, 221 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 144 Cadava, Eduardo, 208, 223n6 Calotypy, 33 Camera and the Pencil, The (Root), 19, 38–39, 87–91, 153n20 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 31–32, 48 Cameron, Sharon, 100, 103, 110, 112, 120 Carlyle, Thomas, 62–64, 66, 84, 140 Carte-de-visite photographs, 167 Cavell, Stanley: on Emerson, 72–74, 82, 84–85n19; on photography and film, 74n12, 79, 89; on Thoreau’s Walden, 110; The World Viewed by, 79 Cinema. See Film (cinema) “Circles” (Emerson), 69

Index “City Photographs” (Whitman), 190–91, 201 Civil War: Brady’s photographs of, 189, 193; and Douglass, 132, 133, 146, 154, 158–59; Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 16, 21, 185, 189, 193–97; Holmes on photographs of, 191–92, 201; Trachtenberg on photographs of, 193–94, 196; Whitman’s Civil War memoranda, 21, 184–99, 200, 216; in Whitman’s Specimen Days, 21, 185–89, 192–93, 195, 213; Whitman’s work in hospitals during, 186, 188, 190–91 Cixous, Helene, 84n19 “Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, The,” speech (Douglass), 135, 148–50, 152, 155, 161, 163, 176–77, 179 Collected Writings (Whitman), 224 Communication, Peters on, 9, 15, 52, 64 Complete Poems and Prose (Whitman), 181–82, 205–7 Convulsiveness, 185–86, 192–96, 199, 202, 216, 217, 218 Cornelius, Robert, 23–26, 41–42, 45, 61, 74, 168–69, 217 Counterfeit presentment, 153–54 Couser, Thomas, 45 Crane, Stephen, 42 Crary, Jonathan, 78 Crawford, William, 25–26 Critic, 210 Critical reproduction, definition of, 59 Daguerre, Louis J. M.: Douglass on, 137, 138; Emerson on, 74–79, 81–87, 94; Gouraud as pupil of, 6; invention of photography by, 3, 16, 23, 42, 68, 85–86, 95, 137, 138; Morse on daguerreotypes, 12, 25; naming of daguerreotypes for, 32; on photograph as self-representation, 28; and portraiture using photography, 36; and production process for daguerreotypes, 37; on representational status of photographic images, 3; Shakespeare compared with, 82–86, 91. See also Daguerreotypes Daguerrean metaphor, 82–86, 91, 170–71, 172 Daguerreotypes: Cornelius’s portrait, 23–26, 41–42, 45, 61, 74, 168–69, 217; and Dickinson, 60; double image of, 37–38, 68, 87, 95, 191; Douglass on,

Index 138–39; Emerson on, 26, 65–66, 68–69, 71, 72, 75–76, 79; Holmes on, 29, 37–38; Morse on, 12, 25; naming of, after Daguerre, 32; Plumbe’s daguerreotype gallery in New York City, 191; Poe on, 71, 75; and portraiture, 36, 37–38, 65–66; production process for, 37–38; sitting for portraits, 65–66, 144, 145; Stowe’s use of term, 172, 173; Thoreau on, 103, 110–11, 114, 119; Whitman on, 191, 214; Zealy daguerreotypes, 148–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 175. See also Photography Darkroom, 29, 38, 90, 117, 120, 207 Davidson, Cathy, 145 Davy, Sir Humphry, 107, 123, 125 Deconstructive criticism, 46–47 “Dedication of Monument on Bull Run Battle-Field,” 197n20 De Man, Paul, 46–47, 48 “Democratic Vistas” (Whitman), 213–14, 216 Democritus, 27, 28, 141 De Quincey, Thomas, 111–12 Dickinson, Emily, 60, 224n8 Dickinson Electronic Archives, 224n8 Digital technology: on Dickinson, 224n8; on Douglass, 220; on Emerson, 220; and hypermedia, 219–21, 224n8; and Library of Congress American Memory project, 21, 41, 203, 220–25; and metonymy, 218–19; and photography, 2, 8, 22, 41–42, 220–25; and radiant textuality, 219; on Thoreau, 220; Walt Whitman Archive, 22, 220, 223–24; on Whitman, 21, 22, 41, 203, 220–25; and World Wide Web, 218–20 Dissemination, 10–11 “Doings of the Sunbeam” (Holmes), 36, 64, 191–92 Dorsey, Peter, 162, 163 Douglass, Frederick: abolitionist speeches of, 7, 20, 132–33, 144n11; clock image of, 158–59; on composite character, 176, 179; concern of, for appearance of his publications, 133n3; on counterfeit presentment of photographic portraits, 153–54; and critical theory of pictures, 154–59; critique of ethnology by, 135, 148–54, 163, 176–77; on democratic potential of photography, 138–39, 142–43; digital resources on, 220; and distinctive features of Negro physiognomy, 145–54; and Garrison, 163–66; and imagina-

241 tion, 131–32; literacy of, 132, 161; metaphor in autobiography by, 162; and metonymic interest in photography, 157–59; mother of, 171–75, 178–79, 218; on nature, 156–57; on negative implications of cheapness and universality of photographic portraiture, 142–45; overview of, 19–20; and photographic processes, 137–45; photographic representations in texts of, 136, 160–80; photographs of, 20, 133–35, 160–63, 165, 168–69, 182; on photographs of family members, 141–42; on picture making faculty, 156–57, 180; on racial iconography for American character, 177–78; as representative man, 132, 160–61; review of A Tribute for the Negro by, 149, 163; scars on back of, 166–67, 175; on selfidentity and photography, 142–45; slave narratives of, 7, 130–31; on slavery, 20, 59, 130, 135–36, 150, 158–59; on stern serenity of photographic processes, 142–45, 153, 168, 169; on thought pictures, 154–57, 169 —works: “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” 144n11; “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” speech, 135, 148–50, 152, 155, 161, 163, 176–77, 179; “The Heroic Slave,” 170–71, 172; The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 133n3, 160, 163n28; My Bondage and My Freedom, 20, 44, 130, 132n1, 135–36, 160–63, 165, 168–69, 171–80; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 20, 130–33, 146, 160, 162, 163–65, 171; “The Nature of Slavery,” 130; “Our Composite Nationality” speech, 176n44; “Pictures and Progress” speech, 20, 132–33, 135–39, 141–46, 149, 152–59, 161, 162, 169, 171, 179, 181 Eakin, Paul John, 47, 48, 50, 59, 60 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 166 Eastman, George, 34, 207 Eastman Kodak, 2, 34–35 Egan, Susanna, 47–48, 50 E. & H. T. Anthony factory, 38 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: on art, 69–71, 73, 75, 81; autobiographical nature of essays by, 44; Cavell on, 72–74, 82, 84–85n19; on circles, 31, 69; correspondence between Carlyle and, 62–64, 140; on daguerreotypes, 26, 65–66,

242 68–69, 71, 72, 75–76, 79, 144, 168; digital resources on, 220; and double meaning of type, 81, 94–95; on “fragment of me,” 218; Holmes’s biography of, 44; on impressionability, 79–88, 225; journals of, 7, 26, 62, 65–67, 79, 80–81, 104, 144; lectures by, 132; on memory, 86–87; on metonymy, 55, 91–92, 95; on nature, 67–69, 71–72, 80–83; overview of, 18–19; Peters on, 10; on photographic unhandsomeness, 65–66, 144, 168; photographs of, 62–64, 66; and photography, 13–14, 18–19, 26, 65–79, 81–87, 91, 94–95, 104, 137; on poets, 79–84, 214; on representativeness, 6–7, 18–19, 60, 65, 76, 81–84, 88, 92–93, 214; on Shakespeare, 80–86, 91, 218; on sitting for daguerreotype portrait, 65–66, 144, 145; on strangeness of Daguerre’s photographic discovery, 74–79, 81, 83, 85, 95; and theory of expression, 44; Thoreau’s eulogy by, 96, 97, 101–2; and Transcendentalism, 7 —works: “American Scholar,” 61, 155, 218; “Art,” 69–71, 73, 75, 81; “Art and Criticism,” 92n26, 95n29; “Camera,” 75–76; “Circles,” 69; Essays: First Series, 69–71, 76–77; “Experience,” 23, 57, 73–74, 90, 218; “Fate,” 81, 84–85, 94; “Friendship,” 10; “Intellect,” 64–65, 76–79, 86; “Lecture on the Times,” 13–14, 74–75, 137; “Man Thinking,” 155; “Memory,” 86–87, 211; “The Method of Nature,” 67–68; “The Pencil of Nature,” 68; “The Poet,” 79–80; “Poetry and the Imagination,” 55, 80, 91; Representative Men, 7, 18–19, 44, 65, 80–84, 88, 92–95, 142; “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” 92–95; “Thoreau,” 96 Emerson and Power (Lopez), 69 Essays: First Series (Emerson), 69–71, 76–77 Ethnology: and Agassiz, 20, 148–55, 157, 168, 175; Douglass’s “Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered,” 135, 148–50, 152, 155, 161, 163, 176–77, 179; Douglass’s critique of, 135, 148–54, 163, 176–77; mixed races or composite nature of civilization, 176, 179; and photography, 166; and Prichard, 173–78; and Prichard image in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, 175–76, 178–79; racial iconog-

Index raphy for American character, 177–78. See also Race Everett, Nicholas, 185n6 Ewen, Stuart, 38n19 “Experience” (Emerson), 23, 57, 73–74, 90, 218 Expression: and Cornelius’s self-portrait, 45; Douglass on stern serenity of photographic processes, 142–45, 153, 168, 169; and Douglass’s photograph, 168–69; Emerson on photographic unhandsomeness, 65–66, 144, 168; Emerson’s theory of, 44; in Lincoln’s portraits, 197–98; Matthiessen on, 7, 44; Root on facial expression, 87–91; and Root on photography as fine art, 39–40, 87–91; Trachtenberg on, 36–37. See also Faces and facial expression Eye of camera metaphor, 116, 117–18 Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States (Virga), 41–42 Faces and facial expression: Douglass on racial iconography of, 177; Douglass on reading face of slave, 179–80; Douglass on stern serenity of photographic processes, 142–45, 153, 168, 169; Emerson on photographic unhandsomeness, 65–66, 144, 168; in Lincoln’s portraits, 197–98; Root on, 87–91. See also Expression Family portraiture, 141–42 Faraday, Michael, 91n25 “Fate” (Emerson), 81, 84–85, 94 Fichtelberg, Joseph, 185n6 “Field Where General Reynolds Fell,” 196n19 Film (cinema), 74n12, 79, 89 Folsom, Ed, 13, 169n38, 183–84, 193n16, 223 Frank, Adam, 60n49 Franklin, Benjamin, 43–44, 51 “Friendship” (Emerson), 10 “Fruit Piece, A” (Talbot), 125 Gallery of Illustrious Americans (Brady), 16, 19, 88, 93–94, 142, 147, 149, 160 Gardner, Alexander: advertisement for Civil War photos by, 194n17; and “Dedication of Monument on Bull Run Battle-Field,” 197n20; and “Field Where General Reynolds Fell,” 196n19; and “A Harvest of Death,” 195–96; photographic “presentments” by, 208; Photographic Sketch Book of the

Index Civil War by, 16, 21, 185, 189, 193–97; Trachtenberg on, 193–94; and Whitman’s Specimen Days, 21, 185, 193–97 Gardner, Jared, 167, 177–78 Garrison, William Lloyd, 163–66 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 132, 161n26, 174 Gaze versus glance, 219 Gilmore, Leigh, 18, 49–52, 55 Gilpin, William, 127 Glance: gaze versus, 219; Whitman’s “Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” 56–57, 182, 215, 216; and Whitman’s Specimen Days, 186, 199, 215 Gleason, Herbert, 96n1, 97–99, 121 Gliddon, George, 148, 150–52, 175–76 Gouraud, Francois, 66 Grusin, Richard, 8n9, 51–52, 106, 219, 221 Gunning, Tom, 85n19, 139–40, 143 Harper’s Weekly, 167n35 Harrison, Gabriel, 2 “Harvest of Death, A,” 195–96 Heliography, 39–40, 52, 123. See also Photography Heraclitus, 67, 68 “Heroic Slave, The” (Douglass), 170–71, 172 Herschel, Sir John, 33, 37, 42, 107 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 132 Hirsch, Marianne, 4n3 Hollis, C. Carroll, 53 Holmes, Oliver Wendell: Atlantic Monthly articles on photography by, 16, 26–31, 33–38, 46, 64, 138–41, 191–92, 212; biography of Emerson by, 44; on carte-de-visite photographs, 167; on cheapness and universality of photographs, 138, 140–41; on Civil War photographs, 191–92, 201; on contradictions in photographic process, 30–31, 33; on daguerreotypes, 29, 37–38; on form versus matter, 140–41; on “instantaneous” photograph of Broadway street scene, 34; on “latent soul” of photograph, 213; on miraculous nature of photography, 221; on “mirror with a memory” metaphor of photography, 27–29, 44, 46, 212; on Niagara Falls, 212; on photochemistry, 31, 35–37; on photographic intimacy as new form of friendship, 64, 140, 142; on photographs as new currency, 139–40, 143; on product versus process of photography, 29–31

243 Hubbard, Melanie, 60 Hypericons, 56 Hypermedia, 219–21, 224n8. See also Digital technology Iconography, 164, 177–79 Iconology, 155 Iconology (Mitchell), 56, 82n16, 155 Imagination: and Douglass, 131–32; Thoreau on imaginative versus scientific, 127–28 Immediacy of autobiography, 45, 50, 136 Immediacy of photography: and Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans (Brady), 93; as characteristic of photography, 32–33, 52, 56, 78, 101, 136; Emerson on, 75; and Gardner, 196; Holmes on, 36; mediated immediacy, 32–33, 52, 109, 117, 118, 136, 153n20; and remediation, 51, 106; and Root, 89, 90, 153n20; Talbot on, 106, 108, 109, 117, 118 Impression: and Cornelius’s selfportrait, 45; De Quincey’s style of, 111–12; and Douglass’s photograph, 169; Emerson on impressionability, 79–88, 225; and Root on photograph’s expression, 87–91; Talbot on accidents of photographic impressions, 125, 129; Thoreau on writing’s impression, 111–13 Indexicality of photography: Armstrong on, 124, 207; as characteristic of photography, 55; Emerson on, 57, 86; Krauss on, 32, 35, 95; Roof on, 117; and Root, 90; and Talbot, 108, 124 Individualism, 40, 147 “Intellect” (Emerson), 64–65, 76–79, 86 Internet. See Digital technology “Interregnum Paragraph” (Whitman), 200, 203 Jakobson, Roman, 53 Jay, Gregory, 161n26 Johnson, F. H., 212 Johnson, Linck C., 185n6 Kane, Henry Bugbee, 97n1 Kinney, Katherine, 188n9 Kodak camera, 34–35, 207 Krauss, Rosalind, 14–15, 32, 95 Landow, George P., 224n8 Lavater, Johann K., 87, 95 Leaves of Grass (Whitman): autobiographical nature of generally, 44;

244 butterfly image in, 209; “half-formed pictures” of, 11–13; Matthiessen on, 14n17; photographic images in, 181, 186; photograph of Whitman in, 1–2, 3, 5, 12–13, 210; and “Pictures” notebook fragment, 54; preface of, 10; publication of, 44; review of, by Whitman, 1, 5, 11–12, 181; revisions of, 181 “Lecture on the Times” (Emerson), 13–14, 74–75, 137 Lester, C. Edwards, 93–94 Library of America editions, 160n25, 161 Library of Congress, 41; American Memory project, 21, 41, 203, 220–25 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The, 133n3, 160, 163n28 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 43 Light Writing and Life Writing (Adams), 4 Lincoln, Abraham, 183, 197–98 Literary technology, 100–101 Loeffelholz, Mary, 60n50 Lopez, Michael, 69 Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Voss), 168n37 “Man Thinking” (Emerson), 155 Master Plots (Gardner), 167 Matthiessen, F. O., 6, 7, 13–14, 44, 59 McDowell, Deborah, 174–75, 178–79 McFeely, William S., 133n3 McGann, Jerome, 217, 219 McKibben, Bill, 124–25 McQuire, Scott, 143, 168 Mediating image, 82 Mediation: autobiography as literary mediation, 45–52; and immediacy of photography, 32–33, 52, 109, 117, 118, 136, 153n20; juxtaposition of photographic and autobiographical mediation, 1–9; meaning of verb mediate, 14; Peters on, 9–11, 52, 222; photography’s process of “unmediated mediation,” 106; and photonymy, 15, 26, 32–34, 49; Thoreau on, 109–10 Mediums, 84–85n19 “Mediums” (Whitman), 9 “Memoirs” (Franklin), 43–44, 51 Memoranda during the War (Whitman), 186–87, 192–95 “Memory” (Emerson), 86–87, 211 Metaphors: autobiography as metaphors of self, 46–47; daguerrean, 82–86, 91, 170–71, 172; in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, 162; in Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,”

Index 170–71, 172; Gilmore on autobiography and, 50, 52; metonymy versus, 14–16, 53; mirror metaphor in Emerson’s “Memory,” 86–87; mirror-ofnature metaphor, 82, 84; “mirror with a memory” metaphor of photography, 27–29, 44, 46, 212; Mitchell on dead metaphors, 56, 57; of photographic product, 40; of photography generally, 104; refracted-mirror metaphor of autobiography, 47–48; self-portrait as metaphor of autobiography, 162; Talbot’s eye of camera metaphor, 116, 117–18; Whitman and metaphor of camera, 183n3; Whitman’s use of visual metaphors, 188–89 Metapictures, 82n16 “Method of Nature, The” (Emerson), 67–68 Metonymy: autobiographical, 16, 49–57; and digital technology, 218–19; and Douglass’s interest in photography, 157–59; Emerson on, 55, 91–92, 95; feminists on, 60n50; of language, 118; metaphor versus, 14–16, 53; photography as metonymic medium, 14–16, 31–33, 50, 53–54, 101, 110, 117, 183, 184, 217–18; and Thoreau’s “writing nature,” 100, 102, 112; in Whitman’s poetry, 53–55, 182. See also Photonymy Miller, Nancy, 59 “Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up, The” (Whitman), 194–98 Mirror and the Lamp, The (Abrams), 82–83 Mirror metaphors: in Emerson’s “Memory,” 86–87; mirror-of-nature metaphor by Emerson, 82, 84; “mirror with a memory” metaphor of photography, 27–29, 44, 46, 212; refractedmirror metaphor of autobiography, 47–48. See also Metaphors Mirror-of-nature metaphor, 82, 84 Mirror Talk (Egan), 47–48, 50 “Mirror with a memory” metaphor of photography, 27–29, 44, 212 Mitchell, William: The Reconfigured Eye by, 219 Mitchell, W. J. T.: on abolitionism, 164; on dead metaphors, 56, 57; on digital technology, 219, 220, 221; on hypericons, 56; on iconology, 16, 155; Iconology by, 56, 82n16, 155; on idea of imagery, 155; on images versus text,

Index 56, 157; on metapictures, 82n16; Picture Theory by 82n16 Moral Choices (Walker), 173–74 Morris, Wright, 42–43 Morse, Samuel, 12, 25 Morton, Samuel, 148, 177 Movies. See Film (cinema) Museum Studies, 135 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass): compared with his Narrative, 162, 163–64; compared with Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 163n28; critics on generally, 163n28; Dorsey on metaphor in, 162; on Douglass’s mother, 171–75, 178–79, 218; Editor’s Preface of, 165; frontispiece of, 134, 160–61, 163, 165, 168–69, 182; introduction to, 132n1, 160–61, 175–76; on pass-words, 179; and Prichard image, 173–76, 178–79; publication date of, 44, 130; on reading face of slave, 179–80; signature of frontispiece in, 160, 161; and textual freedom, 163–64; verbal and visual literacy of generally, 20, 135–36 Myerson, Joel, 203n25 “My Picture-Gallery” (Whitman), 53–54, 55 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: compared with My Bondage and My Freedom, 162, 163–64; on Douglass’s mother, 171; on escape from slavery, 180; frontispiece of, 133, 160, 169; Garrison’s preface to, 165; on literacy of Douglass, 132; publication date of, 130–31; on slave in form, 146; visual literacy of, 20; on whipping of Aunt Hester, 174 “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” (Peabody), 164–65 Nature: Douglass on, 156–57; Emerson on, 67–69, 71–72, 80–83; mirror-ofnature metaphor, 82, 84; Thoreau on nature’s chemistry and mechanics as ongoing process, 126n33, 159; Thoreau on photography as amanuensis of, 103–10; and Thoreau on power to fade, 126–27; Thoreau on traces of, 126, 129, 218, 225; Thoreau’s photographic register of, 19, 96–110, 114, 119–29, 218; Whitman on, 200–203 “Nature of Slavery, The” (Douglass), 130 Negative: Emerson on, 94; Holmes on, 202, 213; photographic, 30–31, 37, 87,

245 140–41, 199, 213, 215; Talbot’s negative-positive process of photography, 37, 105, 202; and Whitman’s Specimen Days, 201–3, 208 Newhall, Beaumont, 37n18 New York Independent, 167 New York Leader, 190–91 Niagara Falls, 211–13 Niepce, Joseph-Nicéphore, 85, 122–23 “Night Battle, over A Week Since, A” (Whitman), 186 Nott, J. C., 148, 150–52, 175–76 O’Connor, William D., 201 “Old Marlborough Road, The” (Gleason), 121 Olney, James, 46, 52, 164, 165 On Heroes (Carlyle), 84 Orvell, Miles, 4n3, 183n3, 205 O’Sullivan, T. H., 196 Otherness: and autobiography, 48–49, 58–59; and photography, 29, 33, 49, 147; of race, 147 “Our Composite Nationality” (Douglass), 176n44 Painting: Bryson on, 70; photography compared with, 30, 39, 65, 72, 81, 83, 90, 108, 127 Paradox of photography, 123–24, 128 Peabody, Ephraim, 164–65 Peirce, C. S., 15, 32 “Pencil of Nature, The” (Willis), 68 Pencil of Nature (Talbot), 16, 19, 28, 68, 102, 106–8, 114–18, 124–25, 128–29 Peters, John Durham, 9–11, 14, 15, 52, 64, 222 Phillips, Wendell, 132 Photochemistry: Barthes on painting versus, 25, 31, 102, 108; Daguerre’s process versus negative-positive process of photography, 37–38; and Emerson’s simile “like iodine to light,” 85; Holmes on, 31, 35–37; and instability and impermanence of photographic image, 123–26; and light’s chemical activity, 122–23; Root on, 90; and Talbot, 15n18, 102, 107–8, 124; Talbot on accidents of photographic impressions, 125, 129; and Thoreau, 108–9, 122 Photofinishing industry, 38 Photographic anekphrasis, 133–34, 135, 179 Photographic intimacy, 64, 140, 142

246 Photographic meaning, 53–54, 153 Photographic memory, 27–28, 56, 57 Photographic register: definition of, 97; and nature’s chemistry and mechanics as ongoing process, 126n33; and nature’s power to fade, 126–27; and Talbot compared with Thoreau, 102–11, 114–19; Thoreau on analogy of writing and photography, 109–14, 118, 120; and Thoreau on photography as nature’s amanuensis, 103–10; and Thoreau on scientific versus imaginative, 127–28; in Thoreau’s writing, 19, 96–129 Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Gardner): advertisement for, 194n17; “Dedication of Monument on Bull Run Battle-Field” in, 197n20; “Field Where General Reynolds Fell” in, 196n19; “A Harvest of Death” in, 195–96; metonymy and metaphor in generally, 16; as “strange analogy” for Civil War, 189; Trachtenberg on, 193–94; and Whitman’s Specimen Days, 21, 185, 193–97 Photography: amateur, 34–35; autobiographical implications of, 17–18, 23–40; autobiography with photographs generally, 48–49; coinage and origin of term, 33, 104, 123n28; as communication media, 9, 14; convulsiveness of tension between process and product of, 185–86; and darkroom, 29, 38, 90, 117, 120, 207; democratic potential of, 138–39, 142–43; and Dickinson, 60; and digital technology, 2, 8, 22, 41–42, 220–25; film compared with, 89; as fine art, 26, 38–40, 87–91, 166; first photograph, 123; halftone process for, 207; instability and impermanence of, 123–26; invention of, 3–4, 12, 15, 16, 23, 43, 85, 95, 105–8, 123, 137, 138; juxtaposition of photographic and autobiographical mediation, 1–9, 58–61; as metonymic medium, 14–16, 31–33, 50, 53–54, 101, 110, 117, 183, 184, 217–18; names for, 32–33, 39; negative-positive process of, 37, 87, 105, 202; and negatives, 30–31, 37, 87, 140–41, 199, 213, 215; and otherness, 29, 33, 49, 147; painting compared with, 30, 39, 65, 72, 81, 83, 90, 108, 127; paradox of, 123–24, 128; and photographer as intermedium, 40; and photographic implications of

Index autobiography, 41–55; and photographic meaning, 53–54, 153; processing of photographic films and prints, 38, 90, 207; products and processes of, 14, 29–31, 37, 87; spirit photography, 84–85n19; strangeness of photographs, 33–37; and subjectivity in objective form, 157–58; trick photography, 203–5; Victorian art photography, 205; writing compared with, 100–101, 104, 109–10. See also Daguerreotypes; Immediacy of photography; Indexicality of photography; Photochemistry; Portraiture; Reproducibility; and specific photographers and writers on photography Photonymy: definition and description of, 15, 26, 32–34, 55; and Holmes, 26–31, 33–38, 46; and mediation, 15, 26, 32–34, 49; multifaceted nature of, 15–16; and Root on photography as fine art, 38–40, 87–91; and strangeness of photographs, 33–37 Physiognomy of Negroes, 145–54 Picture of Slavery (Bourne), 164, 165 “Pictures and Progress” speech (Douglass), 20, 132–33, 135–39, 141–46, 149, 152–59, 161, 162, 169, 171, 179, 181 Picture Theory (Mitchell), 82n16 Picturing Ourselves (Rugg), 4 Plato, 56 Poe, Edgar Allan, 71, 75 “Poet, The” (Emerson), 79–80 “Poetry and the Imagination” (Emerson), 55, 80, 91 Poets, 79–84, 214. See also Whitman, Walt; and other poets Porter, Eliot, 97n1 Portraiture: ambivalence and repressive inverse of, 147–49, 153; Cornelius’s self-portrait, 23–26, 41–42, 45, 61, 74, 168–69, 217; counterfeit presentment of, 153–54; Daguerre on photographic portraits, 36; democratization of, 138–39, 142–43; of Douglass, 20, 133–35, 160–63, 165, 168–69, 182; Douglass on negative implications of cheapness and universality of photographic portraiture, 142–45; Douglass on stern serenity of photographic processes, 142–45, 153, 168, 169; of Emerson, 62–64, 66; Emerson on photographic unhandsomeness, 65–66, 144, 168; Emerson on sitting for daguerreotype portrait, 65–66, 144,

Index 145; of family members, 141–42; Lincoln’s portraits, 197–98; Root on facial expression in, 87–91; of Thoreau, 97–98; of Whitman, 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12–13, 21, 182, 184, 198, 203–10; Zealy daguerreotypes, 148–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 175 Price, Ken, 223 Prichard, J. C., 173–76, 178–79 Prichard’s Natural History of Man, 173–76, 178–79 Process pictures, 207, 208, 214, 217, 221 Process reproduction, 222, 223 Quarterly Review, 166 Race: Agassiz on, 148–49; and distinctive features of Negro physiognomy, 145–54; Douglass on, 149–50; mixed races or composite nature of civilization, 176, 179; and Prichard image in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, 175–76, 178–79; racial iconography for American character, 177–78; and Zealy daguerreotypes, 148–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 175. See also Ethnology; Slavery Reading American Photographs (Trachtenberg), 193–94 “Real War Will Never Get in the Books, The” (Whitman), 187, 200 Reconfigured Eye, The (Mitchell), 219 Refracted-mirror metaphor of autobiography, 47–48 Remediation, 8n9, 51–52, 106, 122 Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin), 8n9, 51–52, 219 Representation: counterfeit presentment of portraits, 153–54; Daguerre and Talbot on representational status of photographic images, 8; and reproducibility of photography, 101, 124; and reproducing photography, 170; specimen representation of Whitman’s Civil War memoranda, 188–89; and subjectivity in objective form, 157–58; Trachtenberg on representational estrangement of photography, 18, 25, 36–37. See also Self-representation Representative Men (Emerson), 7, 18–19, 44, 65, 80–84, 88, 92–95, 142 Representativeness: and Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 88, 93–94; Douglass as representative man, 132, 160–61; Emerson on, 6–7, 18–19, 60,

247 65, 76, 81–84, 88, 92–93, 214; Trachtenberg on representational estrangement of photography, 18, 25, 36–37 Reproducibility: and Batchen on digital imaging, 221n2; Benjamin on, 222, 223; as characteristic of photography, 17, 41, 50, 55; and Douglass, 163, 168, 170; Emerson on, 18, 65, 78, 82, 83, 85, 91; Holmes on, 140, 141; and negatives, 140–41, 199; and representation, 101, 124; Roof on errant metonymy of photographic reproducibility, 16, 33, 50, 117–18, 183; and Root, 90; of Shakespeare’s images, 18, 65, 82, 91; of slave narratives, 165; Talbot on, 19, 124, 125, 202; and Whitman’s process pictures, 214, 221 Reproducing photography, 170 Reynolds, David S., 182 Richardson, Robert, 99, 111n20, 127 Ripley, Peter, 133n3 Romanticism, 10, 40, 51, 64, 82–83 Roof, Judith, 15, 16, 33, 50, 117–18 Root, Marcus: The Camera and the Pencil by, 19, 38–39, 87–91, 153n20; on counterfeit presentment of portraits, 153n20; on facial expression, 87–91; and heliography, 39–40, 52; on photochemistry, 90; as photographic writer generally, 16; on photograph’s expression, 87–91; on photography as fine art, 26, 38–40, 87–91; and reading of American subjectivity into surfaces of photographic forms, 157; Sekula on, 147 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47 Rugg, Linda Haverty, 4, 17n20, 48–49 Ruskin, John, 127 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 73–74, 172 Sarony, Napoleon, 205 Sayre, Robert, 5, 43–44 “Scene in a Library, A” (Talbot), 114–18 Scenes in a Library (Armstrong), 116, 116–17n23 Schirmeister, Pamela, 84 Scientific versus imaginative, 127–28 “Seeing Niagara to Advantage” (Whitman), 211–13 Sekula, Allan, 14, 53–54, 101, 110, 147, 153 Self-representation: Daguerre and Talbot on photograph as, 15, 28; definition of, 17; Douglass on stern serenity of photographic processes, 142–45, 153, 168, 169; Rugg on self-image, 17n20;

248 verbal and visual connotations of, 162. See also Autobiography Shakespeare, William, 65, 80–86, 91, 218 Sierra Club, 96, 97n1 Silver Sunbeam, The (Towler), 35, 38 Slave narratives, 7, 130–31, 160, 164–65, 167, 172. See also Douglass, Frederick; Slavery Slavery: and distinctive features of Negro physiognomy, 145–54; Douglass on, 20, 59, 130, 135–36, 150, 158–59; Douglass on reading face of slave, 179–80; in Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” 170–71, 172; photographs and graphic picture of, 20, 165–68; proslavery ethnology, 148–54; scars on slave’s body, 166–68, 174–75; Thoreau on, 130–31; violence against slave women, 174–75; and Zealy daguerreotypes, 148–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 175. See also Abolitionism; Slave narratives Smith, James M’Cune, 132n1, 160, 175–76 Smith, Martha Nell, 224n8 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 17, 146–47 “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” (Talbot), 125 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 7 Sontag, Susan, 31 Speaking into the Air (Peters), 9 Specimen Days (Whitman): as autobiography, 7, 184–85, 199–200, 215–16; binding of, 209; butterfly portrait of Whitman in, 203–10, 220, 221; on Civil War, 21, 185–89, 192–93, 195, 213; confusion and incompleteness of, 184–85, 210, 216; critics on, 185n6; ending of, 210; flashes of light in, 210–13, 215; and Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 21, 185, 193–97; “Interregnum Paragraph” in, 200, 203; on invalidism of Whitman, 199–200; on light clinging to written lines of, 210; on nature, 200–203; negative nature of, 201–3; on Niagara Falls, 211–13; as photobiography, 210–13, 215–16; photographs of Whitman’s parents in, 203n25; publication date of, 184; review of, 210; “Seeing Niagara to Advantage” in, 211–13; “Straw-Color’d and Other Psyches” in, 203 Spiritualism, 84–85n19, 95 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 168n37

Index Stereographs, 29, 78. See also Photography “Stereoscope and the Stereograph, The” (Holmes), 27–31, 37, 138, 141, 212 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 167, 172, 173 “Straw-Color’d and Other Psyches” (Whitman), 203 Sundquist, Eric, 163n28 “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture” (Holmes), 34 “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic” (Emerson), 92–95 Sweet, Timothy, 67, 195 Talbot, William Henry Fox: on accidents of photographic impressions, 125, 129, 140; on amphitype, 33, 55; Barthes compared with, 116–17n23; and eye of camera metaphor, 116, 117–18; Gardner compared with, 196; invention of photography by, 42, 68, 85, 102, 105–8; library of, 114–18; and negativepositive process of photography, 37, 105, 202; Pencil of Nature by, 16, 19, 28, 68, 102, 106–8, 114–18, 124–25, 128–29; and photochemistry, 15n18, 102, 107–8, 124; photogram of leaf by, 124–25; on photograph as curious self-representation, 15, 28; on photography as medium, 30; on representational status of photographic images, 3, 124; on reproducibility of photographic images, 19, 124, 125, 202; “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” by, 125; Thoreau compared with, 102–11, 114–19, 122, 126, 128–29 Taylor, W. Curtis, 203 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 78 Thayer, William Roscoe, 203–4 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 223 Thoreau, Henry David: on analogy of writing and photography, 109–14, 118, 120; on daguerreotype, 103, 110–11, 114, 119; on De Quincey, 111–12; digital resources on, 220; Emerson’s eulogy of, 96, 97, 101–2; escape to Walden Pond by, 131; journals of, 7, 97, 100, 102, 103, 110–14, 119, 126n33, 127, 129; on journal writing to record spontaneous life and thought, 118–19; and literary technology, 100–101; and metonymy of “writing nature,” 100, 102, 112; Morris on, 43; and natural

Index science, 102; on nature’s chemistry and mechanics as ongoing process, 126n33, 159; on nature’s power to fade, 126–27; overview of, 19; and photographic chemistry, 108–9; photographic register in writing by, 19, 96–129; photograph of, 97–98; and photographs of Concord, 97–99, 121; on photography, 19, 103–14, 118, 120, 127–29, 218; on photography as nature’s amanuensis, 103–10; Richardson’s biography of, 99; on scientific versus imaginative, 127–28; on slavery, 130–31; on suggestiveness of writing, 112–13; Talbot compared with, 102–11, 114–19, 122, 126, 128–29; on traces of nature, 126, 129, 218, 225; on “two views of the same,” 102, 119–20; on winter vision in swamp, 114, 119; on writing’s impression, 111–13 —works: Walden, 7, 19, 44, 99, 110, 120, 124–25, 128, 130, 131; “Walking,” 120–22, 125–26; The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 97–98 Thoreau Country, 97n1 “Thoreau” (Emerson), 96 Thoreau’s Walden: A Photographic Register, 97n1 Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory (Morris), 42–43 Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Eakin), 47, 48, 50 Towler, John, 35, 38 Trachtenberg, Alan: on Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 94; on Civil War photographs, 193–94, 196; on Cornelius daguerreotype, 25; on daguerreotypes, 191; on photography as medium of language, 104; on popular republican ideology of the image, 71; on representational estrangement of photography, 18, 25, 36–37; on technical reproduction of photography, 55; on Thoreau, 104, 109; on type, 152; on Whitman’s photograph, 5; on writers, 6, 17; on Zealy daguerreotypes, 149, 156 Transcendentalism, 7 Traubel, Horace, 8, 184, 198, 207 Tribute for the Negro, A, 149, 163 Trick photography, 203–5 Twain, Mark, 42, 43 Two Rivulets (Whitman), 207 Type: Douglass on, 150; Emerson on double meaning of, 81, 94–95; Tracht-

249 enberg on, 152; and Whitman’s butterfly portrait, 208 Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon), 150–51, 175–76 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 172 “Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier” (Whitman), 187 Victorian art photography, 205 “View from His Window at Le Gras” (Niepce), 123 Virga, Vincent, 41–42 Vision and Painting (Bryson), 70 Voss, Frederick S., 168n37 Wald, Priscilla, 163n28, 164, 175 Walden (Thoreau), 7, 19, 44, 99, 110, 120, 124–25, 128, 130, 131 Walker, Peter, 173–74 “Walking” (Thoreau), 120–22, 125–26 Wallis, Brian, 148 Walls, Laura Dassow, 100, 101, 102n6, 128 “Weather.—Does it Sympathize with These Times, The?” (Whitman), 189 Web sites. See Digital technology Wedgwood, Thomas, 107, 123 Werner, Marta, 60n49 Westerbeck, Colin, 134–35, 169n38 Wexler, Laura, 133, 179 Whitman, Walt: and autobiography’s metonymic subtext, 53–55, 217; butterfly portrait of, 203–10, 220, 221; in Civil War hospitals, 186, 188, 190–91; Civil War memoranda by, 21, 184–99, 200, 216; and Civil War photography, 193n16; on convulsiveness, 192–96, 199, 200, 202, 216, 217, 218; on daguerreotypes, 191, 214; on development, 213–15; digital resources on, 21–22, 41, 203, 220–25; on future of America, 213–14; on “half-formed pictures,” 11–13; invalidism of, 199–200; on Lincoln’s portrait, 183, 197–98; and metaphor of camera, 183n3; metonymy in poetry by, 53–55, 182; Morris on, 42, 43; on nature, 200–203; and negative nature of Specimen Days, 201–3, 208; notebooks of, 220, 223–24; overview of, 21; and photographic confusion, 184; photographic images in works by, 181–83, 184, 186, 207; on photographing a tempest, 189, 199, 216; photographs of, 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12–13, 21, 182, 184, 198, 203–10; and

250 photography, 13, 14n17, 21, 53–54, 183–86; on photography’s phantom concourse, 190–91; “Pictures” notebook fragment by, 54; on Plumbe’s daguerreotype gallery in New York City, 191; on process picture, 207, 208, 214, 217, 221; review of Leaves of Grass by, 1, 5, 11–12, 181; and self-estrangement of proliferation of photographic images, 7–8; and specimen representation, 188–90; and speculative vision of photography, 190–91; on suggestiveness of his writing, 216, 217; at Timber Creek, 200–201, 209; visual metaphors used by, 188–89 —works: “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” 56–57, 182, 215, 216; “City Photographs,” 190–91, 201; Collected Writings, 224; Complete Poems and Prose, 181–82, 205–7; “Democratic Vistas,” 213–14, 216; Leaves of Grass, 1–2, 10, 12–13, 44, 54, 181, 209, 210; “Mediums,” 9; “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” 194–98; “My Picture-Gallery,” 53–54, 55; New York Leader articles, 190–91; “A Night Battle, over A Week Since,” 186; “The Real War Will Never Get in the

Index Books,” 187, 200; “Song of Myself,” 7; Specimen Days, 7, 21, 184–89, 192–93, 195, 199–213, 215–16; Two Rivulets, 207; “Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier,” 187; Memoranda during the War, 186–87, 192–95; “The Weather.— Does it Sympathize with These Times?” 189 Whitman Archive, 22, 220, 223–24 Willis, N. P., 68 Wood, Marcus, 167 Wordsworth, William, 83 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 222 World Viewed, The (Cavell), 79 World Wide Web. See Digital technology Writing: analogy of photography and, 100–101, 104, 109–14, 118, 120; Thoreau on suggestiveness of, 112–13; and Thoreau on “two views of the same,” 102, 119–20. See also Autobiography; and specific authors Writings of Henry David Thoreau, The, 97–98, 121 Zealy, J. T., 148, 155 Zealy daguerreotypes, 148–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 175