During the mid-nineteenth century, American commentators
pronounced that new technological innovations in transportation
and communications represented nothing less than the
“annihilation of space and time.” On steamships
and railroads, travelers could now cross vast distances
in days rather than weeks. With the telegraph, Americans
could communicate across the continent with astounding
speed. Though rarely mentioned in the same breath, the
new medium of photography similarly transformed American
life: it brought the distant near. With photographs,
Americans could become familiar with far-off places.
Because photography allowed a glimpse of the past in
new and utterly novel ways, it altered the perception
of familiar places and things. Suddenly, one could move
away from home but preserve a photograph of a birthplace,
study the likeness of a dead relative, or see what a
parent had looked like as a child. Photography let Americans
feel a more immediate connection to people and places
removed by geographical distance and time.
Photography came to the United States in the fall of
1839, when word arrived from France of Louis Jacques
Mandé Daguerre’s marvelous invention, by
which nature herself seemed to inscribe her own image
on a sensitized sheet of silver-plated copper. Men of
science embraced the new technology and quickly improved
upon the process, reducing exposure time so that the
camera could capture not just immobile buildings, but
portraits of human subjects. And indeed, more than 95%
of American daguerreotypes – the prevailing form
of photography in this country from 1839 until the late
1850s – were portraits. Since the daguerreotype
process did not involve a negative, each daguerreotype
was a unique image (much like an instant camera or Polaroid
picture). The daguerreotype’s singularity, coupled
with its small size and distinctive surface glare, made
it inherently ill-suited to become a medium of mass
communication or a tool for the documentation of places
and events. But it served beautifully as a new, more
democratic form of portraiture. In 1853, at the peak
of the daguerreotype’s popularity, Americans produced
some three million daguerreotypes. Photographic portraits
had become commonplace objects of middle-class life.
Photographic technologies evolved rapidly in the mid-nineteenth
century, each new advance allowing photography to be
put to new uses. In 1856, the development of a method
for making tintypes, unique images on inexpensive metal
plates, brought down the price of photographs and resulted
in a sturdy sort of image that could be shipped through
the mail. More significantly, the increasing use of
the “wet-plate” negative process in the
late 1850s gave photographers a way to make glass negatives
from which they could print a theoretically unlimited
number of positive prints on paper. This process made
it more profitable for photographers to venture far
from home to make a photographic image. From a single
negative of Yosemite or a Civil War battlefield, a cameraman
could make a great many prints to sell to the general
public. Nonetheless, the wet-plate negative process
remained slow and tedious, requiring photographers to
sensitize their glass plates immediately before exposure.
Not until the emergence of a dry-plate technology in
the early 1880s did large numbers of amateur photographers
enter the field. With the invention of the Kodak camera
in 1888, photography became a truly popular pastime.
Lured by the slogan, “You push the button and
we’ll do the rest,” consumers flocked to
George Eastman’s camera with the flexible roll
of film.
Photography captured many of the signal scenes of American
life beginning in 1840, such as the Gold Rush, the explosive
growth of San Francisco, the construction of the transcontinental
railroads, the plantations of the ante-bellum South,
and the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. Photographers
documented the growth of the East’s great urban
centers and the exploration of the Rocky Mountain West,
and recorded the faces of presidents and soldiers, actors
and immigrants. But photographs did not simply capture
neutral records of these people, places and things;
they helped inscribe them with meaning. Often distributed
in albums or in sets with descriptive titles or explanatory
captions, photographs could weave complicated narratives
about their subjects. The photographs of the West published
by the federal surveying teams in the 1860s and 70s,
for example, helped argue for the beneficence of westward
expansion. The Civil War photographs in Alexander Gardner’s
Photographic Sketch Book reiterated the righteousness
of the Union cause. The many portraits of western Indians
published in the 1870s and 80s subtly endorsed the idea
of a vanishing race.
Most historians (and the textbooks they write) use photographs
primarily as illustrations, to reiterate ideas
developed from the analysis of literary evidence. But
we ought to be mindful of photographs not just as images,
but as primary source artifacts in and of themselves.
To do justice to nineteenth-century photographs and
explore their rich potential as historical sources,
we need to ask questions about the photographers, about
the photographs as physical objects, and about the ways
in which we encounter them across the divide of historical
time.
Photographs, like literary documents, are not to be
taken at face value. Despite their seeming realism,
they are actually constructions of the human imagination,
made by individuals with particular cultural or economic
ambitions. Like a memoir or a letter, a photograph may
describe events, but it does so through the lens of
the recorder’s own experience. No photograph can
fully convey the complexity of a single unfolding event
or the experience of being in a particular place. It
necessarily reflects the photographer’s choices
about what to photograph and when. Why, we must ask,
did a photographer make a particular image, and for
whom? Who paid for the picture? How did the available
technology shape or limit what the photographer could
produce? As observers with particular political, social,
and moral perspectives, photographers inevitably assess
and judge what they see. Their work is no more to be
embraced uncritically than the work of letter writers,
memoirists, or journalists.
The physical form of the image, as much as its content,
can be useful to historians, conveying information about
the picture’s likely audience and intended uses.
The digitized versions of photographs that float around
the internet today mute the distinctive features of
the originals. But just as a personal letter differs
in important ways from other literary documents such
as newspaper articles or government papers, so too do
different kinds of photographs. A one-of-a-kind daguerreotype
portrait likely stayed in the family that paid for it.
A stereographic view of Yellowstone would have been
widely reproduced and sold for a modest cost. A deluxe
album of Civil War views would have been produced in
small numbers, marketed at considerable cost, and seen
by relatively few.
It is useful to think of photographs as primary source
documents that we can encounter in history
and through history. To consider the photograph
in history, we must ask about the circumstances
of its making, the photographer’s intent, the
public function of the picture, and the ways in which
contemporary audiences understood it. Reinserted into
the world of its production, the photograph becomes
more than the visual record of a material fact. It becomes
a tool for understanding larger issues about patronage,
civic boosterism, and national values. To consider the
photograph through history, however, without
the ties that once bound it to a particular historical
moment, we need to give attention to the picture’s
fate across time. We can learn something by asking why
one picture got relegated to the attic while another
appeared as a magazine illustration, why one album got
preserved in an archive while another got broken apart
and sold. And we must always be aware of how our own
experiences make it impossible for us to understand
nineteenth-century photographs precisely as their original
viewers did. For one thing, we know what comes next.
To put the point in a modern context, we might argue
that it is impossible to see a 1995 photograph of the
New York City skyline precisely as a viewer did then,
because we cannot erase from our memory the knowledge
that those twin towers will meet a tragic end.
Photographs spark the historic imagination. They give
us a powerful way to visualize the past, with all of
its startling similarities and unexpected differences,
and they inevitably spark our human empathy. To gaze
into the eyes of a sitter who sat before a camera 150
years ago is to recognize the human bonds that connect
us to our predecessors. That empathy for the past lies
at the heart of every historical inquiry.
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