Photography

PHOTOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW

Richard C. Keenan

WAR PHOTOGRAPHY

Christina Adkins

CIVILIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Christina Adkins

Photography: An Overview

The American Civil War was the first war to be extensively documented by photography. The photographic process was still in its infancy in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; by modern standards it was a cumbersome and primitive process. With the advent of the war, photography, which had been largely limited to portraiture and the visual recording of landmarks, both natural and humanly constructed, took a new direction and discovered a new purpose. It recorded history with a graphic reality unrealized in any written description; it largely dispelled the romantic imagery of equestrian prowess, flashing sabers, and desperate but heroic stands by larger-than-life figures—images derived from paintings and illustrations that had been the more commonly depicted views of war before the photograph. Photography presented to the public the devastation of war and its destructive aftermath in all their grim reality. Although the Civil War was not definitively documented on film, there were approximately one million photographs taken between 1860 and 1865, and there were more than 3,000 photographers actively practicing their profession in the United States (Schwarz 2000, p. 1515).

Among these photographers was a relatively small group who worked as the first photographers of the devastations of war. The most notable members of the group were Alexander Gardner (1821–1882), Timothy H. O'Sullivan (c. 1840–1882), and James F. Gibson (b. 1828), all of whom began their careers working for Mathew Brady (1823–1896), an enterprising producer of daguerreotypes whose name became all but synonymous with Civil War photography.

Popular American photography began in the 1840s with the daguerreotype, a process for reproducing images on a light-sensitive, silver-coated metal sheet. The process, patented in 1839, had been developed by Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), a French artist and chemist. There was one image produced with each sitting, and the subject was required to hold completely still for a period of time that could last up to a full sixty seconds in order to effect the proper exposure. These proto-photographs were generally kept in decorative boxes designed to protect the product. Daguerreotype studios flourished in New York City in the 1840s, and one of the more successful of these studios was owned by the enterprising Mathew Brady.

Brady's Early Work

Brady, the son of Irish immigrants, began as an art student who also made watch and instrument cases, including cases for daguerreotypes, which awakened his interest in this new technology. He took lessons in the daguerreotype method from Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872), an art instructor and portrait painter who learned the process from its inventor, Louis Daguerre (Morse is better known to posterity as the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and the Morse code).

Brady enjoyed great success with daguerreotypes, and in 1842 opened his own studio and portrait gallery in New York. In 1849 he opened a second gallery in Washington, DC In 1854 he opened an additional gallery in New York. He became world-renowned, winning prizes for his work at the 1851 World Exposition in London and the 1853 World's Fair in New York. Brady photographed every president of the United States from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley, with the exception of William Henry Harrison, who died in 1841 after a little more than a month in office. Brady's best-known presidential photographs are those of Abraham Lincoln, most notably the one that for many years appeared on the American five-dollar bill.

In the 1850s Brady began to turn his attention from the daguerreotype to a new method of photography known as the wet plate process, developed by an Englishman named Frederick Scott Archer. This process used a mixture of nitrocellulose dissolved in acetone called collodion. The collodion was mixed with additional chemicals, applied to a carefully cleaned glass plate, and allowed to stand until it formed a glutinous, jelly-like consistency. The plate was then immersed in liquid silver nitrate in a darkroom, creating sensitivity to light in the gelatinous collodion that would last only as long as the plate remained wet. The wet plate was then placed in an opaque holder and subsequently transferred to the focused and positioned camera, with the subject already in place for the exposure. After exposure, the collodion plate was removed from the camera, again in its opaque holder, and returned to the darkroom, where it was placed in a bath of chemical developer followed by a bath of fixer, usually potassium cyanide. The plate was then washed in water, dried, and given a protective coat of light varnish. The wet plate process was less expensive and gave a sharper image with a greater contrast on the gray scale, unlike the darker quality of the daguerreotype. Moreover, the wet plate process produced a negative from which the photographer could make additional positive photographs in the darkroom.

With the addition of the wet plate process, Brady's studios went on to even greater success. Brady placed particular emphasis on large portraits, some as large as 17 by 21 inches, which were called "Brady Imperials." An Imperial could be carefully retouched with paint or ink to create an impressive lifelike portrait that would sell for fifty to a hundred dollars on average. Brady favored the Imperials, both for the money they brought to the studio and, in particular, for their artistic prestige.

Cartes de visite and the Civil War

Brady's assistant, later the manager of his Washington, DC, studio, Alexander Gardner, wanted to place greater emphasis on the carte de visite, a smaller photograph (2 1/2 x 4 inches) printed on thin cardboard. This process had first been developed by a Frenchman, André Disdéri, who patented his concept in 1854. His process allowed eight negatives to be taken on an 8 x 10 glass plate. The carte de visite, a descendant of the Victorian calling card, from which it derives its name, was extremely popular with the public. The paper print photograph could also be mounted on a slightly larger and heavier piece of card stock with a sentiment (usually a poem or quotation) printed below. The photograph might be a famous landmark or person, or a family member. During the Civil War, thousands of proud young soldiers in new uniforms, on duty and far from home, would stand in line at the photographer's wagon found at almost every encampment to have a carte de visite taken. It would then be mailed home, where it would be placed in the family album for posterity.

The carte de visite also went the other way, and many a soldier carried with him a small likeness of his wife, children, mother or sweetheart. Brady was initially resistant to making these mementos and wanted to concentrate more of the studio's time on the Imperial portrait, with its greater immediate profit and prestige. Gardner, an astute businessman as well as a talented photographer, saw greater profit in the volume that cartes de visite, which sold individually for between ten and twenty cents, would bring. Using existent equipment, Gardner improvised a four-lens camera that could make four images on one glass plate, quadrupling the studio's volume of production of the small photographs. At Gardner's urging, Brady entered into an agreement with the Anthony Brothers, who operated the largest photographic supply company in the country, to produce and distribute the small photographs. The Brady studios would supply the negatives and in return would receive a substantial royalty from the sales (Sullivan 2004, pp. 26–27).

Perhaps the most poignant story concerning the carte de visite is that of an unknown soldier, a sergeant who served with the 154th New York Volunteer Regiment. On July 1, the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, the sergeant was mortally wounded and died before he was able to reach the safety of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. After the battle, his body was found, but without identification. In his hand was an ambrotype photograph of three small children. The young woman who found the body gave the photograph to her father, the owner of a local tavern. The tavern keeper displayed the photograph, and it became a curiosity and conversation piece.

Some months later, in November 1863, Dr. John Francis Bourns, a Philadelphia physician who had come to the battlefield hospital to lend assistance to the sick and wounded, saw the photograph and became intrigued with the case of this unknown soldier. After first locating and marking the grave where the sergeant was buried, he set out to identify and locate the children. Bourns had the photograph of the children duplicated as a carte de visite. Because the format was not expensive, he made multiple copies and circulated them widely. On October 19, 1863, the Philadelphia Inquirer carried the story, and other newspapers throughout the Northeast gave it widespread distribution. Finally, in Portville, New York, Mrs. Philinda Humiston responded to the story. She was the wife of Sgt. Amos Humiston and the mother of eight-year old Franklin, six-year-old Alice, and four-year-old Frederick. She had sent the photograph to her husband months before but had not heard from him since the conclusion of the Gettysburg battle. Sgt. Humiston was thus conclusively identified. The public was greatly moved by the story, and Dr. Bourns sold hundreds of copies of the carte de visite with the poignant image of the orphan children. He donated the proceeds of the sales to Mrs. Humiston and her family (Dunkleman 1999, pp. 12–17).

Stereographs

Another photographic innovation that became extremely popular in the 1850s was the stereograph. The stereograph was a set of photographs (paper prints from glass negatives) printed side by side, with one print having a slightly different, all but indiscernible depth of field, taken by a double-lens specially designed camera. These dual photographs, placed side by side on cardboard, were viewed through a handheld binocular frame with a slight magnification. The view for the spectator was a single three-dimensional image. The stereograph remained a popular entertainment device in American homes into the early twentieth century. It brought to quiet domestic parlors not only the visual pleasures of faraway places with strange-sounding names never before seen, but also the destruction and devastation of the American Civil War.

The continuing demand for cartes de visite and stereographs greatly increased Brady's profits and reputation. In 1864 he opened a new and highly luxurious studio at Broadway and Tenth Street in New York City. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, one of the most popular periodicals of the time, waxed eloquent about the studio's "costly carpet…elegant and luxurious couches…and artistic gas fixtures." There was also a private entrance for ladies arriving in evening dress "to obviate the unpleasant necessity of passing, so attired, through the public gallery." The greatest experience of Brady's career came with the visit of the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, son of Queen Victoria, and heir to the British throne. The prince, later King Edward VII (1841–1910), was on a diplomatic visit to Canada and North America, the first member of the British royal family to visit the United States. Brady invited the prince and his entourage to visit the studio, and the prince readily accepted. He and others sat for individual and group portraits, and spent several hours touring the studio and viewing Brady's prized collection of photographs of prominent Americans. The New York Times reported that the royals "complimented Brady highly upon his proficiency and art" (Sullivan 2004, 28–29).

Brady at the peak of his career enjoyed his artistic recognition and high social standing, but he was not a man with a sound fiscal sense. He lived a life of luxury, traveled often, made some bad investments, and spared little or no expense for the equipment and interior decoration of his studios. In later years he lost everything, including a large collection of negatives held by the Anthony Brothers as security for the purchase of photographic supplies.

Battlefield Photography

The relatively new technology of photography and the American Civil War came together on July 21, 1861. Brady, among a handful of Washington photographers, followed the Federal Army to Manassas, Virginia, just south of the capital, where Union troops engaged the new Confederate Army near Bull Run Creek in the first land battle of the war. Initially Brady was motivated by the opportunity for business profit, but gradually he developed the idea of photographing the war as an important contribution to the new visual dimension of history presented by photography. This first experience, however, produced no known photographs whatever. The newly formed Confederate Army overwhelmed the Federal troops, and the engagement turned into a rout. Brady and other photographers had to hastily pack up their equipment (delicate and easily damaged in the great urgency) and toss it into darkroom wagons as they joined the hasty retreat of soldiers and civilian spectators back to Washington.

Brady's studios continued to be in the forefront of efforts to document the war in photographs, although Brady, afflicted with deteriorating eyesight, gradually took a less active part in on-site photography. Others, particularly Gardner and O'Sullivan, along with James Gibson, took many of the photographs that came to the public's attention as the work of "Mathew Brady Studios." This identification became a point of contention, particularly with Gardner, who resented not receiving credit for his work. Sometime in 1862 or 1863, he left Brady and opened his own studio in Washington with his brother James. Timothy O'Sullivan and others also left Brady and went to work for Gardner. Both Gardner and O'Sullivan went on to distinguish themselves in the annals of photography, receiving due recognition for their compositions. Gardner photographed the meeting between McClellan and President Lincoln, formally posed with military staff outside McClellan's tent, which is perhaps his best-known photograph, as well as much of the destruction of the city of Richmond. At the end of the war Gardner photographed the conspirators convicted in Lincoln's assassination and their subsequent execution. Another associate of Gardner's, George Barnard, followed General Sherman's Army on its march through Georgia and made memorable photographs of the stark devastation of the countryside and the destruction of Atlanta.

Gardner's and Gibson's photographs of the aftermath of the Antietam battlefield were the first graphic images of battlefield dead to reach the American public. The photographs could not be directly reproduced in newspapers because the half-tone process that enables such reproduction of photographs was not invented until the 1880s. Engravings, however, were made from the photographs, depicting such scenes as the Confederate dead who fell near the Burnside Bridge and along the fenced area known as Bloody Lane. The engravings were initially reproduced in Harper's Weekly, and the original photographs, displayed at Brady's New York studio, both horrified and fascinated the public, who came to see them in great numbers (Schwarz 2000, p. 1516).

A reporter for the New York Times visited the studio during the Antietam exhibit, and recognized a deeper significance and value that transcended the more lurid and sensational aspects of the exhibit. In the October 20, 1862 edition of the newspaper, the unidentified reporter wrote the following: "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it" (Frassanito 1978, p. 16). O'Sullivan's photographs of the Gettysburg battlefield, appearing in a later exhibit, produced a similar reaction—particularly the photograph of the bloated bodies of Federal dead lying in a field near the McPherson woods, titled "A Harvest of Death" (Schwarz 2000, p. 1446).

In addition to corpses on the battlefield, skeletonized buildings, and devastated countryside, photographers of the Civil War period recorded in both quantity and detail soldiers posing on captured breastworks and gun emplacements, regiments on parade or drilling in the fields, army encampments, and the formidable and growing ironclad navy. The only missing element is the actual combat. There are no photographs of armies moving into active combat or the explosions, caught at the moment of impact, that are such a distinctive part of war photography in later generations.

This omission had nothing to do with the courage or initiative of the photographers; it was the primary limitation of photography at the time. The exposure time for the wet plate process took approximately ten to thirty seconds, depending on the intensity of the light. Officers and enlisted men could hold such poses without difficulty, but horses, mules, and flying flags could be a problem. Any movement before the exposure was complete would produce a blur in the final image. The photographing of actual battle or combat action was not possible in the 1860s. To compensate for this limitation, photographers would often recreate a particular battlefield scene to enhance its dramatic effect, moving corpses, equipment and weapons into a variety of poses. A good example of this technique is the often-reproduced photograph taken by Alexander Gardner of a dead Confederate sharpshooter in the Devil's Den area of the battle of Gettysburg. William Frassanito, after a painstaking analysis of the photograph and of others taken in the same area, demonstrated conclusively that the body of the sharpshooter had been moved and rearranged, and a number of exposures had been taken of the various positions (Frassanito 1975, pp. 191–192).

Most of the Civil War photographs that have survived were taken by Northerners. Southern photographers were active in the beginning of the war, and were in fact the first Civil War photographers on record. The photographs of the Confederate general staff that appear most often in books about the war, along with other high-ranking officers in Southern uniforms, were taken by photographers in the South. Noted Southern photographers include Andrew Lytle of Baton Rouge and George S. Cook of Charleston, among others. As the Union blockade gradually but effectively reduced all commerce with the world outside the Confederacy only contraband goods were readily obtainable. Photographic supplies and necessary chemicals, including cameras and replacement parts, became increasingly scarce and were simply unavailable in the South by 1863.

By the end of the four-year conflict, several hundred thousand photographs had been taken; a large percentage of those were portraits. Mathew Brady's photographic collection consisted of some 6,000 negatives and photographs taken by his studio and those of other photographers, which he purchased during his lifetime. These photographs were acquired by the War Department in 1874 and are now stored in the National Archives. In addition, there are major collections in the Library of Congress and the Connecticut State Library in Hartford. Other substantial collections can be found in the Boston Public Library, Princeton University's Firestone Library, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunkelman, Mark H. Gettysburg's Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Frassanito, William A. Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

Frassanito, William A. Early Photography at Gettysburg. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1995.

Frassanito, William A. Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1975.

Schwarz, Angela. "Photography." In Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.

Sullivan, George. In the Wake of Battle: The Civil War Images of Mathew Brady. Munich and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2004.

Richard C. Keenan

War Photography

The Civil War was the first conflict to be extensively documented by photographers. Between 1860 and 1865, about one million photographs depicted some aspect of a nation at war (Sullivan 2004, p. 6). During this time, military photography radically altered the vision of battle held in America's popular imagination. In illustrated weeklies, popular histories, and children's textbooks, antebellum print culture produced scenes that celebrated and romanticized war with little acknowledgment of its attendant loss (Frassanito 1978, pp. 27–28). Though images of battlefield casualties constituted only a small portion of the photographs taken during the war, the pictures of the dead captured by such Civil War photographers as Mathew Brady (1823–1896) and his associates confronted the public with drastically different and haunting tableaus.

Though a few photographic images of war had been produced during the Crimean War (1853–1856) in Europe and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) in the Southwest, they were not widely circulated in the United States. Rather, the most abundant visual representations of combat were artist illustrations, particularly woodcut engravings. The technology did not yet exist to replicate photographs in newspapers or magazines, so during the Civil War these publications employed graphic artists to redraw photographic images for their readers. But before that, artists worked without photographic referents, and the illustrations they produced, according to historian William Frassanito, depicted war as "a glorious adventure." Most depicted action scenes of troops in the midst of battle or of individual soldiers in heroic postures. The dead and wounded were pictured, but their presence was subordinated to the unity of the heroic battle scene. The casualties were almost never shown as mutilated, dismembered, or rotting (Frassanito 1978, p. 28).

The 1862 Antietam Exhibit

That type of representation changed when a series of battlefield photographs, titled "The Dead at Antietam" went on display in Mathew Brady's New York studio. The photographs had been made by Alexander Gardner (1821–1882), one of Brady's associates. Portable photo laboratories in horse-drawn wagons gave photographers the mobility to perform field work and follow the military engagements (Bleiler 1959 [1866]). But as the photo process required extended exposure, the technology did not lend itself to recording action shots of engagements, nor did the obvious hazards of setting up equipment in the middle of combat zones (Cobb 1962, pp. 128–129). The process was also complicated by possession of the battlefield after the fighting had ended. Thus, the most dramatic battlefield images taken by photographers were necessarily taken afterward. If burial details had finished clearing the battlefield and interring the dead before the photographers arrived, they documented the aftermath by focusing on the scarred landscape. Alexander Gardner and his assistant made their well-known death studies at Antietam soon after the battle ended. Many of the dead remained where they had fallen on the battlefield in abject postures and in various stages of decomposition (Frassanito 1978, pp. 51–52). Gardner's images presented a terrible spectacle to the viewers who studied the images in Brady's gallery.

A reporter who covered the story for The New York Times acknowledged that though most civilians "recognize the battle-field as a reality…it stands as a remote one." The photos in the exhibit had begun to change that conception. According to the Times, the photographer had "done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it" (October 20, 1862, p. 5).

Some of the battlefield scenes were so graphic that when they were redrawn as magazine illustrations, artists and editors had to select the subjects carefully so as not to offend the sensibilities of their readers. According to the historian Donald Keyes, however, "There was no escaping the truth of the photograph when the camera dispassionately surveyed the carnage and wreckage of humanity and buildings" (Keyes 1976–1977, p.121). As the Times reporter noted, the photos bore a "terrible distinctiveness" so that with the use of a magnifying glass, "the very features of the slain may be distinguished" (October 20, 1862, p. 5). The reporter also speculated that "Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent." But rather than the repulsiveness one would anticipate, the photographs elicited "a terrible fascination… that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth [sic] to leave them." The article continued, "You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men's eyes" (October 20, 1862, p. 5 ).

In a study of photography that was published in the July 1863 Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894), an eminent Boston physician, discussed the Antietam exhibit as evidence that "the field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes fearful interest." Holmes had traveled to the site in search of his son soon after the battle ended, and the photographs in "The Dead at Antietam" captured the consequences that Holmes had witnessed firsthand. He testified to the realism of the photographs by declaring, "Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations" (Holmes 1863, p. 11). Holmes also described his own experience of viewing these "terrible mementos" and their capacity to "thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights" (pp. 11–12). Looking over the prints, Holmes remarked, was "so nearly like visiting the battlefield" that "all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene… came back to us, and we hurried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented" (Holmes 1863, p. 12).

Mathew Brady

Mathew Brady was perhaps the preeminent figure of Civil War photography, but his role in photographing the war has often been misunderstood. Brady was the first person to dispatch a corps of photographers to document the war (Trachtenberg 1985, p. 3). While the images that resulted were copyrighted in the names of individual photographers, the press largely credited Brady for the work of his employees. Many have speculated that this fact ultimately led to Alexander Gardner's decision to leave Brady's employ in 1863 (Zeller 2005, p. 103). Brady's reputation remains largely unchallenged throughout the postwar nineteenth century—for example, an 1891 New York World article referred to Brady as "the grand old man of American photography" and as "a man who has photographed more prominent men than any other artist in the country" (Townsend 1891, p. 26).

Later, however, as scholars began to differentiate the work of several photographers, some questioned whether Brady's name was merely the equivalent of a corporate brand (Panzer 1997, p. 3). In fact, Brady did personally continue to produce images consistent with his earlier portraits of famous subjects. But he also devoted much of his effort to compiling as comprehensive a collection as he could, through directing the work of his employees and buying negatives of pictures taken by other photographers (Library of Congress, n.p.). He spent $100,000 to finance his war enterprise, but sold his collection to the U.S. government for approximately $25,000 to pay his debts (Townsend 1891, p. 26; Panzer 1997, p. 19). "No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives," Brady later lamented. "The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life" (Library of Congress, n.p.).

christina adkins

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Library of Congress. "Mathew B. Brady: Biographical Note." In American Memory: Selected Civil War Photographs. Available from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwbrady.html.

Panzer, Mary. Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997.

Townsend, George Alfred. "Still Taking Pictures." New York World, April 12, 1891, p. 26. Reprinted in Mary Panzer's Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997.

Trachtenberg, Alan. "Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs." Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 1–32.

Zeller, Bob. The Blue and Gray in Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005.

Stereographs and Portraits

What no doubt increased the vividness of the photographs and amplified the viewer's response was that many of the photographs were produced as three-dimensional, or stereoscopic, images. A camera containing two side-by-side lenses would capture almost identical images. When viewed simultaneously under a stereograph viewer—the forerunner of children's 3D View-Master toys—the two distinct images were combined by the viewer's brain to create the optical illusion of a single image with depth (Zeller 1997, pp. 13, 16). Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an avid collector of stereographs and had invented the first practical handheld viewer in 1859 (Zeller 1997, p. 14). The images from "The Dead at Antietam" were reproduced and sold widely—stereographs for fifty cents each, two-dimensional cartes de visite and album cards for a quarter. The scenes were also redrawn by artists and printed in the illustrated magazine Harper's Weekly (Zeller 1997, p. 38).

While the battlefield photos generated the most reaction from viewers, they actually constituted only a small portion of the photographs taken to document the war. More than three thousand photographers were working in the United States at the time (Sullivan 2004, p. 6); at least three hundred of those photographed some aspect of the war (Moyes 2001, p. 17). Most worked as portrait artists, taking pictures of individual soldiers (Zeller 2005, p. 88). In his study of the Union soldier, The Life of Billy Yank, the historian Bell Irvin Wiley cites an official from the U.S. Sanitary Commission who commented on the "immense number" of soldiers who had their likenesses taken by photographers (Wiley 1971, p. 367). According to Wiley, "during their first weeks in uniform countless soldiers visited the 'daguerrean artists' who set up shop in camp or in near-by towns" (Wiley 1971, p. 25). In a letter dated February 1862, Warren Hapgood Freeman wrote to his father, "There is a photograph artist about the camp, but he has such a crowd about his saloon all the time that I have not been able to get a picture yet" (Freeman 1871).

A few photographers, such as Alexander Gardner, who left Brady and established his own gallery in 1863, reproduced maps, took images of large landscape views, and documented various aspects and activities of army life. Of the extensive collections of Civil War photographs that survive in the National Archives, "Soldiers at Rest after a Drill" depicts troops seated on the ground reading letters and playing cards. Other prints include regimental group portraits, an army blacksmith's forge, cavalry columns, refugees fleeing a combat zone, religious services, railroad bridges, the construction of telegraph lines, councils of senior generals with President Lincoln, people and places related to Lincoln's assassination, and fugitives who fled slavery as they arrived at Union lines.

Between November 1861 and March 1862, Timothy O'Sullivan (c. 1840–1882) visited the war zone in Beaufort, South Carolina, where defeated planters had abandoned their lands but former slaves were not yet recognized as free by U.S. government policy (Wilson 1999, p. 108). During his time in Beaufort, O'Sullivan photographed the African Americans of the "Old Fort Plantation," which became the largest group photo of enslaved men and women ever recorded (Wilson 1999, p. 108). Photo collector and author Jackie Napolean Wilson notes the symbolism in the photograph as the subjects "stand in a wake of light emerging from the darkness of shadows." As Wilson explains, the men and women in the photograph are bewildered survivors of an American tragedy (Wilson 1999, p. 108).

A Military Photographer

Most of the photographers who documented the war, either for their own enterprise or as military contractors, did so as civilians (Zeller 2005, p. 88). A notable exception was a Union officer, Captain Andrew J. Russell (1830–1902), who was uniquely positioned to capture much more with his camera. Officially, Russell's assignment as the photographer of military railroads required him to photograph aspects of railroad infrastructure. The photos were then reproduced and distributed to various military and government authorities (Zeller 2005, pp. 89–90).

But Russell also photographed war scenes because he was often traveling with the troops. Most notably, he took rare shots of the second battle of Fredericksburg. Russell photographed soldiers huddled together ready to move on a moment's notice. He also set up his camera on the periphery of the battle and documented the engagement as it progressed. His photos include pictures of what may be smoke from an artillery battery and images of casualties taken twenty minutes after the battle (Zeller 2005, pp. 91–99). Russell is credited with raising the bar of Civil War photographic achievement in that he was able to follow an army in action (Zeller 2005, p. 91).

Other Applications of Civil War Photography

But the documentary value of photography was employed for other purposes as well. The U.S. Congress commissioned photographs to record the condition of prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia, the site of a notorious Confederate prison camp (Orvell 2003, p. 65). The images, which revealed prisoners near starvation, were used as evidence in the trial of the jailer in charge of the camp, Henry Wirz, who was ultimately convicted and executed for war crimes. The Daily National Intelligencer reported the testimony of a U.S. Army surgeon, V. A. Vanderkief, who supervised the treatment of reclaimed prisoners at Annapolis, Maryland. The Intelligencer reported that "a photograph of a man… reduced to a mere skeleton was exhibited," to which the witness testified that "a large number of prisoners who came from Andersonville were of the appearance of that exhibited by the photograph" (August 30, 1865, col. A).

In addition, a report issued by the Surgeon General's Office gauging the material available for a medical history of the war recounted the early uses of medical photography. In 1862, the Surgeon General's Office directed army medical officers to forward monthly reports with details of their surgical cases and pathological specimens. The plan was to establish the Army Medical Museum for the advancement of medical study. Eventually a photograph gallery was also established at the museum. According to George Otis, the author of the Surgeon General's report, "Typical specimens were reproduced, and the photographs, accompanied by brief printed histories, were distributed to medical directors, to be shown to the medical officers serving with them. […] Numerous patients in hospitals were photographed, and the Museum now possesses four quarto volumes, with over a thousand photographic representations of wounded or mutilated men" (Otis 1865, p. 7). This early medical photography allowed army surgeons to document and disseminate knowledge of injuries and treatments that were developed during the war.

After the Civil War, the commercial market for military photographs rapidly disappeared. In 1865 and 1866, Alexander Gardner published two volumes of Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Rather than reproducing the original photographs with artist sketches, the book was produced with actual photographic positives pasted into the pages. The collection was expensive to produce and sold few copies (Bleiler 1959 [1866]). By then, many Americans eschewed reminders of the devastating conflict, especially images that so vividly preserved its violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bleiler, E.F. Introduction to Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, by Alexander Gardner. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959 [1866].

"Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam." New York Times, October 20, 1862. p. 5.

Cobb, Josephine. "Photographers of the Civil War." Military Affairs 26, no 3 (1962): 127–135.

Frassanito, William A. Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

Freeman, Warren Hapgood. "Letter from Warren Hapgood Freeman to J. D. Freeman." In Letters from Two Brothers Serving in the War for the Union to Their Family at Home in West Cambridge, Mass. Cambridge, MA: H.O. Houghton and Co., 1871.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. "Doings of the Sunbeam." Atlantic Monthly, July 1863, 1–15.

Keyes, Donald. "The Daguerreotype's Popularity in America." Art Journal 36, no. 2 (1976–1977): 116–122.

Moyes, Norman B. American Combat Photography from the Civil War to the Gulf War. New York: MetroBooks, 2001.

Otis, George Alexander. Reports on the Extent and Nature of the Materials Available for the Preparation of a Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1865.

Sullivan, George. In the Wake of Battle: The Civil War Images of Mathew Brady. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2004.

"Trial of Henry Wirz: The Proceedings of Yesterday." Daily National Intelligencer. August 30, 1865, col. A.

Wiley, Bell Irvin. The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971 [1952].

Wilson, Jackie Napolean. Hidden Witness: African American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Zeller, Bob. The Civil War in Depth: History in 3–D. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1997.

Zeller, Bob. The Blue and Gray in Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005.

Christina Adkins

CIVILIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

During the Civil War, photography became an important medium through which Americans documented the conflict in their own private collections, communicated sentiment to loved ones, and mourned the losses they endured.

At the beginning of the Civil War, new army recruits and civilians on the home front rushed to take portraits for exchange with distant loved ones. By one account, nearly twenty thousand letters and "two or three bushels" of photographs were mailed daily from a single post office at Nashville (Fitch 1863, p. 313).

Portrait photography was so prevalent that newspaper articles offered advice on "How to Photograph Pleasing Countenances" and "How to Dress for a Photograph." The Washington (DC) Daily National Intelligencer advised that when dressing for a photograph, "violent contrasts of color should be especially guarded against." It also advocated the use of the powder "puffbox," as freckles appeared "most painfully distinct" when photographed (February 3, 1865). The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin reported that a photographer in Cleveland, Ohio, had attempted to alleviate the "stereotyped solemnity" of the portrait-sitter by placing a mirror next to the camera. Subjects could then see their own expressions as they were captured by the camera. Reportedly, the result was that the "stern scowl is suddenly changed to a pleasant smile" (April 25, 1863).

As a corollary to the small card-mounted portraits known as cartes de visite, photo albums became popular, as they allowed people to arrange their own personal photo archives and place them on display in their homes (Trachtenberg 1985, pp. 6–7).

Newspaper classifieds regularly contained advertisements for new types of photo albums. Eastman's Book and Stationary Store in Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, claimed to offer the best albums on the market, purportedly manifesting "decided improvements over any heretofore made"—though what these innovations might have been they did not specify (Lowell Daily Citizen, February 19, 1862). An 1865 article in the Daily Cleveland Herald announced the introduction of a new type of album, the Photograph Family Record, which was intended to preserve the "likeness, descriptions, and records" of each family member. Each record included spaces for two photographs taken at different times in a person's life, a blank marriage certificate, and places to record birth dates, genealogy, education, politics, and various other personal information up to the date of death and place of burial. The article concluded that the new album "affords opportunity for a complete family history, which cannot but become a highly-prized memorial" (August 3, 1865).

Indeed, these personal photo collections were among the valuables saved in times of crisis. For example, one witness to the Confederate raid on Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, recalled seeing "ladies escaping from their houses with nothing but a few photographs or an album" (Schneck 1864, p. 64). Another resident who lived near the soon-to-be-burned courthouse recalled salvaging a few books, the family Bible, and a photograph album by stowing them in a neighbor's house (Schneck 1864, p. 47). While the fact that so few things were salvaged was due to the desperation of the situation, the choice of what to save reveals much about the importance of photographs.

For hospital supervisor Elvira Powers, the photo album she received from her patients was a token of mutual esteem. The album had her name engraved on it and was "of a size to hold one hundred pictures." No gift, she declared, was "more acceptable than the album, especially…[if it contained] the faces of the donors" (Powers 1866, pp. 201–202).

By the 1860s, though, photo collecting was not exclu-ssively a personal matter; photo-reproduction processes had created new commercial possibilities. Whereas the earlier daguerreotype portrait had allowed for only a single copy of a photograph, the carte de visite process, developed in 1850, allowed for multiple prints from a single negative. Meanwhile, the reproduction and sale of celebrity portraits meant that in addition to pictures of their nearest and dearest, people could purchase small portrait prints of famous figures. Whereas enthusiasts previously had to attend galleries to view images of the most prominent public figures of the time, they could now collect prints of such images in their own album archive.

This became the pastime of Southern diarist Mary Chesnut, who in 1861 recorded a peculiar morning encounter with South Carolina Governor John Manning. When Manning arrived for breakfast in full formal attire as if dressed to attend a ball, Chesnut "looked at him in amazement." But Manning assured her, "I am not mad…. I am only going to the photographer." Manning's wife wanted a portrait taken in his dress attire. Chesnut accompanied Manning to the studio, along with her husband James Chesnut Jr. and the former governor, John Means. Afterward, the diarist received a gift of a photo album in which she was to "pillory all celebrities" (Chesnut 1981, p. 37). Though Chesnut's social circle comprised a veritable who's who of famous Confederates, she may have acquired photographs for her album not only from personal acquaintances but also from the portrait copies that were widely available for sale. Chesnut later wrote that her photograph book contained "one of all the Yankee generals" (Chesnut 1981, p. 731). To amuse the young son of a Confederate colonel, Chesnut handed him a photo album; on flipping through it, the child exclaimed "You have Lincoln in your book! I am astonished at you" (Chesnut 1981, p. 412).

Chesnut also recorded an instance in which a suitor submitted his portrait to his intended, a common ritual in nineteenth-century courtships. Sally "Buck" Preston was the object of a Confederate major's attentions—though only after her own older sister had rejected him. The officer, Chesnut noted, sent Sally his photograph, and in due time "cannonaded" her with marriage proposals (Chesnut 1981, p. 445).

Photography was so integral a part of the cultural experience of the war that it became the subject of literary compositions. For example, an anonymous poem titled "The Carte de Visite" appeared in the September 1862 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It tells the story of a soldier who stops to rest on a stranger's front porch. During this respite, he describes a terrible battle to a mother and daughter. An unidentified youth killed in action becomes the subject of particular concern, as the daughter begins to worry that the soldier is referring to her beloved. When the soldier reveals a photograph of the young ensign, the image confirms the daughter's worst fears. The poem concludes, "when we buried our dead that night / I took from his breast this picture—see! / It is as like him as like can be /… One glance, and a look, half sad, half wild, / passed over her face, which grew more pale, / Then a passionate, hopeless, heart-broken wail" (pp. 479–80).

While this poem is fictional, during the war it indeed became common practice to identify casualties from family photographs and other items they carried on their person. "Ordinarily," wrote Edward Parmelee Smith, who ministered among the casualties, "in the inside breast pocket of the blouse, there would be a letter from friends, a photograph, a Christian Commission Testament or Hymn Book, with the name and regiment and home address" (Smith 1869, p. 236).

At Gettysburg, a soldier was found slain on the battle-field with no identification but the ambrotype of his three children. In Incidents of the United States Christian Commission (1869), Smith reflected that perhaps no other story of the war "became so widely known or excited such deep sympathy." According to Smith, the soldier was found clutching the photograph so that it "must have met his dying gaze" (pp. 175–176). The case came to the attention of civilian doctor J. Francis Bourns. To discover the identity of the soldier and notify his family, Bourns had the photograph reproduced, then furnished the image and details to the press. The incident and the search became a national story, and copies of the children's image were reproduced and sold for the benefit of the family. Eventually, the soldier was identified as Sergeant Amos Humiston. When the Humiston family was finally located, Bourns arranged to meet them. According to the Washington Daily National Intelligencer, Bourns "found them living in the same humble house in which the father had left them when he went forth to the service of his country; and when the children gathered together and grouped as they are in the ambro-type, it was seen that there could be no mistake in the family" (February 24, 1864). Bourns returned the original portrait to Humiston's widow, along with the money col-lected from the sale of the photo reprints and various contributions. Copies of the children's photograph, the article added, were still available for sale at a Seventh Street bookstore and in the Patent Office at the National Fair. On January 23, 1866, the Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, OH) reported continued fundraising efforts for the support of Frank, Frederick, and Alice, the children of the patriot martyr of Gettysburg" (The Scioto Gazette, January 23, 1866). A musical composition entitled "The Children of the Battle-field" was published and sold with a brief narrative of the family history and a reproduction of the children's likenesses. The music sold for fifty cents per copy, and card-sized photographs for a quarter. According to the Gazette, the music would be a welcome addition "in every circle where music is a part of home enjoyment, and where are those who with gratitude remember our country's brave defenders." According to Smith, the Humiston family relocated to the National Orphan Homestead, founded at Gettysburg, where Mrs. Humiston worked as an under-matron and where seventy war orphans then resided. Offering an appropriate conclusion to the sentimental story, Smith reported that the "morning after the children came to the institution, it was found that they had gone out quietly and decked their father's grave with beautiful flowers" (Smith 1869, p. 176).

While the case of the Humiston family was exceptional for the amount of media attention it received, William Howell Reed recounted a similar scene of pathos in his memoir Hospital Life in the Army of the Potomac (1866). Reed recalled conducting a roadside funeral and interment for a man who had died on an ambulance bivouac. The man had no identification, and Reed found in the man's packet "only a photograph of a little infant, which showed that there was one tie at least to bind him to this world." After placing the photo "upon his breast, and covering it with his blouse," Reed began the burial and the man "was laid down to rest" (pp. 16–17).

Such stories, however fact-based, were influenced by a cultural association between mourning and photography. Since the development of the daguerreotype in the 1830s, it had become common to commission memorial photographs of recently deceased loved ones. As the genre developed, subjects were commonly posed in lifelike postures. Children, whose memorial photos were sometimes their only recorded likenesses, were pictured as if sleeping. According to historian Miles Orvell (2003), such images were consistent with the Victorian view of death as a bodily sleep from which the deceased would awaken in heaven, and thus offered comfort to the bereaved (pp. 24–25).

"Spirit photography," the discovery of which coincided with the Civil War, also became a popular form of memorial image in the nineteenth century. In March 1861, William Mumler photographed himself alone in his studio, but when he developed the plate he found an additional figure in the frame. Several people claimed that this "spirit extra" was the ghost of Mumler's dead cousin, to whom the image bore a strong resemblance (Kaplan 2003, p. 18). Soon, other photographers began to discover their own "spirit extras." Though spirit images were the result of double exposures superimposed by these photographers, some photographers may have actually believed in the authenticity of their apparition ("Gone but Not Forgotten," p. 6).

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a photo collector and doctor by profession, dismissed spirit photographs as the result of overwrought mourners and unscrupulous photographers. "The actinic influence of a ghost on a sensitive plate is not so strong as might be desired," Holmes wrote sarcastically, "but considering that spirits are so nearly immaterial… the effect is perhaps as good as ought to be expected." Holmes elaborated on what he perceived to be the usual scenario: "Mrs. Brown, for instance, has lost her infant, and wishes to have its spirit-portrait taken with her own. A special sitting is granted, and a special fee is paid. In due time the photograph is ready, and, sure enough, there is the misty image of an infant in the background. Or, it may be, across the mothers lap." It may be impossible to identify the child. But, wrote Holmes, "it is enough for the poor mother, whose eyes are blinded with tears, that she sees a print of drapery like an infant's dress, and a rounded something, like a foggy dumpling, which will stand for a face: she accepts the spirit-portrait as a revelation from the world of shadows" (Holmes 1862, p. 14). But even after belief in the authenticity of spirit photography had subsided, the genre maintained its popularity ("Gone but Not Forgotten," p. 6). According to art historian Louis Kaplan (2003), spirit photography during the Civil War helped mourners to feel connected with dead loved ones and to withstand the daily tragedies and losses that surrounded them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chesnut, Mary. Mary Chesnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Fitch, John. Annals of the Army of the Cumberland:Comprising Biographies, Descriptions of Departments, Accounts of Expeditions, Skirmishes, and Battles, 5th ed. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864.

"Gone but Not Forgotten." Special online feature prepared in conjunction with the P. O. V. documentary A Family Undertaking. PBS.org, 2004. Available from http://www.pbs.org/.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. "Doings of the Sunbeam." Atlantic Monthly, July 1863, pp. 1–15.

"How to Dress for a Photograph." Washington (DC) Daily National Intelligencer, February 3, 1865.

"How to Photograph Pleasing Countenances." San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, April 25, 1863.

Kaplan, Louis. "Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography." Art Journal 62, no. 3 (2003): 18–29.

Orvell, Miles. American Photography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

"Photograph Albums: Just Received a Large and Well Selected Stock Direct from the Manufacturers." Advertisement. Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, February 19, 1862.

"Photograph Family Record." Daily Cleveland (OH) Herald, August 3, 1865.

Powers, Elvira J. Hospital Pencillings: Being a Diary While in Jefferson General Hospital, Jeffersonville, Ind., and Others at Nashville, Tennessee, as Matron and Visitor. Boston: Edward L. Mitchel, 1866.

Reed, William Howell. Hospital Life in the Army of the Potomac. Boston: W. V. Spencer, 1866.

Schneck, B. S. The Burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, 2nd rev. ed. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1864.

The Scioto Gazette, Tuesday, January 23, 1866, issue 49, col C.

"Sergeant Humiston." Washington (DC) Daily National Intelligencer, February 24, 1864.

Smith, Edward Parmelee. Incidents of the United States Christian Commission. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1869.

Trachtenberg, Alan. "Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs." Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 1–32.

Christina Adkins

PHOTOGRAPHY

The first photographer known to be of Jewish birth was Solomon Nunes *Carvalho, an American who in 1853–54 served as artist-photographer with John C. Frémont's expedition to the Far West. However, the 19^th century did not produce many photographers with Jewish backgrounds. Jews took their place as photographers on the world scene in the 20^th century. Among the inventors, the names of Leopold *Mannes and Leopold *Godowsky, the musician-scientists who in 1933 produced Kodachrome, and five years later Ektachrome, rank high. Polaroid, one of the most ingenious of all photographic devices, was invented by Edwin H. *Land. The list of distinguished Jewish photojournalists, beginning with Erich *Salomon, who originated candid photography with the first of the miniature cameras invented in the early 1920s, through John Heartfield (1892–1968), who, in montage photographs of vitriolic satire, blasted the Nazi hierarchy in various German publications until he was forced to flee for his life in the early 1930s, to the ubiquitous magazine photographers, is an extensive and impressive one.

The biggest pool of talented recorders of big world stories is to be found among the staff of Life magazine. Alfred *Eisenstaedt, who joined Life in 1936 when it was founded, had, by 1969, covered more than 2,000 assignments, and more than 90 of his photographs had been used as Life covers. Other famous Jewish staff members included Eliot Elisofon (1911–1973), Fritz Goro (1901–1986), Dmitri Kessel, Ralph Crane, Yale Joel, Ralph Morse, David E. Scherman, and Bernard Hoffman. The equally gifted freelance photographers whose pictures regularly appear in the pages of Life as well as its sister magazine, Time, have also included extraordinarily gifted photographers such as Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson (1933– ), Elliot Erwitt (1928– ), Burt Glinn (1926– ), Philippe *Halsman, Archie Lieberman, Arnold *Newman, and Arthur Siegel (1913–1978). Look Magazine had on its staff such brilliant photographers as Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), while Alex Liberman became the photographer-artist-art director for Vogue. Freelance photojournalists work through photo agencies. Two of the leading ones in 1970 were Rapho-Guilumette, directed by one of the ablest administrators in the field, Charles Redo, and Magnum Photos by Inge Bondi. Among the great number of Jewish photojournalists belonging to these two agencies have been Joe Rosenthal (1912–1981), of the Associated Press, who took the dramatic "Raising of the Flag on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima, 1943"; Diane Arbus (1923–1971), whose photographs of transvestites were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968; Morris Rosenfeld, photographer of yacht races; Robert Frank (1924– ), known for his pictures of the seamy side of U.S. life; Ben *Shahn, whose photographs for the Farm Security Administration were later used as themes for his famous posters and paintings; and Arthur Rothstein, Edwin Rosskam (d. 2006), and Charles Rotkin (1916–2004), who all photographed the American dust bowl for fsa during the depression years of the 1930s.

Photography has dominated fashion and product photography since the 1940s. The remarkably versatile Irving Penn (1917– ) had a flair for graceful, bold compositions, and like Richard Avedon (1923–2004) and Eliot Elisofon was an adventurous explorer and unique stylist in fashion photography. Through unconventional lighting, exaggerated poses, startling costumes, and exotic backgrounds, fashion photographers all over the world have created eye-catching images that have more than once changed female attire everywhere. Two emerging talents in fashion photography at the end of the 1960s were Melvin Sokolsky and William Klein (1926– ). Architectural photography, which requires a highly developed sense of design, and the ability to plan a series of photographs from strategic vantage points at exact moments during the day or night, found an exceptional practitioner in Ezra Stoller. Abstract images, found in objects ordinarily ignored, became the "new reality" of Aaron *Siskind, who, as head of the photography department of the Illinois Institute of Technology and founder of the Society for Photographic Education, exercised considerable influence as teacher-photographer. A gifted student of Siskind's at iit, Len Gittleman, became head of photography at Carpenter Center, Harvard University. Other members of the Society for Photographic Education have been Martin Dworkin of Columbia University, Bernard Freemesser of the University of Oregon; Jerome Liebling (1924– ) of the University of Minnesota; Jerry Uelsmann (1934– ) of the University of Florida; and Ralph Kopell of the State College of Iowa. It is not surprising that photographers of war and battle should rank as distinguished cameramen. David *Seymour (Chim; 1911–1956) was such a person – he died in the Sinai Campaign of 1956; Robert *Capa was another – he died in 1954 in the Indochina War; and among the first casualties in the Six-Day War of 1967 was Paul Schutzer (1930–1967), a staff photographer of Life. Combat photographers have inner discipline, and it was this same quality which caused the death in an air crash of Dan Weiner (1919–1959), who flew out in a storm to cover an assignment in the Kentucky mountains, and of Camilla Koffler (Ylla), the famous photographer of wild animals, who was killed in an accident in 1970 while photographing a wild bullock in India.

Photography, which unites art and science, was a child of the Industrial Revolution. It was the first art in history to owe its very existence to a scientific instrument. However, it would be wrong to think of science-minded Fritz Goro or Roman *Vishniac as cold and factual reporters of the modern world. They are poets who have drawn upon technology at its most advanced to reveal the poetry of an emerging world of thought and feeling. Photography was born largely as a result of the efforts of portrait painters to find some reliable means of getting an accurate likeness.

Portrait photography has been a big industry for over a century. The giants in portrait photography are few, but Arnold Newman and Philippe Halsman, two Jews, are certainly among them. So too are Eliot Elisofon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, *Izis in France, and Alfred Stieglitz. They all share the one essential quality that makes a portrait photographer, the ability to interpret a complex personality creatively, discovering something fresh and important to say. Newman is a master of symbolism that underlines and reinforces his central message. Halsman is a brilliantly inventive and witty graphic artist whose chosen medium is light.

There have been some distinguished Jewish curators, editors, journalists, and critics of photography, especially in the last three decades. Among these are Grace Mayer, curator of photography, the Edward Steichen Memorial Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1962; Jacob Kainen (1909–2001), curator of prints and drawings, The National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, dc; Eugene Ostroff, curator of photography, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; Lewis Walton Sipley (1897–1968), director, American Museum of Photography, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Margaret Weiss, photography critic for the Saturday Review; Jacob Deschin (1900–1983), photography critic for the New York Times; David B. Eisendrath, science-oriented columnist of Popular Photography; Helmut Gernsheim (1913–1995), photography historian of London, England; and Albert Boni, who assembled and edited the comprehensive photographic bibliography published in 1962, Photographic Literature.

[Peter Pollack]

While no definitive "Jewish" photography style emerged, many of the practitioners of landmark photographic images were Jewish. Among them were Nan *Goldin, Annie *Leibovitz, Garry *Winogrand, and Helen *Levitt, who continued to be active into her nineties. At least two European-born photographers, Helmut *Newton and Andre *Kertesz, did significant work as Americans.

In Israel

The early photographers in Ereẓ Israel included Yaakov Ben Dov, Alfred Bernheim, and Shemuel Josef Schweig. Among the contemporary photographers working in Israel are many doing press work and producing picture books on the Holy Land. Among them are Werner Braun, David Rubinger, Micha Bar Am, Peter Merom, and David Harris.

camera judaica

Introduction

The great upsurge of interest in photographing Jewish subjects and in the understanding of photography as documenting the many facets of Jewish life in the past is a phenomenon of more recent years. More exactly, one could speak of a wave of renewed interest, a reinforced presence of photographs aimed at recording Jewishness and Jewish existence, and of a more outspoken use of old photographs as an instrument to safeguard Jewish memory. One feels today a more conscious and concerted involvement of photographers, photo-editors, and curators in an effort to interpret Jewish life through photography than ever before. The age of Jewish photography has arrived.

Moreover, and complementarily, in our age of the threefold domination of the cultural and social life by the camera – through photography (and photojournalism), through film (fiction and documentary), and through television and video – Jewishness itself seems to strive to express its presence in an image-oriented, visible dimension. The emancipated appearance on the one hand, and on the other the admired "sabra with an 'Aryan' look" (cf. the Paul Newman-alias-Ari ben Canaan ideal in the film "Exodus") evolves into a more expressive "Jewish is Beautiful" ideal. The latter is sometimes characterized by an ungroomed haircut-cum-beard often adorned with a big "Chai" sign (or a larger-than-life Magen David) and sometimes crowned with a yarmulke. Photogenic Judaism of the 1970s and 1980s is more visually aggressive than its 1950s–1960s predecessor. The once most powerful expression of the attitude to photography of Orthodox Jews, the refusal to be photographed, is today increasingly limited to the narrowest fringe. The "we have the right to be different" expression of Judaism has become more outward-projected and less abstract. The cameras were there, among other factors, and played their role.

The beginning of the New Wave in Jewish photography could be set in 1974. Three important photographic books, all relating to contemporary Jewish history, appeared in that year, independently of each other. In the German-speaking area, photographer and photo-editor Franz Hubmann published his Jewish Family Album. Germanic and bourgeois in its spirit and composition, the album mainly represented the West European Jewish Family. A photographic social history, it ended (significantly, as we will see) before 1939. In New York, journalist and writer Abraham Shulman compiled and created another family album, The Old Country. His book focused on the poor cousin, eastern European Jewry. Also in New York in 1974, Leyzer Ran compiled and composed a two-volume documentation about pre-war Vilna, Jerusalem of Lithuania. Here the photographs and other documents represented mostly the organized Jewish life, including its destruction and the resistance. Hubmann, Shulman, and Ran, the three compiler-authors, created, through photographs, different views of the Jewish experience. And yet, the books share certain traits that remain discernible in photographic books and exhibitions of later years.

In 1976, Abraham Shulman, perhaps encouraged by the reception of his Old Country, published The New Country, depicting Jewish immigration and early days in America. Also in 1976, the Jewish Museum in New York exhibited Image Before my Eyes, a photographic history of Jewish life in Poland between 1864 and 1939 (again), prepared by the yivo Institute of Jewish Research in New York. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett turned it into a book in 1977; a year later, the book was itself turned into a film. By the same time, a collective of young American Jews sponsored an amateur-photography contest that led to the publication of a book entitled Behold a Great Image, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1978. In the same year, the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv opened its doors to the biggest Jewish photography exhibit/slide show/gallery ever created. This was the year in which the introduction of the image into the realm of representing Jewishness reached its culmination. To the more traditional and religious reader, this statement might sound like a heresy; in reality, there is a transformation. The process goes on, both in compilation and new photography. In 1980 and 1984, the sociologist Gerard Silvain published in Paris, in French, two large volumes based on his collection of (mostly photographic) postcards. The first, Jewish Images and Traditions, includes a thousand postcards illustrating Jewish life. The other, Two Destinies in the Diaspora, juxtaposes two fictional life stories, one Ashkenazi, the other Sephardi, also based on postcards. Also in the 1980s, the Diaspora Museum initiated three worldwide contests in photographing Jewish life. At the same time, the Museum assigned several photographers to take pictures relevant to contemporary Jewish history and sociology. In 1985 Yeshayahu Nir's book The Bible and the Image, the History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 appeared; its popularized Hebrew version Jerusalem and Ereẓ Israel: In the Footsteps of Early Photographers appeared in Israel in 1986. In both editions, Jewish attitudes toward photography are discussed; the latter focuses on Jewish life in pre-Zionist and pre-Mandatory Palestine.

There is little doubt that these books and exhibitions represent less than a carefully orchestrated effort, more than a fad or a fashion. They embody a spontaneously growing cultural movement that arises from certain needs, that focuses certain energies, responds to certain realities. They demonstrate that Jewish photography is a fact, definable as the body of photographic images of Jews and of their culture taken, "encoded," by Jews integrated in it and meaningful to a Jewish audience able to "decode" it. There exists, undeniably, a photographic discourse on Jewish life. It has its themes, motifs, tendencies, and ideologies.

Motifs, Past and Present

types and faces

Behold a Great Image, the photography book that has contemporary Jewishness as its theme, offers perhaps the best starting-point for an introduction to a taxonomy of Jewish motifs in photography. The book is a clearly shaped statement that presents its theme in clearly delimited, ideologically charged terms; it was edited by a team of Jewish activists and militants who used pictures taken by many photographers, most likely all Jewish. Finally, it was published by a representative and prestigious Jewish publishing house.

One opens the book and sees, first and foremost, faces: a first reaction is, "These faces are me, these are my people, they received the Law together with me on Mount Sinai, we were together through the Inquisition and the ghetto, it is for them that we have taken to guns and have built a country." The fact that one might be as far from religion as the authors are from atheism and still identify with these images may serve as evidence as to the validity of the opening sequence. Of the 28 faces depicted, the opening double spread and 11 more pictures do not carry any unequivocal graphic sign of Judaism. Faces in this context serve as signs of identity, and identification is axiomatic to photography. The act of recognition of the Self (or its part) in photographs of the other is the most general and basic function of photography in society and in culture.

The first section, "Faces," is followed by sections on "Children" and "Elderly"; this reads of course that Judaism is a family, a tribe, first and foremost. True, the book represents the editors' specific ideas influenced by "ẓedakah collectives," engaged in voluntary social work. It draws both on feelings of compassion and on sentimentality, also axiomatic to much of photography. But the book's message goes beyond its narrow and immediate aims. In "Children" and "Elderly" and the following sections – "Hasidim," "Trade," "Food," "Demonstrations," "Cemeteries," and "Holocaust" – Family and Tribe become an ethnicity with its own garment, gastronomy, alphabet, political interest, and history. Many of these are perennial motifs in Jewish photography that can be found in retrospective photography books and in modern photographic monographs, and they invite a more detailed discussion.

Whoever enters the permanent exhibition at the Diaspora Museum is first touched by the show-window "Faces" that seems to welcome the visitor. It is a never-ending audiovisual display of Jewish "types," similar in its conception and impact to the opening sequence of Behold a Great Image. Gerard Silvain's Jewish Images and Traditions also opens with "types." And, as Silvain implies, the "Jewish type" is a problematic image. At the beginning of his compilation, there are three postcard-photographs entitled "The Eternal Jew," showing poor, bearded, French ambulant merchants and vagabonds. The photographed "types" that is to say, the models, are not Jewish; yet, they may "seem Jewish," especially in antisemitic eyes. According to Silvain, it was the oral tradition that assimilated such French "types" to Jews, the eternal wanderers. But ambiguities of perception are present even in responses to authentic images. A typical postcard brought later by Silvain shows a "Jewish type." Such postcards, having Jews and other "types" as subjects, were very popular in their time and had nothing denigrating in them. And yet one of the postcards carried an inscription and signature handwritten by the sender: "The town of Leopol (?) is half populated by these dirty Jews. Germaine." Silvain brings another postcard, from Algiers, that also shows in a characteristically typical and neutral manner a young Jewish woman. The handwritten note is quite different in spirit: "Pas mal. Hein! Levy."("Not bad, isn't it! Levy.") As the signatures indicate, the images – in both cases – were created in the beholders' eyes, and so were the connotations. However, although antisemitic propaganda richly used photographs of Jewish faces, none of the portraits used in Behold a Great Image or the Diaspora Museum slide show would attract antisemitic editors today. Jewish photography is actively and consciously involved in the de-caricaturization of the Jewish stereotype. True, very often this tendency leads to an excessive beautification and romanticization of the distinctive traits of the Jewish face. Nevertheless, many photographers of the past and the present portrayed "Jewish types" with sensitive eyes and minds. Some did it with a touch of greatness.

celebrations, customs and study: rites

Few subjects seem as obviously belonging to the field of Jewish photography as weddings (the universally most preferred subject of the trade) and bar mitzvahs. Theirs is a powerful link: they are both memorable family events and graphically expressive rites. Weddings and bar mitzvahs are perceived as prestige-conferring social events in the time they occur, and the value of their depiction rises with time, as they find their way onto walls and into family-albums. The canopy above the bride and groom, the tallit on the youngster's shoulder, provide the Jewish color. It was no miracle that this subject developed into a full-fledged photographic genre.

New Year greeting cards are one of the oldest "holidays" and "Jewish Year" subjects in Jewish trade photography. For the amateur's camera Ḥanukkah candles are among the most favorite subjects of the Jewish year, with their light preferably reflected on children's faces. The environment of study, the yeshivah, the ḥeder and the Jewish scribe belong to this orderof subjects. Jewish study and scripture is a religious practice, a celebration, one rite among others. Other powerful links are at work here: ḥeder means children, yeshivah and scribes – most often – elderly, all "graphic" types. Unfortunately, photography of rites became the very realm of schmaltz, with children, brides, and scribes, and without them.

An interesting innovation in this field was, a few decades ago, the clash between objects of rite with objects of modern life. Photography is profane, and so are most of its subjects. Images such as truck drivers in ḥasidic garments, a yarmulke on the head of a laboratory specialist, a lulav in the hands of a man in overalls, tefillin on the forehead of a tank commander have at once secularized Judaism and by the same token have spiritualized its secular dimension. Today, even this relatively new genre seems overworked and outworn, one kitschy cliché among others.

Greatness, authentic belief, and real cultural values are best served with straight, "documentary" or "anthropological" photographs, or with subdued, somewhat enigmatic images. Roman Vishniac's pictures from 1938 eastern Europe mostly belong to the first category. Nahum T. Gidal's photograph entitled, "The Night in Meron" (taken in 1935), which shows in semi-darkness a traditionally dressed man half leaning, half lying on a building's arched roof, is perhaps the best example of the second. Vorobeichic's 1931 constructivist photo-montage of bookshelves in the Vilna rabbinical library also touches the realm of mystery.

trades and streets

The shtetl – wooden houses, twisted lanes, Jewish artisans and poor storekeepers – preserves the ever present images of our past. To be sure, in a few streets and in some trades the shtetl is well and alive even in our days. Jewish photographers detect and depict it as a curious mixture of relics from the past and of present-day decay, which it, most often, is. But then, photography has this curious power to pictorialize rubbish and romanticize poverty. If rites are the realm of schmaltz, the shtetl is the realm of nostalgia. The fact that old photographs survived the vagaries of time provides them with an additional aura – as if time itself survived with them. Nothing feeds nostalgia as exquisitely as old photographs. Given the extreme hardships, misery, and martyrdom of the old days, one must admit that old pictures feed warm feelings toward a world that never existed in reality.

The beauty of nostalgia, in spite of the appearances, is not a celebration of the past, a real longing to live again, in the future within the conditions of the past. It is a self-assuring celebration of memory itself. To turn old photographs, vital evidence of bygone times, into historical documents, therefore, necessitates a demystifying reading. This means to analyze and deconstruct the idealizing photographic techniques on the one hand, and the falsifying connotations of a selective memory on the other.

It is easy to enjoy the heartwarming old images, knowing that the "golden" olden days when Jewish poverty – often, utmost poverty – was a fact of life, are over. This is not the case when poor socio-economic status and low prestige persist. In 1975 Jerusalem's Israel Museum organized a large scale representation of Jewish life in Morocco. Some of the photographs that were to be included displayed poverty and connoted, moreover, "underdevelopment" and "primitiveness." A prominent Israeli investigator of folklore born in Morocco and involved in the preparation of the exhibition threatened to demonstrate violently his opposition to the enterprise should these photographs, whose authenticity he did not deny, be exposed. One senses behind this opposition an anxiety that they may have confirmed negative stereotypes concerning the Moroccan immigration still current in the more established strata of Israeli society. That such an opposition was never recorded among descendants of eastern-European poor Jews does not imply that the shtetl was less poor than the mellah, the Moroccan Jewish quarter. It indicates that it belonged, already, to a more distant past. It also indicates that the mellah did not find its Vorobeichic, Vishniac, and Gidal.

cemeteries

Cemeteries exercise a powerful attraction for Jewish photographers. There is hardly an illustrated book or an exhibition about Jewish communities where a photograph of tombstones – mostly taken from middle distance – is absent. Paradoxically they signify survival and continuity of the ethnic group. Old tombstones are signs of life, albeit of life gone, but they represent people and a people. With their Hebrew inscriptions, old Jewish tombstones signify survival of a culture, both in the eyes of Jews and of their opponents. Antisemites do not analyze signs. Their instincts tell them that by destroying and desecrating Jewish cemeteries they pose a potent threat to Jewish culture and life.

Nature, always present in photographs of cemeteries, plays a double role, of both adversary and catalyst. The photogeny of tombstones, even half-broken and half-lying, consists of their victory over grass and thistle that threaten to overgrow them and to condemn them to disappearance and oblivion. They signify victory of a cultural artifact over the surrounding nature. On the other hand, adorning the stones and their Hebrew letters with wild greenery, nature embraces them, "naturalizes" them, and turns them in to part of nature. The photogeny of old cemeteries consists of the dialectics of struggle and fusion of culture with nature, of memory with eternity. It adds to the Hebrew inscriptions – a symbol in itself – an immensely powerful second symbolic dimension.

synagogues

Behold a Great Image, the starting point of our analysis, has almost exclusively in its synagogue section, photographs of wrecked synagogues and of synagogues converted into churches. None of the high-class houses of prayer or of other shuls in popular quarters is represented. This is an exceptional representation of the subject, a wrecked synagogue, in the Jewish repertory of symbols, means destruction, pogrom, Kristallnacht, Holocaust. An abandoned synagogue, in opposition, could mean disappearance of a Jewish community through emigration to another or more affluent country, perhaps aliyah to Israel; and in American inner cities, urban exodus toward better ecologies of a wealthy suburb. The particular treatment of synagogues in this book implies ideology. The message is that the latter exodus weakens the coherence of Jewish communities. This may be a plausible point, but the almost exclusive use of images of abandon and decay in living and prospering Jewish America seems to be a textbook case in photographic rhetoric and propaganda.

History, and its more recent chapters, turned the destroyed synagogue into a clearly determined and conventionally decipherable, decodable sign. It turned all old photographs of synagogues in eastern and central Europe from a view of a building of prayer into a view of a monument. The shift can be exemplified by one of Silvain's postcards, printed in his Jewish Images and Traditions. It is a photograph of the Great Synagogue in Frankfurt. Sent on October 22, 1899, it carries the following handwritten inscription and signature in French: "My dear Joseph, for an Israelite this card is a pleasure to have. Your brother, Isaac." Never again will this photography generate a similar feeling of joy over Jewish presence. The meanings that it carries today are of a more complex order. It is nostalgia, but also mourning, pride, anxiety, sorrow, elements of Jewish memory.

A synagogue also remains, of course, in all its aspects, a work of architecture and of decorative art. As such, it represents Jewish art, with all the ambiguities of this concept. It also represents the search for identity and status of a community, an ethnic community in a foreign and not always friendly world. Photographers can capture and differently emphasize any of these connotations. A symbol of Jewish religion, a subject charged with Jewish history and sociology, synagogues are and will remain a permanent motif in Jewish photography.

vanishing communities

Since the 1940s, thousands of Jewish communities have ceased to exist. Many of these disappeared as the result of the Holocaust; some in mass emigration to Israel; others have been gradually abandoned as the Jews have slipped away to other homes, sometimes in the metropolitan areas of the same country. Often the descendants of these communities or other photographers have been motivated to photo-document the material remains. Some of this has been initiated by Beth Hatefutsoth.

The following extracts are taken from the descriptions of Temporary Exhibitions held in the Gallery of the Beth Hate-futsoth (the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv). They speak for themselves and the subject.

Radauti, a town in northeast Romania, was once a busy trade center with a community of 6,000 Jews. By the late 20^th century, only about 200 remained and their numbers continued to diminish as the older generation died and the younger generation left. This is one of the last places in Europe where many of the characteristics of the shtetl life still survive. The American photographer, Laurence Salzmann, spent two years in Romania, preparing his photographs on Jewish life in contemporary Radauti. His work portrays the Jewish life cycle, from circumcision to burial, religious life and cemeteries, economic life and community functions, and he follows two families as they leave Radauti and start a new life in Israel.

Several centuries ago, Jewish life in the Caribbean thrived with activity. Descendants of Marranos, from Spain and Portugal, came to the region in the 17^th century and established a chain of flourishing settlements. Today only a few remnants survive; Jewish community life is limited to a few centers. Elsewhere all that remains are ruins, tombstones, and memorial tablets. Beth Hatefutsoth sent out a small expedition to locate and document the remains. They visited Surinam, Curaçao, Coro (Venezuela), Barraquila (Colombia), Panama, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Thomas and St. Eustatius.

Ethnophotography of a people that had never stopped migrating and perhaps never will.

holocaust

There is a world of difference between the vanished Jewish communities of Radauti and the Caribbean on the one hand, and the vanished Jewish community of Poland on the other. Whatever remains of Polish synagogues or of the terrible sites on which death machinery had left its traces will most likely be photographed again and again by Jews who attempt vainly to apprehend the unacceptable. In contrast, such photographs will also be taken as an outcry to be turned into an ever-accusing evidence, an expression of protest of a people revolting against its historical conditions of existence.

Photographs taken during the Holocaust by Jewish photographers (only those are considered here) are of a different and unique kind. In one sense, they simply are historical documents, reports, and records of an event of unique dimensions. In another, they constitute a personal testimony of a photographer-eyewitness. In a third and utterly exceptional sense, they depict the photographers' own path toward death, a path shared with their portrayed subjects. "Doomed Photographers Reporting about Their Doomed Community" would be the appropriate title of their exhibition. Research, disclosure of official material, and state archives of all Allied powers, and accidental discoveries may lead to the uncovering of more such pictures than those presently known and published. And it is under the above mentioned title that such photographs will have to be studied and incorporated into the pantheon of Jewish Photography.

israel

The Jewish homeland is certainly the most diverse and most problematic subject of Jewish photography. Vested ideology is perhaps nowhere as powerful and influential as in this case.

The authors of Behold a Great Image again provide an interesting example of a clearcut and significant choice. Most of the photographs in their concluding chapter, entitled "Israel, the Land," show Orthodox Jews in their own secluded quarters. It is not difficult to fill in the verbal equivalent of their visual statement: Even in Israel, Jewishness is first of all a religion, and it is picturesque and ultraconservative.

Israel, the land, the state, the people, is in all its facets unique in Jewish history, culture, and experience. It is an important, perhaps central, though not yet fully crystallized, part of it. A Jewish photographer who depicts Israel, and this includes any theme and motif in Israeli life, is operating inside the culture. A controversial work may best exemplify this problem. Some of Joel Kantor's photographs of Israel exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in the late 1980s (Kantor, born in Canada, had lived in Israel for some 15 years) show Israeli security forces brutalizing young Arabs. By their subject matter, esthetics and ethics, they belong to Jewish photography at its best.

Conclusion

First, a single photograph can only exceptionally express a culture's particular point of view by its formal organization. Only exceptionally can a single photograph disclose a photographer's approach to his subjects. Even more rarely will it reveal whether the photographer has operated within his own culture and was intimately acquainted with its values and points of view. But a photographic discourse of larger dimensions, such as an exhibition, a book, or a lifetime work, reflect these characteristics. Photography is vision of things, of people, of life, of the world, and as such, culturally determined. Even the most universalistic and universe-embracing photographic show ever created, "Family of Man," represented the Family in a perceptibly American, "wasp-ish" perspective. To bring another example of the influence of the photographers' cultural background on their work, British/Protestant 19^th-century traveling photographers who visited the Holy Land depicted its biblical sites in the open countryside more often, and included in their pictures of famous landmarks more of the surrounding nature than their French/Catholic counterparts, who focused more closely on monuments and architecture. It is appropriate to observe this relation from another direction. Few audiences were as sensitive to Alter Kacyzne's photographs from the 1920s of Jewish Poland, or to Roman Vishniac's images from eastern European Jewish life in the 1930s, as the Jewish audience. And no gentile photographer has produced on this subject a collection as powerful and as penetrating as Kacyzne and Vishniac. True, Vishniac's collection owes part of its impact to its date – the eve of the Holocaust. But then, precisely, the close relationship to reality is typical of and inherent in the camera's work.

Second, preliminary definitions concerning Jewish photography may now be suggested. The first definition has to be restrictive and limited and formulated in the following manner: The basic body of Jewish photography is constituted by the pictures taken by Jewish photographers who explore and record Jewish life from an insider's point of view, and which appear to Jewish viewers as meaningfully expressing their shared concerns. The second definition has to provide Jewish photography with a broader perspective. It has to leave space for "unpopular" images, which like Kantor's, while relating to present-day Jewish concerns and values, might be rejected by a Jewish audience as too critical. it has also to leave space for more universal concerns of Jewish photographers, since such concerns are part of Jewish experience and culture. Last but not least, it has to leave space for gentile photographers who feel affinity toward Judaism and Jewish culture, perhaps the space English literature had for a Joseph Conrad, and American literature for a Vladimir Nabokov.

Golden is theory, and green the tree of life. The growth of Jewish photographic work during the coming decades and centuries, and the growth of a Jewish audience perceptive to it, will confirm – or reject – the ideas here suggested.

[Yeshayahu Nir]

bibliography:

L. Dobroszycki and B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Image Before My Eyes, A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (1977); N.T. Gidal, Land of Promise (1985); M. Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, ed. by Z. Szner and A. Sened (1977); F. Hubmann, The Jewish Family Album, The Life of a People in Photographs (1974); L. Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania, Illustrated and Documented (1974); Y. Nir, The Bible and the Image, The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 (1985); idem, Bi-Yerushalayim u-ve-Ereẓ Israel, be-Ikvot Ẓalamim Rishonim (1986); A. Shulman, The Old Country (1974); idem, The New Country, Jewish Immigration in America (1976); G. Silvain, Image et Tradition Juives. Un millier de cartes postales, (1897–1917), pour servir a l'histoire de la Diaspora (1980); idem, Deux Destins en diaspora, Moi, Myriam Attias, Sepharade, Moi, Joseph Lewski, Ashkenaz (1984); R. Vishniac, Polish Jews, a Pictorial Record (1947); M. Vorobeichic, Ein Ghetto im Osten (Vilna) (1931); G. Wigoder (ed.), The First Years, Beth Hatefutsoth. The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (1983).

Photography

The origins of photography

Early photographic processes

The evolution of cameras

Early uses of photography

Photography as an art form

Reproducing photographs using ink

Color photography

Snapshots: popular photography

Instant photographs

The uses of photography in science

Photography enters the computer age

Resources

Photography is the art and science of fixing images using light. For most of its history, this has usually meant using silver compounds that darken when exposed to light. With the growth of computers, photography is now often done using electronics that take millions of measurements of light colors and intensities over a focused image in order to make a record of that image.

Photography has affected many areas of science and culture. Photography is not only a ubiquitous aspect of personal life but is an integral part of the modern printing, publishing, and advertising industries, and is used extensively for scientific purposes. Motion pictures consist of a series of photographs, taken at the rate of 24 per second.

The origins of photography

Photography has been called the art of fixing a shadow. The ancient Greeks knew that a clear (though upside down) image of the outside world will be projected if one makes a tiny hole in the wall of a dark room. But no one knew how to make this image permanent. Called a camera obscura, such rooms were chiefly used as aids to drawing, and understanding perspective. After the Renaissance, when perspective became important, camera obscuras become smaller and more sophisticated. By the late eighteenth century, devices had been created that used a series of telescoping boxes and a lens to focus an image. Some even used a mirror to reflect the image upwards onto a piece of glass, making tracing images easier. Gentlemen brought small, portable camera obscuras with them when they traveled, tracing the images onto a piece of paper as a way to record their journeys. In today’s terms, by 1800 the camera had long since been invented, but no one had created film for it.

Many people were thinking about this problem, however. Some chemists had noticed that sunlight cased certain mixtures of silver nitrates to darken. By the early nineteenth century, inventors were trying to combine the camera with these chemical discoveries. The main problems included exposure times as long as eight hours, and how to make photographic images permanent. If light created photographic images, how could they be kept from further darkening once they were finished? This problem was eventually solved by using hyposulfite of soda (now called sodium thiosulfite) to remove the undarkened silver particles.

Early photographic processes

During the 1830s two different photographic processes were invented. The daguerreotype became more popular at first. It was created by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who created illusions for French theater, with help from Joseph Niepce, an inventor. Their process created images on copper plates coated with a mixture of photosensitive silver compounds and iodine. Daguerre realized he could significantly shorten the exposure time by using mercury vapor to intensify, or develop, the image after a relatively short exposure. This made the process more practical, but also dangerous to the photographer since mercury is poisonous. Also, no copies could be make of daguerreotypes, making it virtually useless for purposes of reproduction.

A rival process was created in England by Fox Talbot, a scientist and mathematician. He created images on paper sensitized with alternate layers of salt and silver nitrate. Talbot also used development to bring out his image, resulting in exposure times of 30 seconds on a bright sunny day. Talbot’s process produced negative images, where light areas appear as dark, and dark areas as light. By waxing these negatives to make them clear, and putting another sheet of photographic paper under them, Talbot could make an unlimited number of positive images. This process was called a Calotype.

The daguerreotype produced a positive image with extremely fine detail and was initially more popular. The Industrial Revolution had helped create a growing middle class with money to spend, and an interest in new and better ways of doing things. Soon the area around Paris filled on weekends with families out to take portraits and landscapes. These early processes were so slow, however, that views of cities turned into ghost towns since anything moving became blurred or invisible. Portraits were ordeals for the sitter, who had sit rigidly still, often aided by armatures behind them.

Other photography processes followed quickly. Some were quite different than the previous two methods. One method, invented by French civil servant Hippoyte Bayard in 1839, used light as a bleach that lightened a piece of paper darkened with silver chloride and potassium iodide. Papers employing carbon and iron rather than silver were also used. Platinum chloride, though expensive, proved popular with serious or wealthy photographers because it rendered a fuller range of gray tones than any other process.

Because Calotype negatives were pieces of paper, prints made from them picked up the texture of the paper fibers, making the image less clear. As a result, many artists and inventors experimented with making negatives on pieces of glass. A popular method bound silver compounds in collodion, a derivative of gun cotton that became transparent and sticky when dissolved in alcohol. Negatives made using this process required a shorter exposure than many previous methods, but had to be developed while still wet. As a result, landscape photographers had to bring portable darkrooms around them. These wet collodion negatives were usually printed on a paper treated with albumen. This produced a paper with a smooth surface that could be used in large quantities and reproduced rich photographic detail.

Dry plates using silver bromide in a gelatin ground appeared in 1878. They proved popular because they were easier than wet plates, and were soon produced by companies throughout the United States and Europe. In 1883, manufacturers began putting this emulsion on celluloid, a transparent mixture of plant fibers and plastic. Because celluloid was durable and flexible, its use led to the commercial development of negative film on long rolls that could be loaded into cameras. By 1895, such film came with a paper backing so that it could be loaded outside of a darkroom. It was also far more sensitive to light than early photographic processes. These developments made photography more accessible to the average person, and lead to the widespread popularity photography has today.

Roll film also proved important to the motion picture industry because it allowed a series of photographs to be recorded sequentially on the same strip of film.

The evolution of cameras

A commercial camera based on Daguerre’s patent, came out in France in 1839. New camera designs followed, mirroring the changing uses for and technologies used in photography. Large portrait cameras, small, foldable cameras for portable use, and twin-lensed cameras for stereoscope photos came out soon after the invention of photography. Bellows cameras allowed photographers to precisely control the focus and perspective of images by moving the front and back ends of a camera, and thus the focal planes.

The single lens reflex camera, which allowed for great control over focus and a fast exposure time, was an important advance that lead toward today’s cameras. This camera used a mirror, usually set at a 45 degree angle to the lens, to allow photographers to look directly through the lens and see what the film would “see.” When the shutter opened, the mirror moved out of the way, causing the image to reach the film rather than the photographers eye. Single lens reflex cameras were in use by the 1860s, and used roll film by the 1890s. Because they were easy to use and allowed for a great degree of spontaneity, this type of camera proved popular with photojournalists, naturalists, and portrait photographers.

In early photography, exposures were made by simply taking off and replacing the lens cap. With the introduction of dry plates and film that were more sensitive to light, photographers required a more precise way of making fast exposures, and shutters became necessary. By 1900, shutters were sophisticated enough to control the aperture size and shutter speeds, which generally went from one second to 1/ 100th of a second. Lenses were improved to allow larger apertures without a loss of focus resolution. With exposure times becoming more precise, methods of precisely measuring light intensity became important. Initially, a strip of light-sensitive paper was used, then pieces of specially treated glass. The most accurate method used selenium, a light-sensitive element. Photoelectric meters based on selenium were introduced in 1932. They became smaller and less expensive, until by the 1940s, many cameras came with builtin light meters.

Cameras continued to become lighter and smaller throughout the twentieth century. The 35 millimeter roll film camera so widely used today had it’s origins in a 1913 Leitz camera designed to use leftover movie film. In 1925 Leitz introduced the Leica 35mm camera, the first to combine speed, versatility, and high image quality with lightness and ease of use. It revolutionized professional and artistic photography, while later models following its basic design did the same for amateur photography. In the years that followed, motor drives that automatically advanced film, and flashes that provided enough light in dark situations were perfected. The flash started in the mid-19th century as a device that burned a puff of magnesium powder. By 1925 it had become the flashbulb, using a magnesium wire. In the 1950s, the invention of the transistor and dry-cell batteries lead to smaller, lighter flashes, and smaller, lighter cameras as well. In all but the simplest cameras, photographic exposures are controlled by two factors: how long the shutter stays open, and the size of the hole in the lens is that admits light into the camera. This hole, called the aperture, is usually measured as a proportion of the distance from the aperture to the film divided by the actual diameter of the aperture.

Early uses of photography

Many artists were threatened by the invention of photography. Immediately after photography was first displayed to the public, the painter Paul Delaroche said, “From today, painting is dead.” In fact, many portrait painters realized that photography would steal their livelihood, and began to learn it. Ironically, many early photographic portraits are overly stiff and formal. With exposure times that could easily be half a minute, subjects had to be in poses in which they could remain motionless. As the chemistry of photography improved, exposure times shortened. The public appetite for photographs grew quickly. By the 1860s, portraits on cards presented when visiting someone, and stereographic photos, which used two photographs to create an illusion of three-dimensional space, were churned out by machines in large batches.

As with the camera obscura, one of the biggest initial uses of photography was to record travel and exotic scenery. Photographers lugged the cumbersome equipment used for wet collodion prints through Egypt, India, and the American West. At the time, Europeans were increasingly interested in exotic places (and were colonizing some of them), while most Americans got their first glimpses of a wilderness they would never see through photography. With more people living in cities and working in industrial settings, views of unspoiled nature were in demand.

England’s Francis Frith became famous for his photographs of the Middle East in the 1850s. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, photographers like Edward Muybridge and Timothy O’Sullivan did the same in the American West, often emphasizing its desolate grandeur. (Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion later helped lead to motion pictures.) The West was still an unexplored frontier, and often these photographers traveled as part of mapping expeditions. The pictures they took of geysers in 1871 and 1872 played an important role in the decision to create Yellowstone National Park, America’s first national park. Some of these photographs sold thousands of copies and became part of how Americans saw their country.

Photography as an art form

For much of its early history, people argued about whether photography should be considered art. Some, including many artists (many of whom used photographs as guides for their own work), considered photography a purely mechanical process, produced by chemicals rather than human sensibility. Others said that photography was similar to other printmaking processes like etching and lithography, and no one argued that they were not art. Still, at large expositions, curators usually hung the photographs in the science and industry sections rather than with the paintings.

An 1893 showing of photographs in Hamburg, Germany’s art museum still provoked controversy. But that was about to change. In 1902, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz formed the PhotoSecession in New York City. The group’s shows and publications firmly advocated the view that photography was art. Their magazine, Camera Works, which used high-quality engravings to reproduce photographs, proved extremely influential, showing that photography could be used for artistic purpose.

Artistic photography reflected many of the same trends as other branches of art. By the end of World War I in 1918, leading-edge photography had moved away from the soft-focus pictorialism of the nineteenth century. It became more geometric and abstract. Photographers began concentrating on choosing details that evoked situations and people. Lighter, more versatile cameras enabled photographers to take scenes of urban streets. Photography proved important in documenting the Great Depression. Many photographers concentrated on stark depictions of the downtrodden.

At the other end of the spectrum, this interest in spare but elegant depictions of everyday objects worked well with advertising, and many art photographers had careers in advertising or taking glamorous photographs for picture magazines.

Landscape photography also flourished. The best known twentieth century landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, created a system for precisely controlling the exposure and development of film to manipulate the amount of contrast in negatives.

These developments helped give photography a separate and unique identity. The Museum of Modern Art in New York formed a department of photography in 1940, showing that the medium had been accepted as an art form. Since then, art photography has thrived, with many artists making important contributions in areas ranging from landscape to street photography to surrealist photomontage.

Reproducing photographs using ink

The history of photography is intimately linked to that of mass production. Publishing was growing quickly even as photography did, fueled by the growth of cities and newspapers and increased literacy. Before photography, newspapers, magazines, and illustrated books used wood engravings to illustrate their articles. These engravings could be printed in the same presses, using the same methods and papers as the movable type used to print text. The images and type could therefore be printed on the same piece of paper at the same time. For photography to become practical for publishing, a way of cheaply reproducing photos in large editions had to be found. Some were skeptical that photography would ever prove important as an illustrative method. Most illustrations for newspaper articles were created by artists who had not seen the events they were rendering. If the imagination was so important in illustration, what need was there for the immediacy and “truthfulness” of a photograph?

Finding a method for mechanically reproducing photographs in large numbers proved difficult. By the late nineteenth century, several methods had been perfected that created beautiful reproductions. But these methods were not compatible with type or with mass production. This limited their usefulness for editions larger than a couple of hundred copies. An early method that was compatible with type, developed by Frenchman Charles Gillot around 1875, produced metal relief plates that could reproduce only lines and areas of solid tone.

The method that finally worked, called photoengraving, broke the continuous tones of a photograph down into patterns of black dots that were small enough to look like varying shades of gray when seen from a slight distance. Such dot patterns, called screens, can easily be seen in a newspaper photograph, but a photograph in the finest magazine or art book uses essentially the same method, although it may require a magnifying glass to see the dots. Although Fox Talbot had conceived of using a screen to reproduce photographs as early as 1853, a practical screening method was first patented in 1881 by Frederick E. Ives.

A photoengraving is made by coating a printing plate with light-sensitive emulsion. A negative is then printed on the plate through a grid, called a screen, which breaks the image into dots. The dots are made acid resistant, and then the plate is put into a bath of acid. This removes areas around the dots, making the dots raised. The dots can then be inked with a roller, and printed on paper using a printing press.

By the 1890s these halftones (so called because they were composed of areas that were either black or white), were appearing in magazines and books, and some newspapers. With the edition of photographs, publications evolved, changing their layouts to emphasize the powerful realism of the new medium. Magazines began sending photographers to the scenes of wars and revolutions. The resulting photographs often did not appear until days or weeks later, but the images they brought back from conflicts like the Spanish-American war and World War I fascinated the public to a degree it is hard to imagine now that wars are broadcast live on television.

The mass production of photographic images affected more than publications. Original photographs were costly. But such images became affordable when printed by a printing press. We think nothing of getting a postcard with a photograph on it, but until the invention of photoengraving, such postcards were far more expensive. Nor did an image have to be a photograph to benefit from photoengraving. A drawing or painting, whether for an art book or an advertisement, could be photographed, then printed through a screen to create a mass-reproducible image.

Halftone reproductions quickly increased in quality, partly under pressure from magazine advertisers, who wanted their products to look good. By the time World War I began in 1914, magazine reproductions were sometimes as good as less expensive modern reproductions.

These developments expanded and changed the audience for photography. To appear in a mass-circulation magazine, a photograph had to have mass appeal. Many photographers had earned a living selling photographs and postcards of local sights. This became difficult to do once photographs of the most famous international sights and monuments became widely available.

Reproductions were not the only way large audiences could see photographs, however. Many photos were shown in the nineteenth century equivalent of the slide projector. Called the magic lantern, it was often used to illustrate lectures. Early documentary photography was often shot to accompany lectures on subjects like the condition of the poor in urban slums.

Color photography

From the invention of photography, most people considered its inability to render color to be an important defect. Many early photographs had color painted on by hand in an attempt to compensate. Those attempting to solve the problem of creating color photographs took their cues from researchers into human vision, who theorized that all colors in nature are made from combinations of red, green, and blue. Thus early attempts to create color photographs centered on making three layers of transparent images, one in each of these colors, and sandwiching them together. Each layer was photographed using filters to block out other colors of light. This resulted in photographs that were foggy with poor color.

In 1904, the first practical method of creating color images, called the autochrome, was invented by the Lumiere brothers of Lyon, France. Autochromes used a layer of potato starch particles, dyed red, green, and blue, attached to a layer of silver bromide photographic emulsion, all on a plate of glass. They were expensive and required long exposures, but autochromes had significantly better color and were easier to process than previous methods. By 1916, two other color methods competed with the autochrome. All were considered imperfect, however, because they were grainy, and their color was inaccurate and changed over time. Therefore, with the publishing industry and the public hungry for color photographs, attention turned to subtractive color methods.

The subtractive color starts with white light, a mixture of all wavelengths of light, and subtracts color from it. The process uses a three-layer emulsion of yellow, cyan (a greenish-blue), and magenta (a cool pink). When subtracted from white, these colors produce their opposites: red, green and blue. Kodak released a subtractive color film for motion pictures in 1935, and in 1938 a sheet film for photography, while the German Agfa Company released its own variation in 1936. Other companies followed. By the 1940s, color negative roll film for use in 35 millimeter cameras was available.

Two methods are currently used for creating color prints. In the chromogenic method the color dyes are created when the print is processed. In the dye-bleach or dye-destruction method, the color dyes are present before processing. The dyes not needed for the image are removed by bleaching.

Snapshots: popular photography

For the first 50 years of its existence, photography was so difficult it usually dissuaded amateurs. In 1888, the first Kodak camera, aimed at the amateur market, sold for $25 (equal to about $513 in 2005 dollars). It used factory-loaded film of 100 exposures, and had to be returned to the factory for film development. In 1900, the first of the very popular Brownie cameras was released. The camera cost $1 ($22 in 2005 dollars), the film was 15 cents a roll ($3.32 in 2005 dollars), and the camera was light and simple to operate. The Brownie, and the cameras that followed it, quickly made photography a part of American family life.

Instant photographs

Instant print film, which was introduced by Polaroid in 1948, delivers finished photographs within minutes. The film consists a packet that includes film and processing chemicals, and, often, photographic paper. After exposure, the packet is pulled from the camera. In the process it gets squeezed between rollers that break open the developing and fixing chemicals, spreading them evenly across the photographic surface. Although popular with amateurs for instant snapshots, instant photographs are often used by professional photographers as well because they can be used to test how lighting and compositions look to a camera before they shoot for later development.

The uses of photography in science

Photography has became an essential component of many areas of science. Ever since the U.S. Surgeon General’s office compiled a six-volume record of Civil War wounds shortly after the war, it has played a crucial role in the study of anatomy. Photographs can provide an objective standard for defining the visual characteristics of a species of animal or a type of rock formation.

But photography can also depict things the human eye cannot see at all. Hours-long exposures taken through telescopes bring out astronomical details otherwise unseeable. Similar principals apply to some photos taken through microscopes. High-speed photography allows us to see a bullet in flight. In 1932, the existence of neutrons was proven using photographs, as was the existence of viruses in 1942. The dwarf planet Pluto was discovered through comparisons of photographic maps taken through telescopes.

X rays taken at hospitals are really photographs taken with x-ray light rather than visible light. Similarly,

KEY TERMS

Aperture— The size of the opening in a camera lens through which light comes.

Camera obscura— A dark room or box with a light-admitting hole that projects an image of the scene outside.

Negative— Images with tonal values reversed, so that objects appear dark. Usually negatives are film from which positive prints are made.

Photoengraving— A process through which the continuous tones of a photograph are converted into black and white dots that can be reproduced on a printing press.

Single lens reflex camera— A camera that uses a single lens and a mirror to admit light for the film and for the photographer to use to focus on.

infrared and ultra-violet photographs, which detect invisible wavelengths of light, can be used for numerous purposes including astronomy and medicine, and the detection of cracks in pipes or heat loss from buildings. In all these cases, evidence and experimental results can be easily exchanged between scientists using photographs.

Photography enters the computer age

Like many other things, photography has been deeply affected by computers. Photographs now can be taken by cameras that do not even use film. Instead they use electronic sensors to measure light intensities and translate them into digital code that can be read by a computer. The computer translates the digital code into a grid of points, each assigned a number that represents a color (or level of gray for black-and-white photos). The process is similar to the way in which music is translated into digital form when it is put on a compact disc.

Once digitized, images can be manipulated by computers in many of the same ways they can be changed while making prints in a darkroom. But because digital images are essentially a series of numbers, they can be manipulated in other ways as well. For publishing purposes, digital images can be converted to halftones by the computer, making the process easier and faster. As a result, many newspapers, magazines and advertising firms have switched to digital photography for increasing amounts of their work.

See also Photocopying; Scanners, digital.

Resources

BOOKS

Hoy, Anne H. The Book of Photography: The History, the Technique, the Art, the Future. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2005.

Marien, Mary Werner. Photography: A Cultural History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.

Mulligan, Therese and David Wooters. A History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2006.

Scott M. Lewis

Photography

Photography is the art and science of creating images using light . For most of its history, this has usually meant using silver compounds that darken when exposed to light. With the growth of computers, photography can also be done with electronics that measure light intensities and create images based on them.

The invention and perfection of photography has affected many areas of life. Of course, nearly every family now has albums full of snapshots, portraits, and wedding photographs. But photography is also an integral part of the modern printing , publishing, and advertising industries, and is used extensively for scientific purposes. Motion pictures consist of a series of photographs, taken at the rate of 24 per second.

The origins of photography

Photography has been called the art of fixing a shadow. The ancient Greeks knew that a clear (though upside down) image of the outside world will be projected if one makes a tiny hole in the wall of a dark room. But no one knew how to make this image permanent. Called a camera obscura, such rooms were chiefly used as aids to drawing, and understanding perspective. After the Renaissance, when perspective became important, camera obscuras become smaller and more sophisticated. By the late eighteenth century, devices had been created that used a series of telescoping boxes and a lens to focus an image. Some even used a mirror to reflect the image upwards onto a piece of glass , making tracing images easier. Gentlemen brought small, portable camera obscuras with them when they traveled, tracing the images onto a piece of paper as a way to record their journeys. In today's terms, by 1800 the camera had long since been invented, but no one had created film for it.

Many people were thinking about this problem, however. Some chemists had noticed that sunlight cased certain mixtures of silver nitrates to darken. By the early nineteenth century, inventors were trying to combine the camera with these chemical discoveries. The main problems included exposure times as long as eight hours, and how to make photographic images permanent. If light created photographic images, how could they be kept from further darkening once they were finished? This problem was eventually solved by using hyposulfite of soda (now called sodium thiosulfite) to remove the undarkened silver particles.

Early photographic processes

During the 1830s two different photographic processes were invented. The Daguerrotype became more popular at first. It was created by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who created illusions for French theater, with help from Joseph Niepce, an inventor. Their process created images on copper plates coated with a mixture of photosensitive silver compounds and iodine. Dagurre realized he could significantly shorten the exposure time by using mercury vapor to intensify, or develop, the image after a relatively short exposure. This made the process more practical, but also dangerous to the photographer since mercury is poisonous. Also, no copies could be make of Daguerroptypes, making it virtually useless for purposes of reproduction.

A rival process was created in England by Fox Talbot, a scientist and mathematician. He created images on paper sensitized with alternate layers of salt and silver nitrate. Talbot also used development to bring out his image, resulting in exposure times of 30 seconds on a bright sunny day. Talbot's process produced negative images, where light areas appear as dark, and dark areas as light. By waxing these negatives to make them clear, and putting another sheet of photographic paper under them, Talbot could make an unlimited number of positive images. This process was called a Calotype.

The Daguerrotype produced a positive image with extremely fine detail and was initially more popular. The Industrial Revolution had helped create a growing middle class with money to spend, and an interest in new and better ways of doing things. Soon the area around Paris filled on weekends with families out to take portraits and landscapes. These early processes were so slow, however, that views of cities turned into ghost towns since anything moving became blurred or invisible. Portraits were ordeals for the sitter, who had sit rigidly still, often aided by armatures behind them.

Other photography processes followed quickly. Some were quite different than the previous two methods. One method, invented by French civil servant Hippoyte Bayard in 1839, used light as a bleach that lightened a piece of paper darkened with silver chloride and potassium iodide. Papers employing carbon and iron rather than silver were also used. Platinum chloride, though expensive, proved popular with serious or wealthy photographers because it rendered a fuller range of gray tones than any other process.

Because Calotype negatives were pieces of paper, prints made from them picked up the texture of the paper fibers, making the image less clear. As a result, many artists and inventors experimented with making negatives on pieces of glass. A popular method bound silver compounds in collodion, a derivative of gun cotton that became transparent and sticky when dissolved in alcohol . Negatives made using this process required a shorter exposure than many previous methods, but had to be developed while still wet. As a result, landscape photographers had to bring portable darkrooms around them. These wet collodion negatives were usually printed on a paper treated with albumen. This produced a paper with a smooth surface that could be used in large quantities and reproduced rich photographic detail.

Dry plates using silver bromide in a gelatin ground appeared in 1878. They proved popular because they were easier than wet plates, and were soon produced by companies throughout the United States and Europe . In 1883, manufacturers began putting this emulsion on celluloid, a transparent mixture of plant fibers and plastic. Because celluloid was durable and flexible, its use lead to the commercial development of negative film on long rolls that could be loaded into cameras. By 1895, such film came with a paper backing so that it could be loaded outside of a darkroom. It was also far more sensitive to light than early photographic processes. These developments made photography more accessible to the average person, and lead to the widespread popularity photography has today.

Roll film also proved important to the motion picture industry because it allowed a series of photographs to be recorded sequentially on the same strip of film.

The evolution of cameras

A commercial camera based on Daguerre's patent, came out in France in 1839. New camera designs followed, mirroring the changing uses for and technologies used in photography. Large portrait cameras, small, foldable cameras for portable use, and twin-lensed cameras for stereoscope photos came out soon after the invention of photography. Bellows cameras allowed photographers to precisely control the focus and perspective of images by moving the front and back ends of a camera, and thus the focal planes.

The single lens reflex camera, which allowed for great control over focus and a fast exposure time, was an important advance that lead toward today's cameras. This camera used a mirror, usually set at a 45 degree angle to the lens, to allow photographers to look directly through the lens and see what the film would "see." When the shutter opened, the mirror moved out of the way, causing the image to reach the film rather than the photographers eye . Single lens reflex cameras were in use by the 1860s, and used roll film by the 1890s. Because they were easy to use and allowed for a great degree of spontaneity, this type of camera proved popular with photojournalists, naturalists, and portrait photographers.

In early photography, exposures were made by simply taking off and replacing the lens cap. With the introduction of dry plates and film that were more sensitive to light, photographers required a more precise way of making fast exposures, and shutters became necessary. By 1900, shutters were sophisticated enough to all control of the aperture size and shutter speeds, which generally went from one second to 1/100th of a second. Lenses were improved to allow larger apertures without a loss of focus resolution. With exposure times becoming more precise, methods of precisely measuring light intensity became important. Initially, a strip of light-sensitive paper was used, then pieces of specially treated glass. The most accurate method used selenium, a light-sensitive element. Photoelectric meters based on selenium were introduced in 1932. They became smaller and less expensive, until by the 1940s, many cameras came with built-in light meters.

Cameras continued to become lighter and smaller throughout the twentieth century. The 35 millimeter roll film camera so widely used today had it's origins in a 1913 Leitz camera designed to use leftover movie film. In 1925 Leitz introduced the Leica 35mm camera, the first to combine speed, versatility, and high image quality with lightness and ease of use. It revolutionized professional and artistic photography, while later models following its basic design did the same for amateur photography. In the years that followed, motor drives that automatically advanced film, and flashes that provided enough light in dark situations were perfected. The flash started in the mid-19th century as a device that burned a puff of magnesium powder. By 1925 it had become the flashbulb, using a magnesium wire. In the 1950s, the invention of the transistor and dry-cell batteries lead to smaller, lighter flashes, and smaller, lighter cameras as well. In all but the simplest cameras, photographic exposures are controlled by two factors: how long the shutter stays open, and the size of the hole in the lens is that admits light into the camera. This hole, called the aperture, is usually measured as a proportion of the distance from the aperture to the film divided by the actual diameter of the aperture.

Early uses of photography

Many artists were threatened by the invention of photography. Immediately after photography was first displayed to the public, the painter Paul Delaroche said, "From today, painting is dead." In fact, many portrait painters realized that photography would steal their livelihood, and began to learn it. Ironically, many early photographic portraits are overly stiff and formal. With exposure times that could easily be half a minute, subjects had to be in poses in which they could remain motionless. As the chemistry of photography improved, exposure times shortened. The public appetite for photographs grew quickly. By the 1860s, portraits on cards presented when visiting someone, and stereographic photos, which used two photographs to create an illusion of three-dimensional space, were churned out by machines in large batches.

As with the camera obscura, one of the biggest initial uses of photography was to record travel and exotic scenery. Photographers lugged the cumbersome equipment used for wet collodion prints through Egypt, India, and the American West. At the time, Europeans were increasingly interested in exotic places (and were colonizing some of them), while most Americans got their first glimpses of a wilderness they would never see through photography. With more people living in cities and working in industrial settings, views of unspoiled nature were in demand.

England's Francis Frith became famous for his photographs of the Middle East in the 1850s. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, photographers like Edward Muy-bridge and Timothy O'Sullivan did the same in the American West, often emphasizing its desolate grandeur. (Muybridge's photographic studies of motion later helped lead to motion pictures.) The West was still an unexplored frontier, and often these photographers traveled as part of mapping expeditions. The pictures they took of geysers in 1871 and 1872 and brought William H. Jackson played an important role in the decision to create Yellowstone National Park, America's first national park. Some of these photographs sold thousands of copies and became part of how Americans saw their country.

Photography as an art form

For much of its early history, people argued about whether photography should be considered art. Some, including many artists (many of whom used photographs as guides for their own work), considered photography a purely mechanical process, produced by chemicals rather than human sensibility. Others said that photography was similar to other printmaking processes like etching and lithography , and no one argued that they were not art. Still, at large expositions, curators usually hung the photographs in the science and industry sections rather than with the paintings.

An 1893 showing of photographs in Hamburg, Germany's art museum still provoked controversy. But that was about to change. In 1902, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz formed the PhotoSecession in New York City. The group's shows and publications firmly advocated the view that photography was art. Their magazine, "Camera Works," which used high-quality engravings to reproduce photographs, proved extremely influential, showing that photography could be used for artistic purpose.

Artistic photography reflected many of the same trends as other branches of art. By the end of World War I in 1918, leading-edge photography had moved away from the soft-focus pictorialism of the nineteenth century. It became more geometric and abstract. Photographers began concentrating on choosing details that evoked situations and people. Lighter, more versatile cameras enabled photographers to take scenes of urban streets. Photography proved important in documenting the Great Depression. Many photographers concentrated on stark depictions of the downtrodden.

At the other end of the spectrum, this interest in spare but elegant depictions of everyday objects worked well with advertising, and many art photographers had careers in advertising or taking glamorous photographs for picture magazines.

Landscape photography also flourished. The best known twentieth century landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, created a system for precisely controlling the exposure and development of film to manipulate the amount of contrast in negatives.

These developments helped give photography a separate and unique identity. The Museum of Modern Art in New York formed a department of photography in 1940, showing that the medium had been accepted as an art form. Since then, art photography has thrived, with many artists making important contributions in areas ranging from landscape to street photography to surrealist photomontage.

Reproducing photographs using ink

The history of photography is intimately linked to that of mass production . Publishing was growing quickly even as photography did, fueled by the growth of cities and newspapers and increased literacy. Before photography, newspapers, magazines, and illustrated books used wood engravings to illustrate their articles. These engravings could be printed in the same presses, using the same methods and papers as the movable type used to print text. The images and type could therefore be printed on the same piece of paper at the same time. For photography to become practical for publishing, a way of cheaply reproducing photos in large editions had to be found. Some were skeptical that photography would ever prove important as an illustrative method. Most illustrations for newspaper articles were created by artists who had not seen the events they were rendering. If the imagination was so important in illustration, what need was there for the immediacy and "truthfulness" of a photograph?

Finding a method for mechanically reproducing photographs in large numbers proved difficult. By the late nineteenth century, several methods had been perfected that created beautiful reproductions. But these methods were not compatible with type or with mass production. This limited their usefulness for editions larger than a couple of hundred copies. An early method that was compatible with type, developed by Frenchman Charles Gillot around 1875, produced metal relief plates that could reproduce only lines and areas of solid tone.

The method that finally worked, called photoengraving, broke the continuous tones of a photograph down into patterns of black dots that were small enough to look like varying shades of gray when seen from a slight distance. Such dot patterns, called screens, can easily be seen in a newspaper photograph, but a photograph in the finest magazine or art book uses essentially the same method, although it may require a magnifying glass to see the dots. Though Fox Talbot had conceived of using a screen to reproduce photographs as early as 1853, a practical screening method was first patented in 1881 by Frederick E. Ives.

A photoengraving is made by coating a printing plate with light-sensitive emulsion. A negative is then printed on the plate through a grid, called a screen, that breaks the image into dots. The dots are made acid resistant, then the plate is put into a bath of acid. This removes areas around the dots, making the dots raised. The dots can then be inked with a roller, and printed on paper using a printing press.

By the 1890s these halftones (so called because they were composed of areas that were either black or white), were appearing in magazines and books, and some newspapers. With the edition of photographs, publications evolved, changing their layouts to emphasize the powerful realism of the new medium. Magazines began sending photographers to the scenes of wars and revolutions. The resulting photographs often did not appear until days or weeks later, but the images they brought back from conflicts like the Spanish-American war and World War I fascinated the public to a degree it is hard to imagine now that wars are broadcast live on television .

The mass production of photographic images affected more than publications. Original photographs were costly. But such images became affordable when printed by a printing press. We think nothing of getting a postcard with a photograph on it, but until the invention of photoengraving, such postcards were far more expensive. Nor did an image have to be a photograph to benefit from photoengraving. A drawing or painting, whether for an art book or an advertisement, could be photographed, then printed through a screen to create a mass-reproducible image.

Halftone reproductions quickly increased in quality, partly under pressure from magazine advertisers, who wanted their products to look good. By the time World War I began in 1914, magazine reproductions were sometimes as good as less expensive modern reproductions.

These developments expanded and changed the audience for photography. To appear in a mass-circulation magazine, a photograph had to have mass appeal. Many photographers had earned a living selling photographs and postcards of local sights. This became difficult to do once photographs of the most famous international sights and monuments became widely available.

Reproductions were not the only way large audiences could see photographs, however. Many photos were shown in the nineteenth century equivalent of the slide projector. Called the magic lantern, it was often used to illustrate lectures. Early documentary photography was often shot to accompany lectures on subjects like the condition of the poor in urban slums.

Color photography

From the invention of photography, most people considered its inability to render color to be an important defect. Many early photographs had color painted on by hand in an attempt to compensate. Those attempting to solve the problem of creating color photographs took their cues from researchers into human vision , who theorized that all colors in nature are made from combinations of red, green, and blue. Thus early attempts to create color photographs centered on making three layers of transparent images, one in each of these colors, and sandwiching them together. Each layer was photographed using filters to block out other colors of light. This resulted in photographs that were foggy with poor color.

In 1904, the first practical method of creating color images, called the Autochrome, was invented by the Lumiere brothers of Lyon, France. Autochromes used a layer of potato starch particles, dyed red, green, and blue, attached to a layer of silver bromide photographic emulsion, all on a plate of glass. They were expensive and required long exposures, but Autochromes had significantly better color and were easier to process than previous methods. By 1916, two other color methods competed with the autochrome. All were considered imperfect, however, because they were grainy, and their color was inaccurate and changed over time. Therefore, with the publishing industry and the public hungry for color photographs, attention turned to subtractive color methods.

The subtractive color starts with white light, a mixture of all wavelengths of light, and subtracts color from it. The process uses a three-layer emulsion of yellow, cyan (a greenish blue), and magenta (a cool pink). When subtracted from white, these colors produce their opposites: red, green and blue. Kodak released a subtractive color film for motion pictures in 1935, and in 1938 a sheet film for photography, while the German Agfa Company released its own variation in 1936. Other companies followed. By the 1940s, color negative roll film for use in 35 millimeter cameras was available.

Two methods are currently used for creating color prints. In the chromogenic method the color dyes are created when the print is processed. In the dye-bleach or dye-destruction method, the color dyes are present before processing. The dyes not needed for the image are removed by bleaching.

Snapshots: popular photography

For the first 50 years of its existence, photography was so difficult it usually dissuaded amateurs. In 1888, the first Kodak camera, aimed at the amateur market, sold for $25. It used factory-loaded film of 100 exposures, and had to be returned to the factory for film development. In 1900, the first of the very popular Brownie cameras was released. The camera cost $1, the film was 15 cents a roll, and the camera was light and simple to operate. The Brownie, and the cameras that followed it, quickly made photography part of American family life.

Instant photographs

Instant print film, which was introduced by Polaroid in 1948, delivers finished photographs within minutes. The film consists a packet that includes film and processing chemicals, and often photographic paper. After exposure, the packet is pulled from the camera. In the process it gets squeezed between rollers which break open the developing and fixing chemicals, spreading them evenly across the photographic surface. Although popular with amateurs for instant snapshots, instant photographs are often used by professional photographers as well because they can be used to test how lighting and compositions look to a camera before they shoot for later development.

The uses of photography in science

Photography has became an essential component of many areas of science. Ever since the U.S. Surgeon General's office compiled a six-volume record of Civil War wounds shortly after the war, it has played a crucial role in the study of anatomy . Photographs can provide an objective standard for defining the visual characteristics of a species of animal or a type of rock formation.

But photography can also depict things the human eye cannot see at all. Hours-long exposures taken through telescopes bring out astronomical details otherwise unseeable. Similar principals apply to some photos taken through microscopes. High-speed photography allows us to see a bullet in flight. In 1932, the existence of neutrons was proven using photographs, as was the existence of viruses in 1942. The planet Pluto was discovered through comparisons of photographic maps taken through telescopes.

X rays taken at hospitals are really photographs taken with x-ray light rather than visible light. Similarly, infrared and ultra-violet photographs, which detect invisible wavelengths of light, can be used for numerous purposes including astronomy and medicine, and the detection of cracks in pipes or heat loss from buildings. In all these cases, evidence and experimental results can be easily exchanged between scientists using photographs.

Photography enters the computer age

Like many other things, photography has been deeply affected by computers. Photographs now can be taken by cameras that do not even use film. Instead they use electronic sensors to measure light intensities and translate them into digital code that can be read by a computer. The computer translates the digital code into a grid of points, each assigned a number that represents a color (or level of gray for black-and-white photos). The process is similar to the way in which music is translated into digital form when it is put on a compact disc .

Once digitized, images can be manipulated by computers in many of the same ways they can be changed while making prints in a darkroom. But because digital images are essentially a series of numbers, they can be manipulated in other ways as well. For publishing purposes, digital images can be converted to halftones by the computer, making the process easier and faster. As a result, many newspapers, magazines and advertising firms have switched to digital photography for increasing amounts of their work.

See also Photocopying; Scanners, digital.

Resources

books

London, Barbara, and John Upton. Photography. 5th ed. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1994.

Szarkowski, John. Photography Until Now. The Museum of Modern Art, New York: 1989.

Turner, Peter. History of Photography. New York: Exeter Books, 1987.

Scott M. Lewis

KEY TERMS

Aperture

—The size of the opening in a camera lens through which light comes.

Camera obscura

—A dark room or box with a lightadmitting hole that projects an image of the scene outside.

Negative

—Images with tonal values reversed, so that objects appear dark. Usually negatives are film from which positive prints are made.

Photoengraving

—A process through which the continuous tones of a photograph are converted into black and white dots that can be reproduced on a printing press.

Single lens reflex camera

—A camera that uses a single lens and a mirror to admit light for the film and for the photographer to use to focus on.

PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WRITERS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Brooklyn Eagle, 15 September 1855.

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

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

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

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

Goldberg, Vicki, ed. Photography in Print: Writings from1816 to the Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondary Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Stauffer