At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen 9780822378266

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At the Edge of Sight

shawn michelle smith

At the Edge of Sight Photography and the Unseen

Duke University Press Durham and London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the edge of sight : photography and the unseen / Shawn Michelle Smith. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5486-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5502-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Photography—Social aspects—United States. 2. Photography—United States—History. 3. Photography, Artistic—History. I. Title. tr23.s626 2013 770.973—dc23 2013020978

—  For Joe

Contents



ix

List of Illustrations



xv Acknowledgments

1 Introduction First Photographs

21 — Excess and Accident

23 Chapter 1 Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida 39 Chapter 2 The Politics of Pictorialism: Another Look at F. Holland Day

73 — My Muybridge

75 Chapter 3 The Space Between: Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies 99 Chapter 4 Preparing the Way for the Train: Andrew J. Russell

129 — When the Train Rolls In

131 Chapter 5 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons’s Nostalgic Views

165 Chapter 6 Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography

193 — In the Crowd

195 Chapter 7 Afterimages: Abu Ghraib

213 — Untitled (Abu Ghraib)

215 Epilogue A Parting Glance

217 Notes



265 Bibliography



283 Index

Illustrations

Plates 1. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, “first photograph,” c. 1826 2. William H. Mumler, Bronson Murray, 1862–75 3. F. Holland Day, St. Sebastian, 1906 4. Eadweard J. Muybridge, dancing waltz, two models (detail), 1884–87 5. Andrew J. Russell, Mormon Family, Great Salt Lake Valley, 1869 6. Andrew J. Russell, Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo Cañon, 1869 7. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, To Live in Beauty, glass lantern slide 8. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Old Pillsbury Homestead, Willowdale Farm, Kingfield, Maine, night scene, glass lantern slide 9. Augustus Washington, Philip Coker, c. 1857

Figures Introduction 1. William Henry Fox Talbot, Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway, 1844 5 2. William H. Mumler, John J. Glover, 1862–75 9 3. William H. Mumler, Mr. Chapin Oil Merchant—& His Spirit Wife & Babe Recognized, 1862–75 13 4. William Henry Fox Talbot, Bust of Patroclus, 1844 15 Excess and Accident Photographs by Shawn Michelle Smith 21 Chapter 1 1. James VanDerZee, family portrait, 1926 25 Chapter 2 1. F. Holland Day, The Seven Words, 1898 40 2. F. Holland Day, Crucifixion, 1898 40 3. F. Holland Day, Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit, 1898 42 4. F. Holland Day, It Is Finished, 1898 43

5. John Lamprey, front view of Malayan male, c. 1868–69 46 6. F. Holland Day, The Return to Earth, 1908 48 7. F. Holland Day, The Vision, 1907 49 8. F. Holland Day, St. Sebastian (close-­up), 1906 51 9. F. Holland Day, portrait of Nicola Giancola, c. 1906 52 10. F. Holland Day, Ebony and Ivory, c. 1897 54 11. F. Holland Day, Menelek, 1897 56 12. F. Holland Day, African Chief, 1896 or 1897 57 13. F. Holland Day, An Ethiopian Chief, c. 1897 58 14. F. Holland Day, Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty, 1896 59 15. F. Holland Day, Armageddon, c. 1900 60 16. F. Holland Day’s Sacred Subjects, Royal Photographic Society, London, 1900 61 17. Frederick Evans, portrait of F. Holland Day in Algerian robes, 1901 64 18. Clarence H. White, portrait of F. Holland Day with male nude, c. 1897 66 19. F. Holland Day, crucifixion with two Roman soldiers, 1898 68 20. Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day in his London darkroom, 1900 70 My Muybridge Artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith 73 Chapter 3 1. Eadweard J. Muybridge, horses, running, 1881 76 2. Eadweard J. Muybridge, running, full speed, 1884–87 78 3. Eadweard J. Muybridge, walking, 1884–87 79 4. Eadweard J. Muybridge, on guard, walking, and turning around, 1884–87 82 5. Eadweard J. Muybridge, striking a blow (right hand), 1884–87 84 6. Eadweard J. Muybridge, boxing, open hand, 1884–87 85 7. Eadweard J. Muybridge, ascending stairs, looking round, waving hand’chief, 1884–87 87 8. Eadweard J. Muybridge, turning, ascending stairs, bucket water in r. hand, 1884–87 87 9. Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, one pouring bucket of water over eight, 1884–87 88 10. Eadweard J. Muybridge, toilet, two models, one disrobing eight, 1884–87 90 11. Eadweard J. Muybridge, toilet, sitting and putting on stockings, 1884–87 93 12. Eadweard J. Muybridge, getting into bed, 1884–87 93 13. William H. Rau, After the Opera: Dropping the Skirt, c. 1900 94 14. William H. Rau, Chicken Salad and Oysters after the Matinee, c. 1901 94 15. Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, eight brings cup of tea, one takes cup and drinks, 1884–87 96 16. Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, one standing, the other sitting, crossing legs, 1884–87 96 17. Eadweard J. Muybridge, wrestling, Graeco-­Roman, 1884–87 97 x — Illustrations

Chapter 4 1. Andrew J. Russell, 59 No Construction Train at End of Track Gen Casement’s Outfit Gen in Foreground, c. 1868 102 2. Andrew J. Russell, Major Russell’s Bedroom, Uintas, number 240, 1869 104 3. Andrew J. Russell, Echo City, from Witches Rock, 1868–70 106 4. Andrew J. Russell, Deep Cut, No. 1 West of Wilhelmina Pass, Weber Cañon, 1868–70 108 5. Andrew J. Russell, Shadow Lake, Uintas, 1868–70 109 6. Andrew J. Russell, Carmichael’s Cut, Granite Cañon, 1869 112 7. Andrew J. Russell, Granite Cañon, from the Water Tank, 1869 113 8. Andrew J. Russell, Dale Creek Bridge, from Above, 1869 114 9. Andrew J. Russell, Laramie Hotel, Laramie City, 1869 115 10. Andrew J. Russell, The Wind Mill at Laramie, 1869 116 11. Andrew J. Russell, Source of the Laramie River, 1869 118 12. Andrew J. Russell, On the Mountains of Green River, 1869 119 13. Andrew J. Russell, 227 East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, May 10, 1869 121 14. Andrew J. Russell, military railroad operations in northern Virginia: men using levers for loosening rails, c. 1862 or 1863 124 15. Andrew J. Russell, Residence of Brigham Young, 1869 126 When the Train Rolls In Photographs by Shawn Michelle Smith 129 Chapter 5 1. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Old Pillsbury Homestead, Willowdale Farm, Kingfield, Maine 132 2. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, The Home of Paul Revere, Boston, 1920 134 3. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Lucy Butts Carville spinning, West New Portland, Maine, c. 1910 137 4. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, attic view, West New Portland, Maine, c. 1909 137 5. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, aunt Hannah and aunt Abigail, 1898–99 138 6. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Isaac husking corn, Kingfield, Maine, c. 1901 139 7. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, uncle Tristram G. Norton shelling corn with Dorothy, Kingfield, Maine, 1901 139 8. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, The Coming of Mechanization, Kingfield, Maine, 1906 140 9. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, loading hay 140 10. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, plowed field 141 11. Wallace Nutting, from Vermont Beautiful, 1922 143 12. Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race—Navaho, c. 1904 145 13. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Appalachia cabin, 1897 146 Illustrations — xi

14. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Private Carriage, 1897 149 15. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, plantation cabins, South Carolina, 1926 150 16. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, No Maam! I Don’t Want My Picture Taken, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926 151 17. Anonymous, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons photographing the Felder family, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926 152 18. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, the Felder family, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926 154 19. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, man on horseback, Dorothy in the background (cropped), Charleston, South Carolina, 1926 155 20. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, landscape view, river and mountains 156 21. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Dorothy in the woods, c. 1905 157 22. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, landscape view, trees and river 158 23. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Dorothy and Berenice in Old Patriarch 160 24. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, To Live in Beauty 161 Chapter 6 1. John Brown, Daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, c. 1846–47 166 2. Augustus Washington, Sarah Taintor Bulkeley Waterman, c. 1853 169 3. Augustus Washington, Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, c. 1853 171 4. Augustus Washington, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, c. 1852 171 5. The Washington Daguerrean Gallery, broadside, 1851 173 6. Advertisement from the Hartford Daily Courant, October 8, 1852 177 7. View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, unidentified artist after daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, 1856 183 8. Augustus Washington, Urias Africanus McGill, c. 1854 185 9. Augustus Washington, unidentified woman (McGill family member), c. 1854 185 10. Augustus Washington, Beverly Page Yates, c. 1857 187 11. Augustus Washington, James B. Yates, c. 1857 188 12. Augustus Washington, Edward Morris, c. 1857 188 13. Augustus Washington, James Skivring Smith, c. 1857 188 14. Augustus Washington, Edward James Roye, c. 1857 189 In the Crowd Artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith 193 Chapter 7 1. Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, October 25, 2003 196 2. Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 8, 2003 199 3. Cpl. Charles Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 7, 2003 204 4. The hooded man, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 4, 2003 206 5. Abu Ghraib Prison, November 2003 207

xii — Illustrations

6. The rescue of Spc. Shoshana Johnson, April 2003 209 7. Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 4, 2003 211 Untitled (Abu Ghraib) Artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith 213

Illustrations — xiii

Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to many people and institutions. A Roger Brown Residency, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, helped me to write a key piece of the book, and a Faculty Enrichment Grant from saic enabled me to secure essential images and reproduction permissions. For supporting my research on chapter 5, I would like to thank the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England and the Stanley Museum, in Kingfield, Maine, especially Jennifer Tuttle, Cally Gurley, and Jim Merrick. I am grateful for the opportunity to present work in progress at the following institutions and conferences: Department of Eng­ lish, University of Louisville; Critical Issues Speaker Series, University of Connecticut; Center for African American Studies, Princeton University; Humanities Research Center, Rice University; Cultural Studies Department, Columbia College, Chicago; Maine Historical Society; Department of Art History, University of Texas; Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University; Department of History, Northern Illinois University; Bavarian American Academy, Munich; Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego; Visual Culture Workshop, University of Michigan; Department of English, University of Kentucky; Photofolks Working Group, Toronto; University of Illinois, Chicago; Department of English, University of Missouri; American Studies Department, Rutgers University; College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University; Gender in the Archive Workshop, University of Michigan; Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association; Cultural

Studies Association; Great Lakes American Studies Association; Visual Culture Center, University of Wisconsin; American Studies Department, Saint Louis University; Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, Hatfield College, University of Durham, England; and Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England. For these conversations I would especially like to thank Jeff Clymer, Elspeth Brown, Susan Griffin, Ellen Rosenman, Erika Doss, Jill Casid, Cherise Smith, Martha Cutter, Anne Cheng, Caroline Levander, Jaafar Aksikas, Curtis Marez, Saidiya Hartman, Heide Fehrenbach, Christof Decker, Volker Depkat, Michael Davidson, David Serlin, Sara Blair, Matthew Mancini, Susanne Wiedemann, Andrea Noble, Jonathan Long, Edward Welch, and Jennifer Tuttle. Chapter 1 was originally published in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, edited by Jonathan Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2009), 98–111, and reprinted in Photography Degree Zero, edited by Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge: mit Press, 2009), 243–58. An earlier version of chapter 5 was first published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 346–69, and reprinted in an extended version in American Photography, edited by Bettina Gockel in collaboration with Patrizia Munforte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012). An earlier version of chapter 6 was published in Visual Cultures—Transatlantic Perspectives, edited by Volker Depkat (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012). Chapter 7 was originally published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 20 (2006): 72–85. I am grateful to all for permission to reprint these pieces here. I am amazed by the rigor and brilliance of the women in my writing group, Jennifer Cole, Judy Farquhar, and Maud Ellman, and indebted to them for reading almost every piece of this book. Sharon Sliwinski helped me sort out the introduction and imagine the next project, and Patrick Rivers, Kai Mah, and Maud Lavin offered insightful comments on one of the chapters. I have had the pleasure of working with wonderful students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; their work and critical conversations are a constant source of inspiration. Several colleagues and friends close to home have helped make the whole thing worthwhile: Kym Pinder, Amy Mooney, Patrick Rivers, Kai Mah, Geof Bradfield, Mark Caughey, Kelly McKaig, Bruce Riley, Romi Crawford, Jim Elkins, Margaret MacNamidhe, Sara Levine, Chris Gaggero, and Terri Kapsalis—thank you. And one more round for Kym, Amy, and Romi and the writing group that wasn’t. xvi — Acknowledgments

It has been a pleasure and a thrill to work with Ken Wissoker. He helped frame the book in important ways, and I am grateful for his wisdom and guidance throughout the review process. I would also like to thank Jade Brooks for her patience in answering countless questions. I am indebted to my family for their unwavering support and for pulling me away from time to time just for fun: thank you Sandy, Jay, and Shannon Smith, Derek Hutchinson, Haley, and Dylan. My deepest gratitude goes to Joe Masco, who cared for this project all along the way. He could see it even when I couldn’t, and this book, like so many things, is for him.

Acknowledgments — xvii

Introduction 

First Photographs

The “first photograph” is hard to see. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s pewter plate, produced in 1826, presents an almost indiscernible deep blue shadow. The artifact is on permanent display at the Harry Ransom Center (hrc), at the University of Texas, Austin, and although historians of photography have disputed the hrc’s claim to the first photograph, the plate is, without doubt, one of the earliest extant photographic images, a remarkable survivor from a period of experimentation and innovation. If not the first, it is certainly one of the first. And Niépce’s plate serves a discussion of beginnings well because the elaborate manner in which the hrc has displayed it spectacularly announces a desire for firsts (see plate 1).Visitors to the hrc cannot miss Niépce’s plate. The museum has housed it in its own small viewing room, an ornate modern shrine. There, alone in the darkened room, behind Plexiglas, illuminated from above, sits the first photograph, displayed in an ornamental gold frame. The excess of “aura” produced around the artifact is remarkable. It is presented as a kind of religious relic. I recently made a trip to see this photograph. As I entered the theatrically staged room, a docent darted in after me and proceeded to entertain me with stories about the making and provenance of the photograph, about how it was acquired and transported to the hrc, about how an expert technician maintains the atmosphere of inert gas in which the photograph is encased. As he spoke, I stooped and shifted until I could just barely discern the image I knew to look for, a view from the upper-­story window of Niépce’s studio in his country house, Le Gras, in Saint-­Loup-­de-­Varennes, France. The photo-

graph shows, through a dense atmospheric haze, several architectural shapes—walls and towers and pitched roofs. The geometric forms are stretched at sharp angles, and a trapezoidal roof seems to float, unmoored in the center of the frame. Historians of photography have named these dim shapes: “The picture is framed on the left by the loft of his [Niépce’s] pigeon house and on the right by a wing of the house. In the center is the sloping roof of a barn, with the top of a pear tree rising above it.”1 Perhaps paradoxically, however, all of this is much easier to see in a copy—the copy photograph Helmut Gernsheim commissioned from the research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company in the mid-­twentieth century.2 Or perhaps the fact that a copy is more legible than the original forecasts the future of photography and epitomizes its nature superbly.3 Niépce called his photograph a “heliograph,” the writing of the sun. He made the image on a pewter plate 16.5 centimeters tall by 20.5 centimeters wide and coated with bitumen of Judea, which he exposed for eight hours in a camera with a biconvex lens. He then washed the plate with oil of lavender and petroleum to remove the bitumen not hardened by light.4 What remained fixed to the plate, traced in bitumen on pewter, is the view from his studio window, the view that Niépce must have spent long hours contemplating during the years of his work and experimentation. The image overtly registers the photographer’s point of view, and while all photographs might be said to do so, Niépce’s photograph inscribes his habitual vantage on the world from the very place in which he conjured photography. What is most visibly on display in the hrc’s presentation of the plate is a longing for origins, a desire to claim possession of the first photograph. And, oddly enough, what is perhaps least visible is the image inscribed on the plate itself. If, as Walter Benjamin has suggested, a “fog” “surrounds the beginnings of photography,” obscuring its early history, Niépce’s hazy image seems an appropriate manifestation and metaphor for the origins of the medium.5 Once again, this first photograph is hard to see. Niépce’s plate, and its elaborate framing, unwittingly highlight the limitations of photography even as they herald its beginnings. I am interested in this faulty start because it underscores, at the very heart of photography, both an intense desire, and a failure, to see.6 Most early photographers and commentators marveled at how much photographs did visually record—at how much could be seen in photographs, and how much more, in fact, than was normally seen with the 2 — Introduction

naked human eye. The British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot celebrated the camera’s visual prosthetics even though many of his own extant prints are extraordinarily hard to see. In the 1840s, Talbot devised a reproducible, negative-­positive printing technique, ushering in the form of photography that would dominate its later history, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The hrc boasts a number of Talbot’s early salt prints made from calotype negatives, as well as his famous publication, The Pencil of Nature, the first photo-­illustrated book. After viewing Niépce’s heliograph, I made my way upstairs to the hrc’s extensive photography archive to examine Talbot’s work from the 1840s. There I was sequestered in a separate, darkened room so that I might “see” the prints without damaging them. Talbot’s salt prints are mysterious and compelling, their stealth enhanced by the literal twilight in which they must be examined. They are extremely faded, barely visible stains of deep purple-­blue and amber on yellowed paper.7 It is as if after a century and a half the prints are releasing their images, allowing them to evaporate. Or perhaps they are hoarding the images, permitting them to sink into the paper entirely. Viewing the prints in the dark, one waits for the images to emerge, to gather and deliver themselves into focus. One looks hard, and it is as if the subtle traces of shade and form must first imprint themselves on the retina before they can be seen.8 The faint impressions give one an intense desire to see them, to recapture their fleeting images. The twenty-­four photographic plates included in The Pencil of Nature are much more clearly legible. The images include architectural studies, photographs of statuary, collections of china, glass, and books, scenes from everyday life, copies of prints and text, and contact photographs “directly taken” from lace and leaf, along with accompanying discussions that showcase the technological capabilities of photography. Talbot celebrates the wide range of photography’s potential applications—its capacity to catalogue objects and to aid in genealogical inquiries, its ability to reproduce and alter the scale of texts and other artworks, and to record “scenes of daily and familiar occurrence.”9 Talbot was astonished by the detail recorded in his images, and recommended viewing them with a magnifying glass in order to discover their minutiae: This magnifies the objects two or three times, and often discloses a multitude of minute details, which were previously unobserved and First Photographs — 3

unsuspected. It frequently happens, moreover—and this is one of the charms of photography—that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-­plate is seen, and upon it—­unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view was taken. Plate 13, depicting the entrance gateway to Queen’s College, Oxford, to which this discussion corresponds, does in fact show a clock tower visible in the background, with the time of 2:10 stilled on its face (see introduction figure 1).10 Talbot’s enthusiasm for details “unconsciously recorded” in a photograph resonates powerfully with what Walter Benjamin would later call the “optical unconscious.” Describing the optical unconscious as one of photography’s revelations, Benjamin seized on photography’s ability to make visible what usually evades perception. With “the dynamite of the tenth of a second,” and the expansion of the close-­up, photography revolutionized seeing, making new worlds visible beyond the limits of natural human sight.11 Just as Talbot celebrated the extraordinary detail photographs disclosed when examined with a magnifying glass, Benjamin also marveled at photography’s prosthetic powers: “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.”12 He thus followed photography’s early commentators, nearly a century later, in highlighting photography’s revelatory capabilities.13 But Benjamin’s provocative term, the “optical unconscious,” also underscores the sense that we inhabit a world only ever partially perceived. For Benjamin, photography does not simply disclose elements previously “unobserved,” it also reveals things that never could be seen with the unaided human eye.14 “Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored.”15 As photography shows us more, it also shows us how much we don’t see, how much of ordinary seeing is blind.16 The optical unconscious introduced by photography is a deeply uncanny sensibility, then—it is the revelation and recognition that we inhabit a world unseen. 4 — Introduction

Figure Intr0.1 William Henry Fox Talbot, Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway, plate 13 from The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844).

As Rosalind Krauss has argued in The Optical Unconscious, Benjamin’s articulation of the optical unconscious does not make sense in Freudian terms. For Benjamin, the camera is a kind of prosthesis, “an instrument that enlarges vision,” increasing one’s grasp of the material world. But, as Krauss notes, Freud “is clear that the world over which technical devices extend their power is not one that could, itself, have an unconscious.”17 She parts ways with Benjamin, then, in order to pursue the unconscious “as externalized within the visual field” by a group of artists.18 Krauss is interested first and foremost in the unconscious, and in how artists engage the unconscious, and only secondarily preoccupied with the projection of the unconscious in the realm of the visual. In my engagement of the phrase “the optical unconscious,” I return to Benjamin and to photography. I am interested in the optical side of this equation, in the new frontiers of vision that photography introduced, in the visual world over which the camera extends its power, the visual world that does not, itself, have an unconFirst Photographs — 5

scious. Photography expanded the realm of the visible, but it also exposed its limits, both physiological and technological. Enabling one to see more, it simultaneously demonstrated how little is ordinarily visible, giving one the unnerving sense of living in a world only partially perceived. Here, then, the optical unconscious is the recognition of ordinary blindness—the revelation of an unseen world that photography does not fully disclose, but makes us aware of it in its invisibility. Photography brings into view what Avery Gordon has called “a kind of visible invisibility.”19 It draws us to the edge of sight. Benjamin himself parts ways with Freud in the very gesture in which he invokes the unconscious to explain the camera’s technological reach. He differentiates what he calls the “optical unconscious” from what he deems Freud’s “instinctual unconscious” by setting them up as parallel but different structures: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”20 If psychoanalysis discovers the (instinctual) unconscious, a psychic process the conscious mind cannot know, photography discovers the optical unconscious, a visual dynamic the eye cannot see. As the (instinctual) unconscious remains unknown, so the optical unconscious remains unseen. Just as Freud took recourse in visual metaphors to explain the unconscious, Benjamin borrowed the language of psychoanalysis to explain the unseen that photography makes us aware of in its invisibility.21 In my own gestures toward that invisible realm, I will choose less psychoanalytically laden terms to describe the sense of the unseen that photography introduces, in order ultimately to maintain the distinctions Benjamin (and Krauss) recognize between the (instinctual) unconscious and the optical unconscious. Siegfried Kracauer also proposed that one of photography’s (and film’s) most striking characteristics is its capacity to “reveal things normally unseen.”22 Such things include “the small and the big,” “the transient,” and, most compellingly, “blind spots of the mind.”23 For Kracauer, as for Benjamin, the camera discloses details and captures motion that the unaided eye cannot see, making one newly aware of hidden worlds. But Kracauer’s blind spots of the mind also include those things that “habit and prejudice prevent us from noticing.”24 In other words, blind spots of the mind are the cultural, not simply physical, bars to seeing that photography exposes. The camera reveals in such blind spots “unconventional complexes,” which ordinarily go unnoticed, “the refuse,” and “the famil6 — Introduction

iar,” or what one knows “by heart and therefore not by sight.”25 As Miriam Hansen has argued, Kracauer turns to photography not only for its capacity to visually record the world, but also for its ability to denaturalize the world we normally see: “If Kracauer seeks to ground his film aesthetics in the medium of photography, it is because photographic representation has the perplexing ability not only to resemble the world it depicts but also to render it strange, to destroy habitual fictions of self-­identity and familiarity.”26 The camera enables one to see the ordinary and the extraordinary. It can pursue “phenomena overwhelming consciousness,” such as “the atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror,” and “special modes of reality,” as perceived by “individuals in extreme states of mind.”27 The camera sees beyond the physical and the cultural limitations of sight. In pushing beyond and revealing new limits to human sight, photography also demonstrated that vision itself was not a stable, but a shifting capacity, technologically, culturally, and historically determined. Indeed, as Jonathan Crary has argued powerfully, by the time of photography’s advent, in the early nineteenth century, vision itself had undergone a profound reconceptualization in the Western world. No longer the elevated, abstracted capacity of an observer separated from the visual field, as exemplified by the camera obscura, vision was newly understood to be an embodied, physiological process.28 What I aim to describe here, following Benjamin and Crary, is a further destabilization of vision, a historically new recognition of limitations, failures, and blind spots in seeing that photography as a visual technology paradoxically introduced. As Martin Jay proclaims, “The invention of the camera” was “the most extraordinary technical innovation in vision during the nineteenth century, indeed perhaps in all of human history,” and photographs incontestably expanded “the range of human visual experience” in extraordinary ways. However, the invention of the camera also helped “undermine confidence in the authority of the eyes.”29 As Benjamin’s description of the optical unconscious suggests, the viewer posited by photography was made newly aware not only of new visual realms, but also of all one could not, and did not, see. My understanding of vision as a physiological process, of seeing and sight, is also always that of what Hal Foster has deemed “visuality,” of “sight as a social fact.”30 In concert with scholars of visual culture, my analysis participates in the critical work that W. J. T. Mitchell describes as “showing seeing,” but it attempts to show “not seeing” as well, and specifically to explore the dynamics of seeing and not seeing introduced by photography.31 First Photographs — 7

Questions about seeing readily open onto larger philosophical discussions about the nature of knowing, and even being, but my ambitions in this book are more discreetly focused. I am interested in how such questions, introduced by photography, subsequently invite us to look differently at photographs as historical and cultural artifacts. What resides at the literal and metaphorical edge of the photograph? What remains just outside the frame? What cannot be seen because the photographer does not focus on it? What cannot be seen because cultural discourses and habits of thought obscure it? What simply does not register photographically? Photography revolutionized perception, making the invisible visible. But as it enlarged the visual world, bringing new things into sight, it also demonstrated how much ordinarily remains imperceptible. In other words, photography revealed the limitations of human sight even as it offered its prosthetic compensation. Further, as it extended the realm of the visible, photography also suggested that some things would remain forever out of sight. Just as vision is not endlessly expandable, photography has its own limitations. The exposure photography proffers is the recognition of a world paradoxically visible in its invisibility. Photography brushes against the unseen, and photographs bring us to the edge of sight.

The Spirit of Photography No photographic genre better manifests a desire to see beyond the limits of natural human sight than spirit photography. Spirit photographs purport to document an occult world inaccessible to human senses. Metaphor and material at once, these photographs epitomize the uncanny sensibility of the optical unconscious. In the nineteenth century, spirit photographers seized upon the idea that the camera could capture worlds beyond sight, and they purported to mechanically reveal what the eye alone could not see. But these entrepreneurs did not limit themselves to the material world; instead, they expanded the idea of photography’s revelatory powers to the spiritual realm of the dead. If photography demonstrated that the camera could “see” and record what the human eye could not, spirit photography proposed that the camera could see and record other things hidden from natural sight, such as ghosts and spirits (see introduction figure 2).32 Interest in spirit photography was widely encouraged by the advent and spread of Spiritualism in the United States and Europe in the mid-­ 8 — Introduction

Figure Intr0.2 William H. Mumler, John J. Glover, 1862–75. Albumen silver print, 9.5 × 5.7 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

nineteenth century.33 Belief in ghosts and spirits was nothing new; what distinguished Spiritualism was an attempt to prove the existence of spirits through observable, verifiable, scientific means. Spiritualists did not relegate ghosts to the supernatural, but instead counted them part of the natural world and aimed to make communication with spirits “a matter of empirical scientific investigation.”34 As their aim was to verify the presence of spirits, Spiritualists concentrated their efforts on spirit manifestations, focused around a medium. Manifestations were thought to provide evidence of spirit existence through rapping, automatic writing, possession, and the transportation of objects.35 From its beginnings, in 1848, with the revelations of the Fox sisters, who proclaimed they could communicate with spirits through rapping, Spiritualism was dominated by auditory communication between mediums and the spirit world, as spirits communicated with the living via sound, through knocking and speech. Spiritualists believed that spirits literally communicated through mediums, inhabiting the bodies and commanding the voices of receptive young women to speak to the living.36 However, according to the historian Molly McGarry, by the 1870s a “second wave of Spiritualism” marked “a shift from sound to vision . . . paralleling new developments in photography.”37 Increasingly, spirits had to be seen to be believed, and séances in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth centered on the visual apparitions and traces of ghosts. The proof of spiritual presence was increasingly measured in visual terms, and photography was called upon to record evanescent spirit appearances signaled through the bodily discharges of mediums. While photographs of mediums were designed to record the ephemeral but visible residues of spiritual contact marked on the medium’s body, spirit photographs suggested that the camera and the photographic emulsion were themselves “mediums” through which spirits manifested themselves. Unlike “documentary” photographs of mediums and séances, spirit photographs constituted a distinct genre of studio portraiture, in which sitters were “visited” by the spirits of the dead, made visible in portraits as wispy white specters. Spirit photographers did not proclaim to see ghosts themselves, nor did they suggest that clients would be able to see ghosts in their studios. Instead, they proposed that the camera could capture and impress onto sensitive photographic emulsion traces of beings that could not be seen by the human eye. Like photography’s early commentators, and Benjamin later, they argued that the camera and photograph could 10 — Introduction

capture more than the naked eye could see, simply extending such claims beyond the natural world, to suggest that the camera opened onto a supernatural realm. In 1861, William H. Mumler began to make spirit photographs in Boston with the help of his clairvoyant wife, Hannah.38 Enthusiastic clients sat for portraits in his studio and received images of themselves with a spirit “extra.”39 At first glance, Mumler’s spirit photographs appear to be rather conventional carte-­de-­visite or cabinet card portraits. They present men and women posed in front of a plain studio background, seated, photographed from the waist up, turned at an angle to the camera, and looking off to the side of the photographic frame. An unusually large expanse of space is left above or to the side of the seated individual, and upon closer inspection one sees that this space is occupied by the ghostly white shadow of another figure. In many of the images, this nearly transparent figure seems to lean in to embrace the more solid subject of the photograph (see plate 2). Mumler’s spirit photography generated a sizeable profit. Several years after he began his work in Boston he opened a studio in New York, near P. T. Barnum’s museum on lower Broadway. Demand for the images was so great that Mumler charged “ten dollars per sitting” “at a time when standard photographs were selling for about a quarter apiece.”40 Business went well until 1869, when Mumler was arrested and charged with fraud. The trial became a testing ground not only for spirit photography but also for Spiritualism.41 Photographers and Spiritualists alike testified at the trial, with most photographers weighing in for the prosecution, and Spiritualists witnessing for the defense. P. T. Barnum, an “expert” in trickery and a critic of spirit photography, was called to testify for the prosecution.42 The judge finally ruled in favor of Mumler, declaring that although he believed spirit photography was a fraud and deception, the prosecution had failed to make a convincing case.43 The press, which followed the trial closely, represented the judgment as a triumph for Spiritualists and even for spirits themselves.44 Not all spirit photographers fared as well as Mumler in the courts. Nevertheless, the will to believe in spirit photography remained powerful. Even after the famous French spirit photographer Édouard Isidore Buguet was convicted of fraud, and exposed the process of his deception in court by describing how he made his images, many of his clients persisted in proclaiming the veracity of his spirit photographs.45 After his conviction, First Photographs — 11

Buguet reopened shop as an “anti-­spirit” photographer and employed the same techniques to produce the same kind of images for the amusement of a new clientele.46 For the consumers of antispirit photographs, veracity was not what made spirit photographs interesting; instead, they appreciated the images as pure entertainment, enjoying the performative hoax, and taking pleasure in the trick. Other nonbelieving enthusiasts embraced spirit photographs as memento mori, using them to remember the dead and to express their own continued bonds of affection for and devotion to the departed.47 One did not need to believe in the actual appearance of spirits on film to see in spirit photographs a register of the felt presence of absent loved ones. The representation, rather than record, of spiritual presence was a kind of comfort in itself.48 To twenty-­first-­century eyes, the trick of double exposure seems so obvious that it is hard to imagine anyone ever believed spirit photographs actually registered the presence of spirits. However, through an interesting acrobatics of logic, some Spiritualists were able to account for double exposures as the techniques of spirits rather than the deception of photographers. They argued that the departed used photographs of their former selves to communicate with the living in a recognizable form. As Tom Gunning explains, Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, a prominent Spiritualist, declared that a spirit photograph should not be taken as a representation of a spirit per se, but rather as “ a reproduction of the former mortal form with its terrestrial accompaniments for the purpose of recognition. ” 49 In other words, a spirit photograph could not be considered representative in the usual way. It did not record a spirit, but instead reproduced the once recognizable image of a now invisible presence. If a disembodied spirit could no longer use the body as a communicative medium, it could use the image of its formerly embodied self, a kind of afterimage, to communicate with the living. In this context, Mumler’s photographs of spirits communing with photographs of clients are particularly compelling. In one image, Mr. Chapin Oil Merchant—& His Spirit Wife & Babe Recognized, a small dark table protrudes into the photographic frame, its decoratively carved underside standing out in relief against a cloudy gray background (see introduction figure 3). At the edge of the table, a small statuette of a boy appears to hold an ornately framed photographic portrait of a man in a top hat. The center of the larger photographic frame is dominated by an ethereal white 12 — Introduction

Figure Intr0.3 William H. Mumler, Mr. Chapin Oil Merchant—& His Spirit Wife & Babe Recognized, 1862–75. Albumen silver print, no size given. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

image of a woman holding an infant. Both are draped in white robes that dissolve into the mist at the bottom of the image. The woman and infant seem to lean toward and gaze lovingly upon the small portrait on the table. According to Molly McGarry, “When clients were unable to come in person to his studio, Mumler asked that they send photographs of themselves to be photographed.”50 Such doubled images suggest that communication takes place between images, in representation, through a trading of visual signs. If spirits used images of themselves to communicate with the living, the living might also use images of themselves to communicate with the dead. Presence could be marked by an image of images, and communication could happen through the circulation of shared signs. Spirit photography underlines the uncanny nature of the optical unconscious, highlighting the unnerving sense that we live in a world unseen. This historical practice exaggerates and exemplifies the ways photographers grasp at the invisible—at what is absent, past, ephemeral, eclipsed. Photographs reside at the brink of the visible world, drawing into awareness what lies beyond.

The Visibility and Invisibility of Race As photographs bring more into view, they also reinforce the invisibility of some things by overtly focusing on others. What is not represented is further obscured. And in any case there is no guarantee that what is captured photographically will actually be seen, because, as Kracauer reminds us, seeing is shaped by cultural forces and the psychic reflexes of viewers. As Irit Rogoff has argued, looking and seeing are always culturally circumscribed: “What the eye purportedly ‘sees’ is dictated to it by an entire set of beliefs and desires.”51 Willful repressions and unwitting blind spots, both personal and collective, limit what can and can’t be seen. In the United States, race has been one of the cultural inscriptions most defined by a dynamic of revelation and obfuscation, of hypervisibility and invisibility. As many scholars have argued, blackness has been misrecognized in the spectacles of white fantasy, and whiteness has often existed in privileged invisibility.52 Indeed, whiteness emerges as a racial category most forcefully when one sees what is ordinarily obscured. As Richard Dyer has argued, whiteness is a cultural category veiled from “ordinary” sight that emerges as one recognizes the obfuscating power of normativity. 14 — Introduction

Figure Intr0.4 William Henry Fox Talbot, Bust of Patroclus, plate 5 from The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844).

Dyer has demonstrated that photographic technologies were developed to secure idealized representations of whiteness; film and lighting were gauged and adapted to register the white face.53 Even Talbot, in 1844, noted that white objects make especially felicitous subjects for the “new art” of photography. He devotes two of twenty-­four plates in The Pencil of Nature to alternate views of a bust of Patroclus, stating, “Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly, in consequence of their whiteness”54 (see introduction figure 4). White things reflect light more readily than dark things, and therefore they require shorter exposure times, a matter of some import to photography’s early practitioners. From the beginnings of photography, First Photographs — 15

then, white objects were sought-­after subjects that seemed to naturally accord with the new technology. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the literal whiteness of material objects blurred into the cultural whiteness of subjects, as photography played a central role in establishing race as a cultural identity that could be seen in new ways. As scientists made race observable in bodies of color, using photography to encode and inscribe race in physiognomy and physiology, commercial studio photographers made the whiteness of their primary subjects simply pass unnoticed as “normal” and “natural.” The practices of race scientists and commercial studio photographers converged to distinguish blackness from whiteness, making one increasingly visible as “race” and the other increasingly invisible as “race.”55 As portraits of white people became ubiquitous, whiteness itself paradoxically faded from view, into the cultural blind spot of normativity. Whiteness is therefore part of photography’s revelation of the invisible, and whiteness emerges into and recedes from sight in a wide range of photographs.

At the Edge of Sight engages the dynamics of seeing and not seeing, of seeing the unseen, and of seeing that we don’t see that photography sets forth. This book does not aim to establish a method exactly, but a means of approach, a sensibility toward the revelations and limitations of photography. Each chapter studies a different manifestation of photography’s brush with the unseen: the punctum, desire, the space between frames, the foreground blurred by velocity, nostalgia, the civil contract, and cultural repression. Most of the chapters focus on early American photographers and their work across the domains of scientific, artistic, and commercial photography. This diverse group, including F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Augustus Washington, showcases the multiplicity of photographic practice in the United States in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This book begins with a close reading of one of the most influential texts in the study of photography, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Chapter 1 focuses on Barthes’s perplexing attempts to define what he calls the punctum, an element in a photograph that launches the viewer beyond the photograph itself. Barthes declares that the punctum is inaccessible to analysis, but a careful reading of his text suggests that his own inexplicable 16 — Introduction

responses to photographs are informed by deep-­seated cultural anxieties about race and sexuality. The cultural knowledge of the studium informs his punctum responses, and race and reproduction emerge as Barthes’s own blind spots. Chapter 2 expands upon the themes of race and sexuality introduced in the discussion of Camera Lucida by turning to F. Holland Day’s pictorialist photography. The chapter proposes that Day’s pictorial aesthetics unsettle photographic denotation, extending the bounds of photographic representation beyond the material world. With symbolism and soft focus, Day manipulated photographic indexicality in order to represent ineffable desire. He embraced photography to see beyond the visible world. Reading closely Day’s extraordinary work at the turn of the twentieth century, including his self-­crucifixion photographs, the Orpheus series, and his black male nudes, I argue that Day used pictorial aesthetics to reframe bodies captured by scientific discourses. Ultimately Day’s photographs challenge scientific visual authority and encode a subjective homoerotic desire. Race and sexuality, as well as science and art, continue to be overt themes in chapter 3, which focuses on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies. Here the “space between” photographic frames operates as the central metaphor, and what is not seen in the images becomes as important as what is. Notable among the things not seen in Muybridge’s motion studies is motion itself—it can only be inferred in the space between frames. As those spaces demand interpretation, as they require filling in, so too do they invite leaps of imagination. This chapter accepts that invitation and experiments in imagining other things that are not visible in the photographs, such as the thoughts and perspective of one of Muybridge’s models. Photography intersected with other technologies of perception in the nineteenth century, and chapter 4 explores its connection to the train. Most obviously a means of transportation, the train was also a viewing apparatus that introduced new forms of perception. The train initiated a new kind of distant panoramic vision, but as it did so it also made it impossible to see what was close at hand, rushing by at great speeds. It relegated the foreground to invisibility. This chapter examines the photographs that preceded the train, making visible the view along the tracks that the train would soon obliterate. It studies Andrew J. Russell’s photographs of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, looking at the views that made First Photographs — 17

way for the train, as well as the cultural blind spots created by that visual mapping. Even as Russell’s photographs revealed what the train obscured, they also performed their own obfuscations. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons also photographed views obscured by industrial progress. With a nostalgic impulse she re-­created pastoral scenes long outmoded by the early twentieth century. Her photographs perform temporal disruptions, staging pictures of the past, and thereby present subjects doubly removed in time. Chapter 5 examines Emmons’s nostalgic, agrarian visions, showing how her photographs of rural life made claims on a racialized American heritage rooted in the land. Emmons idealized the Northern family farm, and she used its image to measure the exploitation of tenant farming in the South. In her efforts to stage an agrarian ideal and critique tenant farming, Emmons also struggled against the limitations of photography and endeavored to expand the range of things the camera could make visible. As her nostalgic views troubled the temporality of the photograph, her lantern slides extended the camera’s visual compass. Ultimately, Emmons sought to make visible a distinctly American mythology of an idealized, agrarian past. Photography’s role in national imaginings is amplified through a study of Augustus Washington’s American and Liberian daguerreotypes from the mid-­nineteenth century. Beginning with Washington’s striking portrait of John Brown, chapter 6 considers the encounter between subject and photographer and the civil contract forged between them. It argues that Washington employed daguerreotypy to represent self-­possession, the racialized foundation of state-­recognized citizenship. His daguerreotypes perform citizenship; they become sites through which national identity can be both imagined and claimed. Whereas Emmons looked backward to envision a national ideal, Washington looked forward, using daguerreotypy to foresee a nation yet to come. His images grasp at the invisible, struggling to manifest new social contracts. Finally, his images make palpable photography’s own blind spot, calling on us to recognize the photographer behind his camera, to perceive the invisible conjurer of subjects and nations. The final chapter brings many of the themes studied in this book into the near present. It takes as its subject the grim digital photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, and tries to understand the power of their unprecedented dispersal. The chapter argues that part of their disruptive force was due to the way they seemed to recall what was repressed, to reproduce culturally suppressed images of lynching from an Ameri18 — Introduction

can past. In the Abu Ghraib photographs, it was as if the ghosts of white women, in whose names lynching was condoned, had returned in distorted form in the figure of Pfc. Lynndie England. This final chapter ties together the threads of race, gender, sexuality, and national imaginings studied throughout the book and demonstrates how photography’s revelations and obfuscations can have disturbing political import. At the Edge of Sight explores the promise and limitations of photography, its capacity to make the invisible visible and to reveal what we don’t see. The book aims to keep photography’s revelatory powers in focus, while also attending to its blind spots. Interspersed throughout the text are visual pauses that present my own photographic work, engaging indirectly questions and strategies examined explicitly in the chapters. These visual focal points are not meant to illustrate theory, but to function as theoretical propositions themselves. In many ways my visual practice follows that of photography’s early commentators. I seize upon the details recorded in photographs, enlarging them and making visible what lies at the limits of natural sight. Further, I try to capture the uncanny sense of living in a world unseen that photography impresses upon us. The details at the edges of photographs are shadows that hover on the brink of invisibility; they are nearly indiscernible peripheral forms that haunt our vision. This visual work is another way I have pursued photography’s revelation of the unseen, by variously focusing on the extraordinary or extraneous detail, reanimating stilled time, exploring the intersection of photography with other technologies, and teasing out the cultural discourses that enable and inhibit seeing. Ultimately, this work is my attempt to understand photography through photography, to follow its directives and clues to seeing what resides at the edge of sight.

First Photographs — 19

Excess and Accident Photographs capture more than their intended subjects. Unwanted or unnoticed things sneak into the frame. People and animals walk in front of the lens. Discarded objects litter yards. Crowds disrupt clear compositions. As photography’s early inventors discovered, the camera records what falls before the lens, regardless of the photographer’s wishes. I am drawn to the people, objects, and shadows that populate the edges of family photographs, the details that were overlooked by photographers, the unintended subjects of snapshots. Such unanticipated details offer an unusual record of everyday life recorded in family snapshots.

Photographs by Shawn Michelle Smith

Chapter 1 Race

and Reproduction in Camera Lucida

In his influential study of photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously makes himself the measure of photographic meaning.1 The book is his attempt “to formulate the fundamental feature” of photography “starting from a few personal impulses” (8–9). In other words, Barthes seeks to discover the essential characteristics of photography through his own particular responses to images. It is this profoundly personal treatment of photography that lends Camera Lucida both its most evocative power and its most frustrating limitations. Barthes’s text has been tremendously important and generative, both theoretically and methodologically, for photography scholars. As his work has demonstrated, the personal can be a powerful point of departure for critical analysis, but as feminist scholars have insisted for decades, “the personal is political.”2 Reconsidering Barthes’s individual and idiosyncratic path to the universal in Camera Lucida reveals the political import of his “personal impulses.” A close reading of the text suggests that many of Barthes’s most important insights are informed by complicated, and sometimes vexing, personal-­political inclinations. Indeed, Barthes’s very conception of photography is laden with anxieties about race and reproduction.3 Barthes’s attempts to define the punctum consistently register a sensation of racial or sexual inquietude. Further, although the punctum is triggered by the photograph, it ultimately has little to do with the image itself. It is an inexplicable response called forth by a photograph, and its troubling, unsettling effect is always a shock

and surprise. Barthes argues that the punctum “is a kind of subtle beyond— as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see” (59), and for him, the punctum is consistently that detail, that something in a photograph, that triggers a relay of thoughts and emotions back into his personal history. The punctum is the trace that launches Barthes beyond the that-­has-­been of the photograph, beyond the photograph’s referential denotation, beyond what can be seen, and into his own memory and experience. The punctum unsettles the fixity of the image, making it available to Barthes’s private narrative.

The Punctum Barthes defines the punctum in distinction to the studium. As many scholars have rehearsed, he suggests that the studium includes the cultural knowledge that informs one’s reading of a photograph; the studium is shaped by “a certain training” (26) that effects a culturally prescribed reading of a given visual field. The punctum is a much more personal response to certain details in the photograph that “wound” or pierce an individual viewer, punctuating, or breaking through the trained reading of the studium (25–27). Barthes proclaims, “In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me.” He thereby suggests that the punctum cannot be codified or predicted for any individual viewer. As readers of Barthes’s text, however, we can assess the examples he uses to describe the punctum, and note the subtle patterns that inform them. In a salient example, Barthes explains the workings of the punctum through his reaction to a photograph by James VanDerZee, a group portrait made in 1926 (see figure 1.1). His studium description of the image is notably condescending: he states that the photograph “utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man’s attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naïveté)” (43). Barthes’s explanation of the studium is laden with a paternal racism that readers are asked to ignore in pursuit of that which really interests him, the punctum. He calls upon the studium as if it is apparent, transparent, as if this lovely formal portrait could not be read in any other way, as if all readers would share his bemused reaction to the image and its subjects. While Barthes’s reading might certainly be attributed to a predictable set of European cultural codes, readers are not asked to “see” those codes as part and parcel of the studium, but instead to see 24 — Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 James VanDerZee, family portrait, 1926. © Donna Mussenden VanDerZee.

through them to the meaning Barthes presumes. In other words, Camera Lucida asks readers to view a race-­based paternalism as natural, or beside the point, rather than as a culturally codified part of the studium to be put under examination. The foundation from which Barthes moves to a discussion of the punctum, his studium reading of the photograph by VanDerZee, is thus perplexing, and his extended rumination on the punctum vis-­à-­vis this photograph is also curious. Considering the image further, Barthes proposes that Race and Reproduction — 25

what truly interests him in the image, the punctum, the details that prick him, are the strapped pumps worn by the woman who stands in the photograph. He notes: “Strange to say . . . this particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness” (43). Here the shiny shoes of an unnamed woman provide the inexplicable something that compels him and captures his imagination. But then the punctum shifts. Recalling the photograph in a later explanation of the punctum as latent, as the detail that haunts the viewer only after the image itself is no longer under view, only after it has been transformed into a visual memory, Barthes muses: “Reading Van der Zee’s photograph, I thought I had discerned what moved me: the strapped pumps of the black woman in her Sunday best; but this photograph has worked within me, and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing; for (no doubt) it was this same necklace (a slender ribbon of braided gold) which I had seen worn by someone in my own family, and which, once she died, remained shut up in a family box of old jewelry (this sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life). I had just realized that however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accommodate a certain latency (but never any scrutiny)” (53). In Barthes’s memory, a woman’s strapped pumps transmute into the punctum of her necklace, “a slender ribbon of braided gold” that resembles a necklace worn by Barthes’s aunt. And yet, if one refuses to rely on Barthes’s recollection of the VanDerZee photograph, and turns to look at it again, one finds that both of the women in the photograph wear necklaces, but they are pearl necklaces, not the ribbons of braided gold that prick Barthes. What, then, is the punctum? Barthes says, “It is what I add to the photograph,” but it is also “what is nonetheless already there.” And yet here it would seem that “what is there” in the photograph, the actual detail (the pearl necklace), can be obfuscated by what Barthes brings to the photograph (the ribbon of braided gold). That which pierces the surface of the photograph may not be visible in the image itself.4 Indeed, the punctum may refer to an entirely subjective signification system. Surely Barthes’s failure to remember precisely the attributes of a piece of jewelry is a slight offense; it is, however, indicative of a much more fundamental interpretive slippage, whereby personal connotation can efface representational denotation through the mechanism of the punctum. Gold 26 — Chapter 1

ribbons displace pearl necklaces, and French aunts efface African American women. One is left to wonder whether this erasure, effected by the punctum, is in part a result of the studium, of a race-­based paternalism that can disregard an African American woman’s self-­representation as trite. The people represented in VanDerZee’s photograph are, in fact, the maternal aunts and uncle of their photographer—Mattie, Estelle, and David Osterhout.5 But Barthes’s musings are of little use in discerning this.6 In fact, in his response to this image he sidesteps his most powerful insight into the distinguishing characteristics of photographic signification, the that-­has-­been, the undeniable referentiality of the photograph, the uncanny presence of its subject. His punctum reaction to the photograph effaces and replaces those depicted with a personal revelation, obscuring the indexicality of the photograph with a memory that might have been evoked by any other sign system. The punctum evades the photograph itself, enclosing Barthes in a solipsistic reverie.7 In making himself (and his memories) the measure of photographic meaning, Barthes obfuscates the presence of other historical subjects, and in so doing disregards the evocative, provoking presence, or present absence, of those represented on photographic film.8 It would seem that the race-­based paternalism registered in his studium reading enables Barthes to devalue those who have been, subsuming them under himself, under his own personal history, under the inadequate prick of the punctum.

The Photograph, the Mask, the Slave Although the portrait by VanDerZee is the image Barthes returns to again and again, it is not the only photograph of African Americans he calls upon to define the fundamental features of photography. In his discussion of Richard Avedon’s portrait, taken in 1963, of William Casby, a man who was “born a slave,” Barthes proclaims to see “the essence of slavery . . . laid bare” (34), and also to understand photographic meaning as a kind of mask. Barthes argues that the photograph means nothing, that it communicates only that-­has-­been, unless it becomes a mask, an abstraction greater than a particular subject, a type divorced from an individual, a culturally translated symbol. If one recalls the language he used to describe the photographic sign in earlier studies, the “message without a code” signifies only to the degree to which it can be abstracted and, in fact, codified. It Race and Reproduction — 27

cannot enter the world of signs proper unless its specificity is transformed. In Barthes’s reading, the portrait of William Casby enters the realm of meaning as it comes to signify “slave,” and ceases to register a singular face. In other words, Barthes collapses William Casby under the sign of slave, seeing in this portrait not a man who must have lived most of his life as an autonomous subject, but instead “the essence of slavery laid bare.” In Barthes’s reading, a subject is transformed into an object; in Frederick Douglass’s famous words, “a man is made into a slave.” Barthes then uses the objectification of Casby to comment on the nature of photographic meaning; photographs become readable through a similar process of abstraction and categorization. The photograph enters meaning as its specific subject is transformed into a cultural object. Elsewhere in Camera Lucida, this process of objectification troubles Barthes. Indeed, it particularly disturbs him when he thinks about his own photographic portraits. As Jane Gallop has recently noted, Barthes very rarely considers photographs of himself in Camera Lucida, choosing instead the role of spectator, of viewer, of the self as the politically autonomous subject authorized to look.9 Musing upon the process of being photographed, Barthes says, “The Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (14). Resisting such objectification, Barthes proclaims: “It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect” (15).10 The political right of subjecthood is, of course, precisely what is denied to the enslaved; he or she is not legally recognized as a subject, but as an object. In Barthes’s analysis, the photograph is in some ways equated with the slave; the cultural meaning of both is accorded by the extent to which they function as objects. Thus Barthes’s choice of the William Casby portrait is particularly telling, for it amplifies the objectification that is central to Barthes’s experience of the photographic process, and central to his description of photographic meaning. For Barthes, the slave figures as the objectified individual that most explicitly emblematizes photography’s transformation of private subjects into public objects—the slave is the objectified subject par excellence. Through the portrait of William Casby, Barthes transfers to enslaved men and women the position of the objectified that he resists for himself. Maintaining his own political right to be a subject, Barthes collapses William Casby into the category of the photographed that signifies slave. 28 — Chapter 1

That-­Has-­Been Slavery surfaces again in Barthes’s articulation of the photographic sign’s most unique characteristic, its indexical testimonial, that-­has-­been. One of the images that registers most powerfully for him the very ontology of photography, this that-­has-­been, is a photograph of a slave market that he cut from a magazine as a child and carefully saved, a photograph that “showed a slave market: the slavemaster, in a hat, standing; the slaves, in loincloths, sitting.” The image provoked the child Barthes’s “horror and fascination,” for as a photograph it proclaimed with “certainty that such a thing had existed” (80). According to Barthes, the photographic sign, unlike the linguistic sign, first exists as both a temporal and a tactile fact—the photograph records light rays reflected off an object, impressing themselves onto photographic film in a fraction of a second. “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent” (80). While the photograph may not be able, without textual interpretation, to tell us much more about the subject it makes visible, it undeniably testifies—that-­has-­been. Through the magic of light and chemistry, “that,” as it existed for a fraction of a second, impressed itself on film. This incontrovertible presence is what fascinated and horrified Barthes about the photograph of the slave market: the photograph gave evidence of slavery, proving its existence with certainty, as Barthes says, “without mediation” (80). In other words, the photograph made slavery uniquely present and even palpable; it impressed the fact of slavery into the time and space of the child Barthes’s consciousness. Following his brief discussion of the photograph of the slave market, Barthes notes a secondary effect of the photograph’s power to proclaim that-­has-­been, namely the sense that the viewer is literally touched by the subject photographed. “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. . . . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (80–81). The light that touches the surface of the subject photographed, captured on film, also touches the viewer, rebounding as it were, in Barthes’s imagination, from subject, to photograph, to viewer. Perhaps this then underscores what is so shocking, for Barthes, about the photograph of the slave market, for it not only testifies to the existence of slavery, it also touches him; in his imagination, he shares a skin with the enRace and Reproduction — 29

slaved men and women. In this provocative shared corporeality, Barthes’s own position as a free, white, self-­possessed European viewer is unsettled, for his “shared skin” metonymically links him with slavery, blackness, and objectification under a white gaze. He achieves for a moment, perhaps, a recognition of what Frantz Fanon called the racial epidermal schema of colonial and postcolonial Europe, in which the black man’s subjectivity is subsumed under the sign of his skin.11 The shared skin that links Barthes to enslaved people must unsettle his own sense of (political) self-­possession, reminding him of that which he refuses, namely his own potential to be objectified. But even as the photograph instills anxiety, it also enables him to pass off the position of the objectified onto others. The shared skin that might force a recognition of his own fragmentation is finally overcome by the logics of differentiation that reinforce Barthes’s white subjectivity in distinction to black objects. Ultimately, the sameness of shared skin glimpsed in photographic indexicality is psychically repressed. By nature of its literal absence in the text, the photograph of the slave market occupies a position intriguingly parallel to Camera Lucida’s most famous image, the Winter Garden Photograph of Barthes’s mother as a young girl. This image is the photograph that sets the second half of the book’s meditations in motion (73). It is the image that Barthes, mourning his mother’s death, ultimately seeks, a photograph that captures her essential self, and in so doing also captures the intrinsic nature of photography, the medium’s unique capacity to make the absent subject present. In the Winter Garden Photograph Barthes finds his mother’s essence captured in the photograph’s that-­has-­been; in this image the mask of photographic meaning suddenly vanishes, and he is left in the presence of his mother’s soul (109). In this instance the that-­has-­been overwhelms the cultural meaning of the image; the portrait is not confined to or delimited by likeness; it offers truth and identity. As Barthes declares: “The Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being” (71). Whereas the portrait of William Casby exemplifies the mask of photographic meaning whereby a unique individual is translated into a cultural sign, the Winter Garden Photograph effects precisely the opposite; it removes the mask to reveal the unique individual. The Winter Garden Photograph becomes, for Barthes, a “treasury of rays” that “emanated” from his mother, “from her hair, her skin, her dress, her gaze, on that day” (82). An image deeply personal and profoundly important to Barthes, it is one he refuses to reproduce for later viewers. Thus, 30 — Chapter 1

the essential images, those that make the that-­has-­been most powerfully apparent, are the images that ultimately remain absent from Barthes’s text, the photograph of the slave market and the Winter Garden Photograph. Barthes’s refusal or inability to reproduce examples of his most powerful evidence is curious in such a heavily illustrated text. One can easily understand, however, his reluctance to share the Winter Garden Photograph, an image deeply important to him, but an image that might prove, for other viewers, “nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’” (73).12 And yet, Barthes’s decision not to reproduce this image also leaves his readers only with Barthes’s interpretation. The photographic evidence is obscured, indeed replaced, by his reading. There is no chance for the represented to stand and meet the gaze of others, and there is no opportunity for another viewer to be authorized. Denied one’s own response to the image, ultimately one can only respond to Barthes himself. This accords with Barthes’s preferences, for one of the very things he proclaims to have admired about his mother is that he had never known her to make “a single ‘observation’” (69). In Barthes’s account, she never looked and considered and critiqued.13 She never performed the intellectual work that was Barthes’s entire purpose. She was there to be observed only, and in the case of the Winter Garden Photograph, to be observed only by Barthes.

An Umbilical Cord of Light The metaphor of a shared skin linking viewer and viewed (81), which Barthes evokes to explain the profound impact of the photograph’s that-­ has-­been, its “intractable reality” (119), is a truly provocative image, especially if one imagines Barthes gazing at the photograph of the slave market, which so intrigued and astonished him as a child. Even more provocative, perhaps, is the kind of skin that Barthes imagines links him as viewer to the photographed subject. In his articulation, “light” becomes not simply a “carnal medium” but an “umbilical cord” (81), joining viewer and viewed in a surprisingly filial, in fact, maternal, relation. If the photograph is the conduit for the umbilical cord of light, exactly who stands in the place of the mother in this relationship, the viewer or the viewed? Once again, Barthes’s discussion of the Winter Garden Photograph is instructive here. In this image, Barthes sees his “mother-­as-­child” (71), and recognizes how childlike she actually did become in her last days. Race and Reproduction — 31

Musing on the end of her life, Barthes suggests, “She had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph” (72). As Barthes’s mother becomes his little girl, Barthes enters, briefly, the procreative model of generation, of reproduction; he becomes a kind of parent. He declares, “I who had not procreated, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother” (72). Barthes, the gay male intellectual without children, is linked through his mother, by becoming his mother’s mother, to what he deems the universal. He transcends himself, his particularity, his death, by momentarily creating a child (his ailing mother). And yet, because this child will not live past his own inevitable death, Barthes’s parenting provides only a taste of the “Life Force” through which, according to “so many philosophers,” so many heteronormative philosophers, the individual transcends death through his or her procreative role in the reproduction of “the race, the species” (72). After his mother’s death, Barthes’s vision of himself as gay male progenitor also dies, and he declares that he can no longer do anything but wait for his “total, undialectical death” (72).14 And yet, he also proposes that his procreative capacity might be reenvisioned in a utopian sense, whereby he might transcend finality through writing, in which he might live beyond himself through the texts he generates. In this sense, writing provides an escape from the body that dies or fails or refuses to procreate; writing enables the proliferation and expansion of the self beyond the awkward limitation and finality of the body. As Barthes argues in his autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, writing also liberates the self from the limitations of its “narrative continuity,” from its biography, from its place in the “family romance.”15 That discreet, continuous self, the self that must be liberated from its singularity and confinement, is construed and anchored by “imagery,” by an “image-­repertoire”—by family photographs.16 It is one’s visual insertion into the family line that connects and confines one to a genealogy. However, writing, marking the beginning of “productive life,” can surpass the image-­repertoire.17 Here, then, photographs represent the domain of the discreet, biographical, ultimately unproductive self, while writing represents the domain of the self liberated from its private definitions and made productive. The photograph adheres one to a body, the written text only to an abstract signifier. In Barthes’s autobiography, as in Camera Lucida, the photograph, like the body it represents, ultimately signifies death. Writing, 32 — Chapter 1

on the other hand, relying on the abstract linguistic signifier, can liberate one from the body, and thereby signify beyond life and death. Following Barthes’s ruminations on photography in his autobiography, one might also associate the photograph, as Victor Burgin has, with a kind of expanded semiotic sphere (in Julia Kristeva’s sense), an extended presymbolic stage in which the body and its sensations, and the mother’s body, dominate self-­perception.18 For Barthes, the image-­repertoire, and the biography it anchors, ends with one’s youth, as one enters the public social sphere through the production of writing. The semiotic, associated with the image (and the mother), ends with mastery of the symbolic. The images that introduce Barthes’s autobiography reinforce such a psychoanalytic reading. A photograph of the infant Barthes being held by his mother, both of them looking out at the camera, is playfully entitled The Mirror Stage: “That’s You.” 19 Clearly referencing Lacan’s mirror stage, in which the infant comes to recognize himself in and as an image, Barthes’s photograph anchors early self-­perception in the image, and in the arms of the mother. Another, later photograph, The Demand for Love, replicates The Mirror Stage, with the child Barthes held in his mother’s arms and both again looking out at the camera.20 The repetition of the pose is strained, however, by the size of the boy Barthes, no longer able, really, to fit in his mother’s arms. In D. A. Miller’s wonderful reading of this image, the photograph announces what he calls “a certain gay male body.” According to Miller, “His ungainly lower limbs betray the boy. . . . They are too long for short pants, and too long to justify what the boy nonetheless evidently persists in wanting: to be carried by his mother.”21 Refusing the mythos of the (presumably straight) male body’s autonomy in his display of the “mothered body,” “every image of Barthes, whether fully grown or all alone,” according to Miller, “materially reinscribes his mother in the characteristically dejected posture of his body, always ducking and drooping, as though always wanting, but never any longer able, to drop into her arms.”22 In Camera Lucida two things are certain: one is a temporal fact, the that-­has-­been of the photograph; the other is a spatial fact, namely, as “Freud says of the maternal body, . . . that ‘there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there’” (40). Those very things that must be superseded by writing in order to liberate the productive self in Barthes’s autobiography—the image-­repertoire and the mother’s body—actually become the source of a procreative imRace and Reproduction — 33

pulse and power in Camera Lucida. Indeed, in Barthes’s final text a powerfully procreative image emerges in his thoughts on photography: as light becomes an umbilical cord that links the photographed to Barthes himself, a vision of the gay male progenitor reemerges. Photography becomes, as it were, a doubly reproductive medium. Light becomes a carnal vehicle, and mechanical reproduction serves as a kind of surrogate for sexual reproduction. In an inventive alteration of what one might traditionally think of as photography’s creative function, Barthes does not place the photographer in the position of progenitor, but instead evokes the viewer, the spectator, Barthes himself, as the origin point for reproduction. In a stunning statement, he declares: “I am the reference of every photograph” (84). If every photograph refers to him, if he becomes the subject of every photograph, then the images also reproduce him, they become his reproductions, his generative offspring. Suddenly the that-­has-­been, the intractable certainty of a temporal real, of the momentary presence in absence of the thing photographed, is subsumed under the sign of the viewer, referring to that viewer, representing and reproducing him. Through this articulation, Barthes becomes, in his own imagination, the mother of all photographs. What is one to make of this? If one returns, as Barthes himself so often does, to the portrait by VanDerZee, it is illuminating to reconsider the punctum in light of these thoughts on reproduction. Revisiting Barthes’s ruminations on this photograph, one finds that it is really only one woman, Estelle Osterhout, and the details of her attire, that trigger the punctum for Barthes. Her low belt, her strapped pumps, and finally her pearl necklace spark Barthes’s mournful response to the photograph. He describes this woman as “the ‘solacing Mammy’” (43), and once again his punctum response is informed by a specific studium training. The African American woman becomes “Mammy” only through the lens of a racialized and gendered class system. Subsuming the woman of color under the white fantasy of the “Mammy,” Barthes symbolically harnesses her procreative energies to raising a white brood, effacing her own potentially reproductive role as mother.23 The necklace Osterhout wears recalls for Barthes that other necklace, the “slender ribbon of braided gold,” which belonged to his aunt. VanDerZee’s aunt reminds Barthes of his own aunt, whom he describes, once again, as follows: “This sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her 34 — Chapter 1

dreary life” (53). (Remarkably, Estelle Osterhout never married either.24) Deeming his aunt an “old maid,” Barthes would seem to denigrate her for failing in her procreative role. And yet, this aunt’s “dreary life” mirrors quite closely Barthes’s own, for he himself never married and lived his entire adult life with his mother.25 Indeed, Barthes’s pity for his aunt may mask an anxiety about his own family position. In a brief discussion of the photograph’s capacity to capture a “genetic feature,” Barthes declares: “In a certain photograph, I have my father’s sister’s ‘look’” (103).26 Ultimately, the punctum in VanDerZee’s photograph is activated by Barthes’s nervous identification with his own aunt. Through a signifying slippage, VanDerZee’s aunt recalls Barthes’s aunt, who finally recalls Barthes himself. What Barthes sees in this image, in the woman who stands behind and to the side of her relatives, slightly in the shadows, is an image of his own aunt, and finally of himself—an image of the one who stands to the side of the family narrative. Barthes is never really the mother of all photographs, but always the aunt.27 Barthes’s anxieties about race and reproduction thus merge in his response to the photograph by VanDerZee. The punctum effectively intertwines them, reminding Barthes of that which he might actively seek to repress, namely the instability of his subject position as a white homosexual man. As Barthes understood, one’s relationship to “the race, the species” (72) falters if one does not reproduce, and sexual reproduction has long been the (heavily monitored) site of racial reproduction. But as sex reproduces race, race might also be said to reproduce sex. Early medical discourses of sexual “deviancy” borrowed from the discourses of race science, categorizing the homosexual body in terms similar to the racialized body.28 In these racialized discourses of sexuality, Barthes might have found himself, once again, uneasily “sharing skin” with black bodies. The intersection of Barthes’s concerns about race and reproduction in Camera Lucida may help to explain his surprising references to Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Galton defined eugenics both as a science of race and a program of controlled breeding, and he utilized photographs to construct the physical signs of familial lineage and race.29 Barthes evokes the eugenicist idea of biological inheritance in his discussion of “the stock” made manifest in the faces of family members caught on film (103–5), and it is here that he bemoans his resemblance to his aunt (103). The family likeness that links Barthes to his aunt also recalls their similar role in refusing to reproduce; they carry, but will not continue, the reproduction of Race and Reproduction — 35

“the stock.” Photographs of their faces may testify to eugenicist thinking, but they will not fulfill eugenicist goals. Barthes directly refers to Galton in the final pages of his text, celebrating his attempt to read the signs of madness in photographed faces (113). Remarkably, it is this mental illness—insanity conjured by Galton, one of the thinkers most profoundly associated with race and reproduction—that finally might release Barthes from the limitations of his own racial and sexual problematics. Deeming Galton’s photographic experiments a failure (113), Barthes nevertheless discovers in all those mug shots, all those frontal stares, a different kind of madness. In response to so many direct looks, Barthes declares that the photograph “bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness” (113). Ultimately, then, the photograph insists on its referent. However much the punctum may launch one beyond the photograph’s subject, that subject’s temporal presence cannot be denied. Perceiving that presence engulfs the viewer in a kind of insanity, for the “effigy,” the person photographed, must live, the representation must be real, the absent must be present. “The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination” (115). The photograph transports the photographed into the time and space of the viewer. To recognize this is to go mad, for ghostly traces become real and present. They touch and haunt the viewer. It is finally this disruptive madness that Barthes champions, and it is this insanity that releases him from the solipsism effected, in part, by the racism registered in the studium.30 Choosing to recognize the radical presence of photographed subjects, Barthes can no longer subsume them under the sign of himself. In the end, even Estelle Osterhout, the subject elided most extensively in Barthes’s meditations on photography, is asserted in her photograph. Finally, Barthes must bear witness to her. Trying to understand the link between “Photography, madness,” and love (116), Barthes returns, once again, to the photograph taken by VanDerZee: “In the love stirred by Photography (by certain photographs), another music is heard, its name oddly old-­fashioned: Pity. I collected in a last thought the images which had ‘pricked’ me (since this is the action of the punctum), like that of the black woman with the gold necklace and the strapped pumps. In each of them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die . . . gone mad for Pity’s sake” (117). Here 36 — Chapter 1

Barthes offers a different model of the possible relationship between viewer and viewed. Entering into a photograph, one might embrace its subject, allowing one’s self to be touched, without demanding reference or representation. One might identify without subsuming or consuming the other. In other words, the presence of the present-­absent might be maintained in the face of one’s own response. The that-­has-­been might be allowed to coexist with the punctum. This model of photographic engagement acknowledges the that-­has-­ been much more powerfully than mere studium recognition. It maintains the urgency and intensity of response accorded by the punctum, without allowing the viewer’s own stories to overwhelm the subject photographed. Such a method of photographic inquiry depends on the labor of the viewer.31 Such mad recognition requires a viewer willing to enter the spectacle of the photograph, willing to embrace its subject. It requires the effort of a devoted son, perhaps, or an obsessive scholar. This is the viewer Barthes finally commits himself to being, and this is the viewer Barthes cannot be certain his own images will secure. Barthes persistently places himself in his text, representing and reproducing himself, symbolically grasping at what he calls the Life Force. Once again, it is his search for his mother’s trace, recorded in a photograph, that compels Barthes’s thoughts on that Life Force. Looking through photographs to find the truth of the one he loved, Barthes must also wonder who will perform this tender act of mourning for him. Will his own photographs, like his aunt’s necklace, remain “shut up in a family box” (53), neglected by more distant relations? Will they become the abandoned and discarded images David Deitcher describes in his search for a gay archive? Reflecting on one such image, Deitcher states: “The knowledge that no children of my own will survive to remember me contributes to [my] morbid predisposition; as does the suspicion that among my eight nieces and nephews, some will forget me too.”32 If the writing life frees one from the family narrative, so does a refusal to reproduce. But the latter “liberation” from the family romance is filled with anxiety for Barthes, because it is also a return to the finitude to which that family narrative, supported by his childhood photographs, seemed to confine him. Surely Barthes has lived on through his writings rather remarkably—his present-­absence remains profound. But it is existential mournfulness and anxiety that pervades Camera Lucida, his last text. After the death of his mother, Barthes cannot be certain his demands for love Race and Reproduction — 37

will be met. Standing to the side of the family narrative, Barthes finds himself faced with what he calls, once again, “total, undialectical death” (72). There will be no heir to reproduce him, no child to mourn his death and to cherish his photograph. Barthes’s personal exploration of photographs demands, in part, a personal response—one I now undertake with some trepidation. I find I can meet Barthes part way, by choosing a path of “sympathy” for his madness. Using the punctum as pathway to the that-­has-­been, I will try to meet Barthes as living effigy. As one aunt, I will consider another, and agree to imagine, at least, that I see Barthes in one of the images he has left behind. I am drawn to a photograph of the adult Barthes preparing himself to tackle the blank slate of his writing tablet.33 It is an unusual photograph, perhaps taken on vacation. The typically dark-­clad Barthes, pictured in enclosed, wooden offices, here sits perched on a plush white rug, in a bright, airy room, dressed entirely in summer whites. It is an image of the adult Barthes who has liberated himself from the family romance through the symbolic practice of writing. But it is also an image in which his short pants recall that earlier photograph of his “demand for love,” of his demand to be central in the family narrative. I gaze at him from behind and to the side, and wonder which close admirer might have taken this photograph. I marvel at my access to this intimate scene. Entering into the image of Barthes, embracing what is dead, this is the photograph I promise to keep. This is the one I will rescue from the advance of a Life Force that forgets and obscures those who do not biologically reproduce. This is the image I will save from Barthes’s own self-­referential practice. Finally, then, as one aunt reflecting on another, I find I can be mad, and also go mad for sympathy’s sake.

38 — Chapter 1

Chapter 2 The

Politics of Pictorialism

Another Look at F. Holland Day

The photographs are stunning. Seven images placed side-­by-­side in a row, they focus softly on the face, neck, and shoulders of a white, bearded man. Across the series, the man’s face struggles between agony and ecstasy, panic and wonder. In each image, the dark shadow of head and neck dissolves into a soft white background. It is as if the emotion of the face has burned itself onto the platinum emulsion. The man’s eyes dart left and right and up, and finally remain closed, as his lifeless head falls partially outside the final frame. The penumbra that surrounds him offsets the highlights that gleam from his crown of thorns (see figure 2.1). These seven platinum prints make up F. Holland Day’s The Seven Words. In the summer of 1898, in the countryside of Norwood, Massachusetts, Day and a group of friends performed the Life and Passion of Christ, together making over 250 photographs, with Day himself cast in the central role of Christ (see figure 2.2).1 As orchestrator and director of the event, Day was meticulous in his attempts to produce “authentic” scenes. He starved himself and grew his hair for several months in preparation for his starring role, and on the July day selected for the performance, he dressed his collaborators in costumes from Assyria, and tied himself to a huge wooden cross of his own design.2 It is almost impossible to imagine Day making these photographs today. Indeed, to even the most secular of viewers, the hubris of the project is astounding. At the turn of the century, however, the photographs were deemed appropriate enough to be published in

Figure 2.1 F. Holland Day, The Seven Words, 1898. Platinum prints. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 2.2 F. Holland Day, Crucifixion, 1898. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

such respectable magazines as Godey’s and Harper’s Weekly, and Day exhibited them in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, London and Paris.3 Among those who did find fault with the work, some responded to the naked male figure, but most queried the success of the photographs in relation to their sacred subject. As Kristin Schwain summarizes: “Many contended that no model could represent the sacred figure in a photograph because of the photograph’s physical relationship to the object or person it represented.”4 Critics maintained that the photographs could not escape Day’s body; they could not effectively transform that specific body into a representation of the sacred body.5 The “photograph’s physical relationship to the object or person it represent[s]” is precisely what Day’s work unsettles. Drawing on a repertoire of pictorialist aesthetic strategies, Day separates photographic signifier from signified, altering and expanding the indexicality of the photograph, transforming Roland Barthes’s “that-­has-­been” into “imagine this.” In an unpublished manuscript written around 1900, entitled “Is Photography an Art?,” Day proposes that photographic “artists have sought no longer detail, but ensemble, not an accumulation of facts, but simplification of the idea. . . . They have found that the indefinite is the road to the infinite.”6 Day’s celebration of the “indefinite” is a far cry from William Henry Fox Talbot’s early praise of photographic precision—“a multitude of minute details.”7 Indeed, Day sought to trouble and manipulate and obscure the photograph’s dazzling detail. His images grasp at the palpable unseen that photography announces but does not fully disclose. Using performance, symbolism, and soft focus, his images seek to transmute the material into the spiritual (see figures 2.3 and 2.4). The photographs ask viewers to see beyond the detail, to understand the index as a portal to the unseen. They appeal to viewers to recognize the invisible realms they evoke, to focus on what is past, absent, imagined, and desired. In many ways, Day’s work participates in long-­standing nineteenth-­ century debates about the nature of photography and its contested status as art. Indeed, his obfuscation of detail in soft focus, a standard practice of the pictorialists, had long been associated with artistic photography, as had religious subjects and tableaus. As early as the 1850s, critics and photographers praised the indistinct, blurred image as one that might claim the status of art, muting the sharpness and reducing the quantity of detail the photograph afforded.8 Henry Peach Robinson, an influential writer on photography throughout the late nineteenth century, proposed that “phoThe Politics of Pictorialism — 41

Figure 2.3 F. Holland Day, Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit, in The Seven Words, 1898. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

tography should be not only the recorder of bald, prosaic fact, but also the means by which something akin to imagination or fancy—real live art— may be worthily embodied.”9 He argued that “an ineffable aesthetic quality” defined photographic art, and proclaimed that “without this indefinite, intangible, hidden, unknown soul, a picture is but a scientific performance.”10 42 — Chapter 2

Figure 2.4 F. Holland Day, It Is Finished, from The Seven Words, 1898. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Like Robinson, Day celebrated the “indefinite” as an elevated aesthetic through which to counter the “scientific performance” of photography. But Day’s pursuit of the “intangible” and “hidden” has a double valence, and his challenge to photography’s “scientific” properties takes on political resonance when considered through a broader cultural lens. At a time when phoThe Politics of Pictorialism — 43

tography was used to fix the body in scientific archives as a normatively raced and gendered entity, Day deployed pictorial aesthetics to unhinge the photograph and the body from the circumscription of the material, visible world. As he troubled the relation of photographic signifier to signified, he also unsettled the terms of scientific photographic evidence, remaking the image into a site of transfer and transportation, rather than a fixed point. His images call into question the “scientific performance” of photography, challenging the normative views of race and sexuality produced in scientific discourses at the time. Using pictorial aesthetics to expand the reach of photography, Day sought to register a doubly obscured desire at the turn of the century. His Christ images are especially notable in this regard for they represent the sacred figure through Day’s body, evoking the passion of Christ to register Day’s passions, drawing homoerotic desire into view in its invisibility.

Understanding the political valence of Day’s aesthetic strategies encourages one to reconsider pictorial photography, as well as Day’s place within it. Although largely overshadowed in the history of photography until recently, at the turn of the century, Day was one of the most influential advocates of photography as an art form. He was colleague and friend to Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White, mentor to Edward Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn (his cousin), and colleague and ultimately competitor of Alfred Stieglitz.11 Day promoted the art of photography nationally through the Boston Camera Club, and internationally through his exhibitions of the New School of American Photography in London (1900) and Paris (1901). As early as 1895, he was elected to the prestigious British photography salon the Linked Ring. The now much rehearsed tension between Day and Stieglitz emerged over Day’s European exhibitions at the turn of the century, and the two men largely parted ways at that time. With his influential journal Camera Work, Stieglitz shaped much of the debate about fine art photography in the United States from New York and eventually changed the direction of artistic photographic practice, rejecting pictorialism and celebrating the unmanipulated, sharp-­focus, “straight” image in the early twentieth century. In the record of art history, Stieglitz has eclipsed Day, despite their comparable influence and interests. According to an established scholarly discourse, Stieglitz, with his “straight” photography of American urbanism and industrialism, heralded the advent of modernism, triumphing over 44 — Chapter 2

Day and other pictorialists with their “soft” photography, rooted in nature and the past. The general rejection of pictorialism and the historical neglect of Day’s work has been undeniably gendered. Pictorial photographs were deemed “fuzzy” by their contemporary critics, and they were decidedly not “straight.” Day’s photographs are allegorical and symbolic. They are hazy, misty, amorphous. They strive to transport viewers out of their present times and places, to conjure other realms, and to evoke ineffable desire. Historians of photography have generally regarded pictorialism as an anomalous, misguided effort finally (and thankfully) surpassed by sharp-­ focus “straight” photography, heralded as an art form true to the specificities of photography as a medium. Scholars read the theatrical staging, elaborate framing, experimental printing, soft-­focus atmospherics, and allegorical themes of pictorialist photographs as attempts to associate photography with the more established and exalted artistic traditions of printmaking and especially painting. Most have regarded pictorialism as imitative, trite, and somewhat embarrassing.12 Rather than condemning pictorialism as a refusal of the technological specificities of photography, we might see it as an aesthetic strategy that explores the limits of photographic representation, and thereby begin to understand the political stakes of pictorialism in more expansive ways. Making images “thick” with atmosphere, the pictorialists unsettled the transparency of photographic evidence, drawing attention to the filters through which we view the photographed body, including the sharp filters of science. In this cultural milieu, Day’s work is both typical and extraordinary. Using pictorial aesthetics, Day encodes homoerotic longing in his photographs, drawing a desire made doubly invisible by cultural blind spots and overt denial to the edge of sight.

Day’s work stands out among the pictorialists for its celebration of the male nude. In fact, Day’s focus on the male nude was unusual within broader artistic circles at the time. As Abigail Solomon-­Godeau has argued, although popular in European Neoclassical art of the late eighteenth century, the male nude was almost entirely eclipsed by the female nude by the end of the nineteenth century.13 Across the span of his most productive years, 1897–1906, Day posed naked young men and boys in the guise of religious, historical, and mythoThe Politics of Pictorialism — 45

Figure 2.5 John Lamprey, front view of Malayan male, Ternate, aged twenty-­five, c. 1868– 69. Carbon print. RAI 2116. © Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

logical figures. While unusual in terms of aesthetic practices at the time, Day made his male nudes in an era in which the naked body (both male and female) began to figure prominently in scientific photographs (as well as in more covertly circulated erotic photographs).14 By the turn of the century, the body was transformed into a visible sign of interior essences, and codified in the photographic archive. Photographs of the body were used to inscribe social and scientific hierarchies, to distinguish “normal” from “deviant,” and to delineate and reinforce distinctions that held profound social, economic, and legal significance. Anthropologists, eugenicists, criminologists, and sexologists codified race, class, gender, and sexuality through photographs of naked bodies (see figure 2.5).15 Reconsidered in this visual context, Day’s work takes on political import. Day’s dreamy images liberate the body from the disciplinary archive: in many of his 46 — Chapter 2

images soft focus obscures detail, and figures provide platforms for imagination rather than observation. Day’s classical and religious images of nude male youths in nature are especially emblematic in their attempt to transport the body beyond the material frame of the photographic referent to a mythological realm. These photographs picture naked young men in the forests surrounding Day’s summer retreat in Little Good Harbor, Maine, posed with statues of Pan, the Greek god of nature, or crowned in laurel, or with chest pierced as St. Sebastian.16 Made with Day’s Dallmeyer-­Bergheim lens without spherical correction, and showcasing his increasing expertise in platinum printing, these photographs are dense with a misty atmosphere that heightens their otherworldly qualities.17 In some of these images, the body appears to dissolve into the atmosphere that surrounds it, as if it is becoming a spirit before one’s very eyes. Some of Day’s most striking images from this later period, the Orpheus photographs, were made in the summer of 1907, at Stone House Hill, near Brockton, Massachusetts.18 They feature as model Day’s apprentice, Nicola Giancola. In The Return to Earth (1908) from the Orpheus series, Giancola is posed at the mouth of a cave (see figure 2.6). He pauses on the path from dark to light to pluck his lyre with flourish. A tall tree trunk runs the length of the vertically cropped image, heightening the division between the dark depths of the cave and the misty light into which the young man emerges. The light reflects off his bare chest, the tree trunk, and the rocks that border his path into the woods. The features of the youth’s upturned face are indiscernible; they blend into the atmosphere that also claims his lyre. The soft, hazy thickness of the image, in which details of feature and forest are obscured, lends the image an otherworldly quality and helps the viewer to imagine Massachusetts woods as on the brink of the netherworld. Day’s Orpheus photographs are notable for more than their mythological themes—they are undeniably erotic. Much of the discussion of Day among art historians has tiptoed around his sexuality, noting his devotion to aestheticism and male beauty, his admiration for Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and his bachelorhood, but nevertheless hesitating to suggest that Day was homosexual.19 Even more surprising, and much more important, is that some scholars have been reluctant to read the homoerotic desire presented in Day’s extraordinary work.20 Given the visual record, it seems unnecessarily limiting to confine an understanding of sexuality to specific The Politics of Pictorialism — 47

Figure 2.6 F. Holland Day, The Return to Earth, from the Orpheus series, 1908. Courtesy of the Royal Photographic Society, Science and Society Picture Library.

Figure 2.7 F. Holland Day, The Vision, from the Orpheus series, 1907. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

sexual acts, while ignoring the erotics of visual practice.21 Whether or not Day was homosexual is beside the point; what is compelling is the way his photographs perform and solicit a homoerotic gaze (see figure 2.7). While some historians of photography have had difficulty discussing Day’s images as erotic, historians of queer visual culture have not.22 In his study Hard to Imagine, Thomas Waugh argues that Day’s work “obsesThe Politics of Pictorialism — 49

sively celebrates homoerotic desire.”23 Reclaiming “the sexual dimension” of Day’s work, however, Waugh disparages its pictorialist aesthetics, decrying Day’s devotion to “soft focus” as an “indulgence” some of his European contemporaries, such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, “mercifully eschewed.”24 But it is precisely through pictorialist aesthetics, through the indeterminacy of soft focus, that the eroticism of Day’s photographs becomes visible and political. It is impossible to read Day’s photographs of Nicola Giancola without noting their erotic charge. Perhaps this is due to Giancola’s slightly more adult body, his heftier frame, which refuses the androgyny of his peers.25 More than anything, it is his adeptness with the pose, his theatrical sense of his own body, which reflects his interaction with the photographer, his performance for Day’s gaze. In St. Sebastian (c. 1906), Giancola’s bound arms and waist throw his shoulders forward, drawing attention to his strained muscles (see plate 3). His head is tossed back in a swoon, eyes closed, lips parted, curls falling back from his face. His exposed neck and profile are touched with light, offset by a dark background that heightens the line. The swoon is one of abandon. By the turn of the century, Saint Sebastian had become a kind of covert homosexual icon. As a figure, the saint was transformed in the Italian Renaissance from a bearded Roman soldier to a beautiful ephebe transfixed by the ecstasy of penetration. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Saint Sebastian was increasingly understood to represent not only an object of homoerotic desire, but also a homosexual subject.26 According to the history of the saint, Sebastian was tortured and left for dead after he revealed his “true,” “hidden” Christian identity. As Richard Kaye suggests, in the late nineteenth century, “Sebastian thus could stand for homosexual self-­revelation as opposed to homosexual affection, and, as such, he was a splendid vehicle for a new conception of same-­sex desire, which, as numerous historians of sexuality have suggested, encompassed a shift from a stress on homosexual acts to an emphasis on homosexual identity.”27 In Day’s Saint Sebastian photographs, then, one might find not only an object of erotic desire, but also a symbol of Day’s self-­revelation (see figure 2.8). Given the theatrical staging of so many of the images that feature Giancola, Day’s portrait of the young man, circa 1906, posed without elaborate trappings, feels all the more immediate and engaging (see figure 2.9). In this tightly framed image, focused on head, neck, and white-­robed shoulder, Giancola tilts his head, looking aslant but nevertheless directly at the 50 — Chapter 2

Figure 2.8 F. Holland Day, St. Sebastian (close-­up), 1906. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

photographer, out of the corners of his eyes. Darkness partially obscures his face, its near side falling into shadow. A light from the side softly highlights his forehead, nose, and the corner of his curved lips. Giancola’s expression is sullen, both tentative and startlingly aggressive at the same time. The young man’s look calls attention to his interaction with the photographer, and suggests that the exchange between the two men was charged with intimacy.28 The Politics of Pictorialism — 51

Figure 2.9 F. Holland Day, portrait of Nicola Giancola, c. 1906. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Saint Sebastian was not the only homosexual muse at the turn of the century. As several scholars have noted, artists often used the symbols of classical antiquity to encode homoeroticism.29 In this context, the portion of the Orpheus myth that Day elects to represent is also significant. Orpheus’s “return to earth” is an episode of deep despair and profound transformation. Orpheus has just lost his beloved Eurydice to Hades forever. His fateful look back to ensure her safety in crossing into the world of the living 52 — Chapter 2

has condemned his lover back to the realm of shades. Notably, as Orpheus emerges from the underworld, he also enters a new stage in his life. According to Ovid’s version of the myth, after losing Eurydice, Orpheus forswears women and begins to take young male lovers.30 Thus, Orpheus’s return to earth is also the moment of his “birth” into homoerotics. At the mouth of the cave he stands on the brink between two worlds and two desires. Certainly these elements of the Orpheus myth would not have been lost on Day, and it is compelling that the parts of the myth he chooses to imagine are those in which Orpheus turns to the love of young men. After this period, Orpheus comes to a terrible end. Enraged by his rejection of women, Dionysian Bacchantes attack him, ripping him to pieces.31 They throw his head into the river, where it floats, still singing, to the island of Lesbos. While not depicted by Day, this gruesome torture haunts his Orpheus series. The beautiful body Day celebrates would soon, according to myth, be destroyed. His depiction of an idealized male body is thus shadowed by the terrifying destruction of that body.32

The haunted images of ideal male beauty in Day’s Orpheus series offer a lens through which we might read much of Day’s work, including the Christ series and the Saint Sebastian images. In Day’s photographs, the revered male body is also frequently the tortured male body, a pattern that hints at sadomasochistic desires and that metaphorically represents the criminal persecution of the homosexual man at the turn of the century.33 Such a trajectory might also help us to understand another series of Day’s male nudes, his striking “African” photographs, in their historical context. Notable for their rarity, and their celebration of African royalty past and present, Day’s African American male nudes openly valorize the black male body at a time when that body was literally torn apart by lynch mobs. Day made his so-­called African photographs in the late 1890s, near the historical height of lynching in the United States. As the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells demonstrated at the time, lynchings were performed under a racist sexual discourse that obscured the economic impetus that fueled the gruesome murders. Lynch mobs promoted themselves as righteous defenders of white women threatened by sexually deviant African American men. White supremacists circulated stories of oversexed black men and raised the cry of rape to legitimize lynching as the retribution of white fathers, husbands, and brothers. This racial sexual discourse was largely The Politics of Pictorialism — 53

Figure 2.10 F. Holland Day, Ebony and Ivory, c. 1897. Platinum print, 18.3 × 20.0 cm. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, N.Y.

effective in permitting white law enforcers to turn a blind eye to lynching, and by the turn of the century in some places mob murders became community spectacles that included all manner of ritualized torture of the black male body.34 Day’s “Nubian” and “African” photographs celebrate and idealize the black male body so feared by lynch mobs. Through several acts of transgression and transposition he situates the African American male body at the pinnacle of perfection, challenging and disrupting a Eurocentric measure of beauty that celebrated the Greek body as ideal.35 Ebony and Ivory (circa 1897), perhaps the most famous of Day’s African photographs, presents a nude male model seated on a leopard skin draped over the table or pedestal that supports him (see figure 2.10). In his right hand he holds up a small white statue for the viewer’s contemplation; it stands out in uninterrupted relief against the dark background. The model’s dark skin is 54 — Chapter 2

presumably the “ebony” to the white “ivory” of the statue. He nearly blends into the dark background that highlights by contrast the white figure he holds. His face turned away from the viewer, the man almost seems another object in this comparison set of opposites.36 Day’s objectification of his model, however, may work toward surprising ends. By placing the nude, as a kind of statue, on a pedestal, Day also positions the African American man as an ideal of beauty, and perhaps as the African source of the Greek beauty symbolized by the small statue he holds. Because the ivory statue seems to emerge out of the dark background of ebony, one might read this as a different kind of emergence, as a kind of inheritance. Although much of Day’s work celebrates Greek culture as the height of Western civilization, the Ebony and Ivory photographs would seem to enter racial debates about the origins of Greek culture. These photographs, as well as Day’s Ethiopia series, suggest an allegiance with thinkers who traced the roots of Greek culture back to Egypt, and through Egypt to the Nubians of Ethiopia.37 The contest over the racial origins of Western culture was especially heated in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Polygenesists and later eugenicists who celebrated ancient Greek culture as the height of a white, Western inheritance worked to “whiten” Egypt, the recognized origin of Greek culture. According to Robert Young, “Egypt, as the earliest civilization, developed in Africa, clearly represented the major potential stumbling-­ block to the claim for the permanent inferiority of the black race.”38 Josiah Nott, George Gliddon, and S. G. Morton all sought to prove the Caucasian origins of Egyptian culture, in order to maintain the coherence of their arguments about the permanent superiority of a white race throughout history.39 African American intellectuals such as Martin Delaney, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and W. E. B. Du Bois conversely sought to establish the Ethiopian roots of Egyptian culture, and thus the Ethiopian roots of Greek and Western civilization.40 At stake on both sides of the debate was “evidence” of racial ability, evidence that was harnessed to proslavery and antislavery arguments in the 1850s, and to proeugenicist and antieugenicist arguments in the early twentieth century.41 Day’s summoning of Ethiopian greatness is explicit and direct in Menelek (1897), which celebrates Menelik I, Emperor of Ethiopia, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (see figure 2.11). According to legend, Menelik I took the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments, from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and introduced Christianity to the Ethiopians.42 As The Politics of Pictorialism — 55

Figure 2.11 F. Holland Day, Menelek, 1897. Platinum print, 24.5 × 19.5 cm. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, N.Y.

a historical figure, then, Menelik links Africa to another cornerstone of Western civilization, namely the Judeo-­Christian religious tradition that Day would so intimately explore in the following years. Day’s Menelek also evokes the contemporary history of Menelik II, the Emperor of Ethiopia who defeated the Italians in the first African conquest over European colonists, in 1896.43 The historical context in which 56 — Chapter 2

Figure 2.12 F. Holland Day, African Chief, 1896 or 1897. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Day made and named this piece (one year after Menelik II’s triumph) gives the image a political resonance that transcends and troubles the photographer’s overt exoticizing of his subject.44 The props that adorn and frame the model in Menelek and one of its variations, the African Chief (see figure 2.12), seem designed to evoke an The Politics of Pictorialism — 57

Figure 2.13 F. Holland Day, An Ethiopian Chief, c. 1897. Platinum print, 18.1 × 18.4 cm. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, N.Y.

exotic otherworld, transporting the model out of Day’s present into an imagined Africa, and linking the African American man to Africa through the revelation and adornment of black skin. The images register the flattening tropes of an exoticized otherness, but they also highlight the self-­ possession of the subject’s solemnly composed face. While exoticism drives these images, so does idealism, and that idealism is linked, through the naming of these works, to overt political resistance to European colonialism, as well as to heavily contested ideas about the racial origins of Western culture.45 Day’s own idiosyncratic brand of symbolism and idealism informs other works featuring the African American model who posed for Mene58 — Chapter 2

Figure 2.14 F. Holland Day, Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty, 1896. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

lek.46 In An Ethiopian Chief (1897), Day has draped the model in the same simple, striped robe that a white model wears in Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty (c. 1896), and has adorned the man’s head with the same downward-­ pointing wings (see figures 2.13 and 2.14). The orb that the white model holds high is propped to the right side of the African American model’s hip, and the metal poppy that the figure holds in the earlier study has been replaced by a spear in the later, gripped in the opposite hand. Day’s homage to the British Romantic poet John Keats, whom he idolized, follows Keats in celebrating beauty as the foundation, and indeed the equivalent, of truth. Modeled after the Greek god Hypnos, with his winged head, the central figure in Beauty Is Truth suggests that dreams and the imagination mark The Politics of Pictorialism — 59

Figure 2.15 F. Holland Day, Armageddon, c. 1900. Published in The Photogram 8 (February 1901). Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

the path to both beauty and truth.47 Resembling so closely Day’s homage to Keats, An Ethiopian Chief celebrates African royalty as the pinnacle of classical values and the black male body as the height of beauty and truth. Day uses the logic of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to celebrate Africa as the origin of beauty, truth, and the aesthetic imagination, and also, perhaps, as the origin of Greek civilization. Day cropped An Ethiopian Chief and presented the photograph in a circular frame in Ethiopian Monarch (1897), the centerpiece of his Armageddon triptych (circa 1900) (see figure 2.15). Situated here as the supreme symbol of justice, the Ethiopian symbol of truth and beauty becomes the ultimate arbiter of sin and virtue.48 In Armageddon, the Ethiopian king is placed as judge between two images that serve as inverted reflections of one another. Justice stands between the sinner and the righteous, determining each one’s path through darkness and light.49 The aura of Menelik, preserver of the Ark of the Covenant, is here transposed onto the more generically named “Ethiopian Monarch” who serves as supreme judge. Displayed at the Royal Photographic Society exhibition in London in 1900, Armageddon served as the base of a large installation of twelve pieces that closely resembles the altar of a church (see figure 2.16).50 Placed in the middle and at the bottom of this arrangement, the triptych also serves as the foundation of a cross configuration that dominates the symmetrical altar. Rising from the platform of Armageddon is Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty, framed with an Entombment photograph, followed by The 60 — Chapter 2

Figure 2.16 F. Holland Day’s Sacred Subjects, installation image, Royal Photographic Society, London, 1900. Published in Photo Era (January 1901): 209. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Seven Words, framed together in a series and topped by one of the alternate images from that series, displayed as a single photograph. To the right of this center cross is one of the crucifixion images. Between the apex of the ascendant Christ and the day of judgment, Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty is figured as the means to spiritual transcendence in the material world, which, like the dead body of Christ with which it is framed, marks a transition point between realms of the physical and the spiritual. Together the images that form the cross suggest that spiritual judgment and redemption will be based on the eternal truth of beauty and that sacrifice to that ideal will lead to eternal salvation. The Politics of Pictorialism — 61

In Day’s work, the black male body, an object of fascination and fear for so many white Americans, becomes the perfect ancient form. The basis of both Greek and Christian cultures is found in Africa, and the black male body serves as ground and apex, platform and pinnacle for spiritual and aesthetic revival. From Ebony and Ivory to Armageddon, in Day’s melded mythology of Greek and Christian civilization, the African American man is central to both the beginning and the end of the world.

Although idealization is prevalent in Day’s work, it is not his only representational strategy with regard to race. Day plays both against and to a racial sexual mythology. His photographs not only contest but also ambiguously extend a scientific gaze that reads the racialized and sexualized body for intersecting signs of “deviance.” As Siobhan Somerville has argued, early sexologists learned to see sex through race, and Day deploys a similar visual and associative strategy to envision his own sexuality through his representation and performance of race. In other words, Day calls upon race to represent himself within a sexual lexicon. Sexologists working to define homosexuality at the turn of the century relied on a conceptual template borrowed from race scientists in the nineteenth century.51 Indeed, one of the ways scientists conceived racial difference was through sexuality—the idea of the purportedly “oversexed” African American man and woman. This shared template was particularly salient in the visual strategies sex scientists used to mark the homosexual body.52 Like the race scientists who both preceded them and were their contemporaries, sexologists purported to map the body, measuring it against a heterosexual norm that they simultaneously created. They marked deviance on the body, deeming homosexuality, like race, a characteristic manifest in physical, discernable, visible traits (the supposedly enlarged clitoris of the lesbian was deemed similar to the supposedly enlarged clitoris of the black woman).53 Like their colleagues, sexologists used visual media to encode the homosexual body—the drawing, the lithograph, the photograph. One might say, then, that sexologists and race scientists practiced the same way of looking at the body and that sexologists learned to see the body through the templates provided by race science. In scientific discourses at the time, the homosexual body was an image transposed on the body of color. The homosexual body became visible through the lens of the racialized body.54 62 — Chapter 2

In scientific as well as popular discourses of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the racial inscription of men of color was effected in part through representations of their sexuality as “deviant.” Once again, in the white-­supremacist discourses surrounding lynching, the black man’s sexuality was described as both overdeveloped and atavistic. Similarly, the harem fascinated a bourgeois Western culture more or less committed to heterosexual monogamy. Indeed, as Malek Alloula has argued, the harem was the central figure of a sexualized Orientalist fantasy.55 As these discourses mapped sex on and through the racialized body, one might say that F. Holland Day attempted to do the same. Day’s fascination with ethnic and racial “types” and his penchant for “exotic” dress might be understood as his attempt to signal codes of sexuality through the associations of race, to map himself sexually through racial performance.56 The implications of this trade are certainly troubling in terms of both race and sexuality, leaving racism and homophobia intact. Nevertheless, seeing this transcription enables one to perceive how Day searched for a visual language through which to represent his desire.57 The portraits Frederick Evans made of Day shortly after Day’s visit to Algeria might be seen as Day’s effort to participate in the American fantasy of a “liberated” Islamic masculinity. As Timothy Marr has argued, several decades before Day made his trip to Algeria, American howadji, or travelers in the Islamic east, developed a romance of oriental masculinity focused on male liberty and the patriarchal power associated with the harem.58 The howadji adopted Arab dress to signal their claim on an Islamicized masculinity; their garb symbolized their male privilege and masculine liberation. Travel writers in the early to mid-­nineteenth century celebrated “the freedom from restraint,” and from the “conventional confinements of race, religion, and gender” that they purported to experience in the Near East.59 While Day may not have been interested in the specific patriarchal privileges of the harem, he might have enjoyed the power to transgress conventional confinements of gender, as well as the largely homosocial spheres of Islamic culture. The very idea of another model of masculinity, as well as the freedom associated with a Western fantasy of Islamic masculinity, may have offered Day a signifying space through which to imagine and perform his own liberated masculinity. In a full-­length portrait, Day stands facing the camera (see figure 2.17). He is dressed in a white burnoose that covers him from head to toe, save for the dark accents of stockings, shoes, walking stick, and the dark cloth The Politics of Pictorialism — 63

Figure 2.17 Frederick Evans, portrait of F. Holland Day in Algerian robes, 1901. Platinum print. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

that secures his turban. He has thrown back his cloak to reveal the loose fitting garments he wears underneath. His pose is slightly askew, his weight on his back leg. Tilting his head, he looks directly at the camera with heavy-­ lidded eyes. Clarence White’s portraits of Day with his “Nubian” model (circa 1900) might be taken as images that trade on the sexualization of the black male body to signal the homosexual white male body. In these photographs, the African American model fades into the darkness behind Day, literally providing the background against which Day is framed. In one of the images, Day wears a dark robe over a high-­necked white shirt. The lines of his face and the curls of his hair are rendered in soft focus, while his left hand, raised, stands out in sharpness (see figure 2.18). In the darkness of the background, the contours of a black man’s body emerge behind Day. Much of this man’s body is imperceptible in the darkness, but the light catches his shoulder and chest, the curve of his forehead, and the hand he has raised to his face. In another of White’s portraits, Day is posed standing in profile, in a long, light robe, his left hand leaning on a pillar for support. Light from above and just behind Day illuminates his hair and traces the edge of his striking profile. The white folds of Day’s robe stand out against the youthful abdomen of an African American man, just visible in the darkness behind Day. This man’s chest glows, catching the diffuse edge of the descending ray of light. His head is submerged in shadow. There is no question that these photographs are deeply problematic. The portraits by Clarence White render Day visible against the dark background of an anonymous black male body, literally making blackness the ground against which Day emerges. But in these perplexing photographs one might also see Day attempting to represent a sexual identity. Without apologizing for Day, one might see racism signifying beyond race in these images. Day does not trade on race only to secure his whiteness, but also to signify a “deviant” sexuality. He pointedly deploys the sexual connotations of the racial signifier. Recalling the association of “deviant” sexualities with race in racial science reanimates these images, allowing one to see their multivalent body politics. Cloaking himself in Algerian robes, or posing himself with naked black men, Day inscribes himself in racialist terms to connote sexual difference. He uses race to signify sexuality, claiming and making visible a coded homosexual identity.60 The Politics of Pictorialism — 65

Figure 2.18 Clarence H. White, portrait of F. Holland Day with male nude, c. 1897. Platinum print, 24.2 × 18.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, N.Y.

Day’s photographs encourage one to consider the photographed body as an object of desire from a number of different perspectives. The images of Orpheus and Saint Sebastian pose youthful male bodies as the beautiful and tortured objects of Day’s desiring gaze. The African images present classical and “exotic” male bodies as ideal subjects. The portraits of the artist with his nude black models situate Day himself within the photographic frame, associating him with bodies that evoked desire, fear, and sexual transgression. The images of Christ uniquely expose Day’s own body, affording viewers, including Day himself, an opportunity to consider the photographer as an object of desire (see figure 2.19). Whereas ancient Greek culture has often been associated with sexual permissiveness, Christian cultures have often been associated with sexual prohibitions. Nevertheless, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, although “Christianity may be near-­ubiquitous in modern European culture as a figure of phobic prohibition, . . . it makes a strange figure for that indeed.” Sedgwick notes that images of Jesus have “a unique position in modern culture as images of the unclothed or unclothable male body, often in extremis and/ or in ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored.”61 Day’s work bridges the divide between Greek and Christian imagery, inviting one to read his Christ photographs through the erotic lens of his Greek images, to consider the Christ-­Day body as that which is “meant to be gazed at and adored.” Seeking devoted viewers for himself, Day uses the template of the Passion of Christ to posit his own body as a tortured object and ultimately as an emblem of transcendence. By reading the ethereal aesthetics and carefully coded symbols of Day’s photographs, one discovers a new kind of politics in the images, and in pictorialism itself. The pictorialists sought, in part, to unsettle the denotative nature of the photograph, making it newly available for symbolic and allegorical meaning, and this flight from the “real” has generally been read as a flight from politics as well. But as my reading of Day’s images suggests, pictorialist aesthetics might also be understood politically, as a way of resisting and subverting other photographic practices that simultaneously inscribed the body and called upon it as evidence. The hazy, atmospheric aesthetics and theatrical performances of pictorialism might be understood to transform the body from legible scientific sign into evocative symbolic sign. Ultimately Day’s pictorialist photographs offer a new kind of evidence. The Politics of Pictorialism — 67

Figure 2.19 F. Holland Day, crucifixion with two Roman soldiers, 1898. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

They participate in the dynamic Roland Barthes deemed the punctum of some erotic photographs: once again, it is “as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.”62 Day’s erotic images also propel desire beyond what the photographs permit us to see, beyond the photographic index, into a mythological and spiritual domain that unsettles the register of the real. Day’s desire transforms the body and the photograph, launching both beyond the limits of fixity and finality.

F. Holland Day’s Christ photographs call to mind a compelling tension in the work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin famously celebrated photography as a form of “mechanical reproduction” that would finally dissipate the “aura” imprisoning art in a cult of originality. Photography, heralding the era of the copy, would nullify obsession with the original, freeing art from the nearly sacred rituals of reverence, to make it newly available for the purposes of political propaganda. No single essay has influenced the cultural study of photography more than Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”63 Pictorialism stands as a willful aberration in Benjamin’s understanding of photography, for the pictorialists, Day among them, sought precisely to elevate the photograph into the pseudo-­sacred realm of original, auratic art. They reproduced themes and scenes from narratives in art history, and sought especially to mimic painterly effects. Most important, the pictorialists worked to undermine the reproducibility of the photograph, making one-­of-­a kind prints on special papers embellished by the artist’s hand (see figure 2.20). As Pam Roberts notes, Day “always paid meticulous attention to the printing of his photographs, . . . trying to differentiate every print from the same negative by reverse printing, cropping, printing darker or lighter, using a variety of fine art papers with smooth and rough surfaces to make each image unique.”64 Working against the dissolution of aura inaugurated by mechanical reproduction, the pictorialists reconfigured photographs as unique and original images. Benjamin’s theory of representation was part and parcel of his revolutionary theory of history, in which he sought to disrupt a blind belief in the idea of progress. For Benjamin, “progress” was a mirage of capital that actually did not change, but continued to reproduce the same. A flood of ever-­changing commodities obscured the retrenchment of debilitating economic and social structures. To disrupt this continual flow, Benjamin The Politics of Pictorialism — 69

Figure 2.20 Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day in his London darkroom, 1900. Courtesy of the Royal Photographic Society, Science and Society Picture Library.

proposed that the “dialectical image” might offer a moment of recognition in which one could perceive, in a flash, the perpetual repetition, discerning how the new was actually the old repeating itself. Such a flash of recognition could drive a wedge in one’s perception of progress, encouraging one to embrace and effect revolutionary change.65 Even more disruptively, if somewhat anomalously, however, Benjamin believed that the so-­called progress of history, the onward march of capital, was sometimes interrupted by “messianic moments.” In such instances the essence of things might suddenly and inexplicably be revealed; a radically other conception of time might momentarily pierce through the illusion of progress.66 Somewhat perversely, perhaps, I cannot look at Day’s Christ images without thinking of the messianic moments that intersect with Benjamin’s materialist theories of photography and history. As attempts to produce messianic moments through mechanical reproduction, Day’s Christ photographs highlight the tensions between the two forms of revolution Benjamin articulated, one technological and one mystical. Day did not, of course, seek the Marxist revolution Benjamin hoped for; nevertheless, his images do have a politics that has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged. His dreamy, soft-­focused images transport bodies beyond the grasp of those scientists who used their own photographic techniques to deem them deviant and undesirable. In Day’s erotic theater, homosexual and black male bodies become the idealized origins of beauty, truth, Christianity, and civilization. Understood in their cultural contexts, Day’s photographs begin to take on new valences and political import. If not exactly the dialectical images or messianic moments Benjamin hoped for, his images nevertheless represent an alternative perception and an alternative understanding of both the body and the photograph. Day’s photographs grasp at the unseen, bringing the ever ineffable—desire—into view.

The Politics of Pictorialism — 71

My Muybridge 

She is forever frozen in tiny frames, her naked body

hunched and springing at the shock of cold water. We see, in the incremental progression of her stilled gestures, her attempt to leap out of the scene. I long to reanimate her and liberate her from this perpetual dousing and drenching.

artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith

Chapter 3 The

Space Between

Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies

Twenty photographs arranged in a grid appear as tiny windows set in a dark frame. In the postage-­sized images, a rider in dark silhouette sits astride a white horse, its tail, mane, and legs flung out, marking its rapid pace. In the first row of five images, the horse stretches its legs; its front hooves touch down alternately as it extends its back legs behind its body. In the second row, the horse pulls its hind legs up under its body, as speed propels it forward. Finally, the horse folds all four legs inward, and for a moment hovers, entirely airborne. Not a single hoof touches the ground (see figure 3.1). Eadweard Muybridge’s work in motion studies began in 1872, at the request of Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, U.S. senator, former governor of California, and breeder of racehorses. Stanford hoped to better understand the gait of his horses in order to improve their performance at the track, and he employed Muybridge to settle the long-­standing question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground at any point in its galloping stride.1 The photographer worked with Stanford for five years, and his striking photographs of horses in flight were discussed widely throughout the United States and Europe.2 Muybridge’s technological achievements were enthralling to those without equestrian interests, as well. Artists, scientists, and photographers all found the images compelling. As the historian of photography Phillip Prodger has argued, “With his first photographs of the galloping horse in California, Muybridge had pushed photography beyond the threshold of what is visible and made time

Figure 3.1 Eadweard J. Muybridge, horses, running, c. 1881. Albumen print. The Attitudes of Animals in Motion: A Series of Photographs Illustrating the Consecutive Positions Assumed by Animals in Performing Various Movements; Executed at Palo Alto, California, in 1878 and 1879, plate 37, 1881. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

stand still. As a result, natural and photographic vision had diverged forever.”3 Or rather, Muybridge’s photographs extended natural vision. They stilled movement that could not otherwise be seen, making the invisible visible. But even as they offered the compensation of the photograph and photographic vision, they also highlighted the limits of human eyesight, calling attention to all that cannot ordinarily be seen. Walter Benjamin almost certainly had Muybridge’s photographic studies in mind when he described the optical unconscious. Several years after his famous work with horses, Muybridge conducted extensive photographic experiments in the study of human motion at the University of Pennsylvania. He meticulously recorded men, women, and children walking, running, jumping, and performing other activities before his cameras. These are the photographs to which Benjamin must have referred when he explained, in “A Small History of Photography,” “Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking, if only in general terms, we have no idea at all what happens 76 — Chapter 3

during the fraction of a second when a person steps out. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”4 Muybridge’s photographs arrest motion, freezing and making visible incremental gestures usually lost in the blur of continuous movement. They enable one to perceive elements in the visual field that generally pass before the eye unnoticed, making one aware of invisible worlds and ordinary blindness. Muybridge’s marvelous motion studies are full of gaps and contradictions. The subject of the experiments, motion itself, slips out of view and remains invisible, caught between frames. Indeed, Muybridge’s photographic evidence depends on the viewer’s imagination to fulfill its promise. Movement is only inferred. It is suggested by the logic of the sequence but remains unseen in the space between frames. As Muybridge’s subjects are caught in the moment of stepping out, they are also caught in a cultural web of anxieties and desires about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet, even as the series reproduce those discourses, they also tack against them in intriguing ways. The photographs are at once scientific and excessive, clinical and pornographic, normative and homoerotic. They are replete with elisions and inconsistencies. Just as motion is invisible in these motion studies, the scientific evidence the images promise is often at odds with what they reveal. The scenarios depicted in Muybridge’s photographs are theatrical, often playful and sometimes outrageous. The models are seen to be inadvertently smiling, laughing, and snickering, enjoying or dumbfounded by the unusual nature of their tasks. Muybridge’s subjects assert themselves through their extraordinary performances, and the viewer is encouraged to consider what they experienced in the unseen time and space between frames. In this spirit, one errant figure walks, dances, laughs, and peers at other models throughout the pages of this chapter. She did not miss the stifling heat and smell of the studio. It felt delicious to be outside, standing naked in the light of day. In 1883, at the prodding of the painter Thomas Eakins, the University of Pennsylvania invited Muybridge to continue his motion studies on the grounds of the university’s new Veterinary Department.5 Muybridge began work in 1884, overseen by a commission of nine men, including professors The Space Between — 77

Figure 3.2 Eadweard J. Muybridge, running, full speed, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 64, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

of comparative anatomy and zoology and doctors and engineers at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Thomas Eakins and Edward Coates, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.6 He constructed a large outdoor theater to conduct his experiments and employed a number of models, including animals, fourteen students from the University of Pennsylvania (men), amateur and professional athletes, mechanics, laborers, and artists’ models.7 After finally working out the mechanics of his photographic process in 1885, Muybridge had his models walk, run, jump, and perform a wide range of tasks along a track in front of batteries of twelve cameras each, spaced at even intervals and set on timers (see figure 3.2). As many as three batteries of cameras were used for each photographic session (in other words, up to thirty-­six cameras total), and they were positioned at different angles, so that a subject’s progressive movements could be recorded from the front, back, and side.8 The massive project was completed in 1886. The process of taking the photographs was elaborate, and the process of making the final collotype prints was equally extravagant. After he made negatives in the individual cameras (again, up to thirty-­six of them), Muy78 — Chapter 3

Figure 3.3 Eadweard J. Muybridge, walking, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 17, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

bridge printed cyanotype proofs. Using the proofs as guides, he selected negatives for enlargement and positive printing on glass lantern slides. He then collected the slides and arranged them on large glass plates, rephotographing them to make composite negatives. Finally, he made collotype printing plates from the composite negatives, inked the plates, and transferred the composite images to paper as prints.9 Muybridge presented his human motion studies under the collective title Animal Locomotion in 1887, and the final publication included 781 plates (562 of human subjects) assembled from 19,347 single negatives.10 Animal Locomotion is full of fascinating contradictions and tensions. Although the images were celebrated for “revealing” the mechanics of motion, the photographs themselves nevertheless remain static. Even as they suggest motion, the images are still. The series break the flow of continuous movement into discrete gestures, fixing gradually shifting poses in still frames. The photographs depend on their places in the series they occupy to imply motion. Viewers infer that photographed subjects have been caught in action only by comparing one frame to the next. Motion is not really captured in the images but remains between frames. The photographic sequence begs the viewer’s leap of faith to connect one image to the next, to deduce movement between images. The sequence requires the viewer to imagine what she cannot see, what remains invisible in the dark bands that divide frames. In one of the series “walking,” a young woman identified as “Model 6” stands naked, perpendicular to the camera, her body in profile (see figure 3.3). Long, wavy hair falls to the middle of her back. Her full white breasts The Space Between — 79

and bottom stand out against the dark background marked with white lines. She is framed tightly, feet and head nearly touching the top and bottom of the image. With her left foot firmly planted on the wooden platform, she raises her right foot, extending her leg out in front of her body. In the next frame, her right leg is fully stretched, foot flexed up, casting a shadow. She has shifted her body slightly and the curve of her left buttock has come into view. Her left arm swings out slightly in front of her hip. In the third frame, her right heel makes contact with the walkway, and her left heel lifts. She is suspended in the middle of the frame, her weight evenly balanced between outstretched legs. In the fourth frame she presses her right foot fully down on the wooden path. Her left foot flexes, toes still on the ground, and her left arm is no longer in sight. Her body arches back slightly as her left leg bends. Such slight shifts in the woman’s position are traced over the course of twelve frames, and it appears that she has taken only two steps across the entire sequence. Below this row of twelve images is another row of twelve in which the same woman faces the camera, seeming to walk directly toward the viewer. In the first few frames, she appears to be smiling, her head turned slightly away from the camera. Muybridge set up his cameras parallel to the trajectories of his subjects, placing them at even intervals to capture progressive points in his models’ movements. Each photographic frame in a given series depicts the subject from the same perspective and distance. Because each camera in a battery bears the same distance from, angle on, and perspective on the model, the relation between viewer and viewed also appears to remain the same. In this way, bodies do not really pass before the viewer. They do not move closer or farther away, but persistently reappear in the same relation to the viewer, with limbs in slightly different positions. It would appear that Muybridge’s subjects, like Model 6, walk in place. Nevertheless, as Marta Braun has argued, viewers believe in both the movement that is suggested by alternating limbs, as well as the traversal of time and space, due to the power of the sequence as a scientific form. “The sequence endows its component parts with movement because we believe any sequence to be orderly, logical, and progressive,” even when it is not.11 Indeed, the overall effect of the sequence, its visual logic as a whole, is more important than any of its component image parts. “The sequence invites us to cooperate in creating the illusion of motion.”12 Muybridge’s series depend on the viewer’s imagination to secure their object. And when the component parts of his sequences didn’t quite add up, he manipulated them, expanding or 80 — Chapter 3

contracting an image here, repeating an image there.13 He understood that the “big picture,” the sequence itself, would carry the overall effect of movement and scientific accuracy he hoped to convey (see, again, figure 3.2; in the top row of images the fourth and fifth are identical). In Muybridge’s photographs, movement is only perceived through the difference between one image and the next, through the slight changes in posture and pose the viewer identifies by “reading” the images in sequence, from left to right. As Braun has argued, “Movement has to be reconstructed by the viewer from these gestures from frame to frame.”14 Motion is what has happened in between the still photographs, and it is marked by difference, the very small variance between one pose and the next. In other words, motion is not “captured” in Muybridge’s photographs; it is only inferred through the perception of difference, or perhaps différance. It is precisely that which is not seen in the images themselves.15 The intended referent is deferred, remaining invisible in the dark space between photographs. Muybridge has often been called the “father of the motion picture” because his photographs are so intent on motion, which is often deemed the particular purview of film. But in their efforts to represent motion, Muybridge’s series paradoxically call attention to the pauses between frames, to the break in the action, the gaps in the progression. Repeating black bars separate individual images, enclosing each in a square of darkness. Film sutures frames together, making the seams invisible, imperceptible to viewers because of the eye’s perceptual lag time. The discrete frames of film images seem to flow together because natural sight is delayed, and the perception of one image persists into the next. For this reason, Muybridge’s colleague in chronophotography, the French photographer Étienne Jules Marey, explicitly privileged photography over film in his scientific experiments. As Mary Ann Doane explains, Marey understood that only photography, not film, could represent more than the eye alone could see. According to Marey, “Cinema produces only what the eye can see in any case. It adds nothing to the power of our sight, nor does it remove its illusions, and the real character of a scientific method is to supplant the insufficiency of our senses and correct their errors. To get to this point, chronophotography should renounce the representation of phenomena as they are seen by the eye.”16 Like Marey, Muybridge also used photography to see beyond the limits of natural human sight, to break the flow of motion and still time, making the elements of movement usually lost in vision’s delay stand out as distinct, perceptible elements. In Muybridge’s photographs the repetition The Space Between — 81

Figure 3.4 Eadweard J. Muybridge, on guard, walking, and turning around, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 355, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

of black lines accentuates the pauses between frames. One sees the seams. Each still image becomes an isolated moment, linked but not sutured to the next. Indeed, the gaps, the spaces between images, are as prominent as the images themselves, and it is in those dark borders that Muybridge’s invisible subject, motion, ultimately lies. She never knew what the elderly photographer would ask her to do. He set her moving in front of rows and rows of cameras. Each twist and turn of her body was captured. She saw herself in the blue proofs—throwing a ball, hopping across rocks, carrying a bucket. She didn’t understand how any of this was science or art, but the work was entertaining. Despite their inconsistencies and illusions, Muybridge’s studies were performed under the rubric of science (once again, in association with the University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary Department), and they resonate with other scientific studies in the late nineteenth century that employed photography.17 Muybridge’s series of men walking and running, and especially those of men walking while carrying a rifle (see figure 3.4), recall the slightly later films of Félix-­Louis Regnault, student of Étienne Jules Marey, who in 1896 produced chronophotographic films of a man performing the marche en flexion. With his own motion studies, Regnault sought to dem82 — Chapter 3

onstrate that a slightly crouched walking position “was more efficient and less shocking to the body than the normal military walk.”18 The marche en flexion Regnault praised as the preferred gait for French soldiers was also said to be the natural walk of “savages,” and Regnault had spent the previous year photographing West African men and women walking, running, and jumping at the Exposition Ethnographique in 1895.19 Regnault believed that “races reveal themselves in movement,” and that therefore ethnographic film could be of use in the “taxonomic ranking of peoples.”20 In other words, for Regnault, motion studies were, by definition, studies of race. His chronophotographic films of French men always signified in relation to his films of racial others. Photography had long been harnessed to racial taxonomies, and before race was thought to manifest in physical movement, scientists sought to fix race in the body itself. As scholars such as Brian Wallis and Allan Sekula have demonstrated, scientists throughout the nineteenth century used photography in their attempts to codify race in and on the body.21 Joseph Zealy’s famous daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women stripped naked in his studio, produced for the polygenesist Louis Agassiz, inaugurated a host of racialized photographic practices that would be taken up and further refined over the course of the nineteenth century by eugenicists such as Francis Galton and early physical anthropologists such as John Lamprey.22 In 1868–69, Lamprey adopted the metrological grid system and utilized it in his photographic studies of Malayan men and women (see figure 2.5). A grid of string erected behind subjects was thought to help scientists accurately measure and compare the bodily proportions of photographed men and women.23 The work of Regnault, Lamprey, and others provides an important racialized context through which to reconsider Muybridge’s work. As Elspeth Brown has documented in the first essay to seriously study race in Muybridge’s motion studies, “Lamprey’s anthropometric grid shows up for the first time in American photography in Muybridge’s University of Pennsylvania project.”24 The deployment of enframing metrics alone suggests a racialized scientific context for Muybridge’s work. Even more startlingly, however, Lamprey’s grid appears in Muybridge’s studies for the first time on June 2, 1885, in series 524–31, depicting Ben Bailey, the only African American subject in Muybridge’s locomotion studies. It is as if the grid clings to the body of color in the photographer’s mind. The introduction of the black body brings with it the anthropologist’s measuring technique. The Space Between — 83

Figure 3.5 Eadweard J. Muybridge, striking a blow (right hand), 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 344, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

The body of color seems to call forth the grid for white scientists by the late nineteenth century. Schooled on discourses of black “savagery” that sought to dehumanize men and women of color, scientists employed the grid to rein in the body perceived to be not quite fully human. They used the grid to manage their anxieties in confronting the black body, and to manage the black body’s perceived excess. For wasn’t the black male body inscribed as overly physical, and outrageously sexual, in the white imagination? Perhaps, then, Muybridge’s grid was first used to restrain the black male body, to break it down into manageable, little five-­centimeter square parts. In one of the series, Ben Bailey, identified as “Model 22,” “Pugilist,” is shown “striking a blow” (see figure 3.5). In the first frame, he stands, entirely naked, his left leg firmly planted, his right leg stretched out before him, foot raised slightly off the ground. He draws his muscled right arm, folded at the elbow, hand clenched in a fist, back behind him. He is coiled, ready to release his energy in a punch. Across the four subsequent frames, Bailey stretches forth his right arm until, in the fifth photograph, he extends it fully, perpendicular to his body, his hand still clenched in a fist. He has thrown his weight forward, onto his right leg, which bends and flexes under his weight. He folds at the hip, extending his torso out with his right arm, and pulls his left arm up against his side. Fully extended, at the moment of maximum force, his right fist seems to hit the black bar that separates the fifth image from the sixth. It is as if he is trying to punch himself out of the frame that would contain him. Bailey’s isolation is marked. He is “striking a blow,” but at what exactly? 84 — Chapter 3

Figure 3.6 Eadweard J. Muybridge, boxing, open hand, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 340, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

In other series, paired pugilists, all white, throw punches at each other. In some, the men are in constant contact—they grab each other around the neck, seeming to embrace in their struggle (see figure 3.6). Unlike the other athletes, Bailey shadow boxes alone. Perhaps Muybridge, or his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, prohibited intimate physical contact across the color line. Or perhaps they implicitly understood that a scene of physical violence between a black man and a white man would prove too sensational for viewers. Or perhaps a direct comparison between Bailey’s muscular physique and that of a white counterpart would prove damaging to the racial hierarchy Muybridge’s motion studies implicitly register. Shadow boxing, Bailey recalls the “shadow archive,” that “generalized, inclusive archive,” that gives the scientific archive its larger cultural meaning. As Allan Sekula reminds us, any individual photograph gains cultural coherence only through its imagined relation to a vast cultural archive of images and discourses.25 Muybridge’s scientific studies, though not purportedly “about” race, nevertheless signify in relation to a shadow archive of fragile racial hierarchies. The Space Between — 85

The scenarios were becoming more involved. She was asked to get in and out of bed. To wash her breasts. To put on stockings. To smoke. To pour water from an earthen jug into a kneeling woman’s mouth. To douse another woman with water. Once introduced into Muybridge’s work, the grid remains. The white men, women, and children who pass before his cameras after Ben Bailey also pass before Muybridge’s grid. And as they perform for the cameras, their movements are caught in the web of references that cling to the grid; as they are frozen in fractions of seconds, they are also fixed in taxonomies of race. What we ultimately find in Muybridge’s locomotion studies is a fascinating archive overwhelmingly populated by the white body. Indeed, the body so often made invisible as an unseen norm in scientific studies of “race” is here brought before the grid for examination. What do we learn about whiteness from this archive? Although there are exceptions, most of the bodies represented in Muybridge’s archive are young and physically fit, many remarkably so. Some of the men perform physical labor, swinging pick axes, digging with spades, hammering, planing, and sawing, their bodies flexed, muscles strained and tight. Others perform athletic activities, such as running, jumping, throwing, hitting, rowing, wrestling, and fencing. As Elspeth Brown has documented, many of the male models were very successful amateur athletes at the University of Pennsylvania, and they exemplify a new philosophy of physical education embraced by the university in the late nineteenth century.26 William Pepper, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania from 1881 to 1894, and a member of Muybridge’s advisory committee, saw “the development of a system of physical education and hygiene” as one of his first and foremost goals. According to Brown, for Pepper, “the development of the white, male student body was directly linked to white racial progress.”27 Elite athletes photographed at the height of their youth and health, Muybridge’s male models represent the “champions” of the race. The women, in contrast, are shown performing a variety of domesticated activities. Like the men, they walk up and down stairs and inclines, but they do so coyly, with hand to mouth, or waving handkerchiefs, or throwing a kiss, or holding pitchers, buckets, basins, and bowls (see figure 3.7 and 3.8). As Linda Williams has argued, Muybridge’s women are anchored in the beginnings of narratives, in mise-­en-­scènes: “Again and again the woman’s body appears to be embedded in a mise-­en-­scene that places her in a more 86 — Chapter 3

Figure 3.7 Eadweard J. Muybridge, ascending stairs, looking round, waving hand’chief, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 96, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 3.8 Eadweard J. Muybridge, turning, ascending stairs, bucket water in r. hand, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 102, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 3.9 Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, one pouring bucket of water over eight, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 408, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

specific imaginary place and time.”28 Whereas the perceived excess of the black male body called forth the containment of the grid, the perceived lack of the white female body begged for a different kind of compensation. According to Williams, the woman’s visible sexual difference incites a need to suppress the threat of castration her body poses for a male viewer, and thus, in Muybridge’s photographs, “the women are consistently provided with an extra prop which overdetermines their difference from the male.”29 Women walk, but with pitchers, and baskets, and buckets. The choice of props for the women in motion is also telling. Certainly the basins, buckets, and pitchers suggest domestic chores, but in the iconography of painting, the pitcher or vase has also long been used to signal a woman’s virginity, the whole urn marking her wholeness, the cracked vessel her sexual experience. Sound containers also hold liquid, and Muybridge’s women seem overwhelmingly associated with water. They pour it from cans and jugs, throw it from basins, splash it on their faces, and douse each other with buckets of it, as if to emphasize and reinforce the fluidity of their bodies, or to offer a hygienic compensation for that fluidity, expunging “dirty” substances with clean liquids (see figure 3.9).30 In Muybridge’s archive of whiteness, gender and sexual difference are consistently on display; indeed, they function as signs of whiteness. In the late nineteenth century, gender differentiation was deemed a marker of racial superiority. One of the central assumptions of Darwinian evolution88 — Chapter 3

ary theory, according to Siobhan Somerville, “was the belief that, as organisms evolved through a process of natural selection, they also showed greater signs of sexual differentiation.”31 Further, as noted in the previous chapter, the sciences of race intersected with the sciences of sexology in the late nineteenth century, and sexologists adopted many of their scientific practices from race scientists, who had long read the body and its physical forms as signs of interior essence.32 Race scientists read what they deemed sexual “deformities” as signs of racial difference: The imagined “large clitoris” of the black woman was thought to liken her physically to the black man, and insufficient gender differentiation was taken as an indicator of racial inferiority. Because distinctions between men and women marked racial superiority for evolutionary race scientists in the late nineteenth century, Muybridge’s encoding of gender in Animal Locomotion might also be understood in racial terms. In this context, the overinscription of sexual difference in the props that situate Muybridge’s women in elaborate mise-­en-­scènes takes on racial meaning. Registered against a grid, buckets, pitchers, basins, and vases signal racial superiority as they denote gender distinctness. Efforts to suppress the “threat” of women’s sexual difference are transformed into signs of civilization. The focus on gender distinction in Muybridge’s work is thus also a racial construct, and gender differentiation is central to the way whiteness emerges in Muybridge’s archive. They couldn’t stop laughing. This amused the photographer too, but he pleaded with them to be more serious—for science, for art. And so they tried again, this time not looking at one another as they embraced and danced. Her partner’s cheek brushed against her own, its softness a surprise. She smelled her musky hair and the trace of soap on her neck. Although executed in the domain of science, Muybridge’s photographs were also made for and used by artists, such as Thomas Eakins, who employed them as sketchbooks for painting. As Tom Gunning has proposed, “A major purpose behind the publication of his [Muybridge’s] magnum opus Animal Locomotion was to provide an atlas of figure studies for artists.”33 And as Muybridge’s motion studies were conceived, at least in part, as documents for artists, they were also, as Janine Mileaf has shown, shaped and influenced by artistic traditions and conventions: “Muybridge modeled his motion studies after the conventions of academic painting.”34 The Space Between — 89

Figure 3.10 Eadweard J. Muybridge, toilet, two models, one disrobing eight, 1884– 87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 427, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Especially in the case of the more narratively based tableaux featuring female models, themes and subjects from art made their way into Muybridge’s scientific studies. A series of plates numbered 427 to 429 shows, from three different vantages, a woman unwinding a diaphanous cloth from the body of another woman. As the latter is disrobed and her body is revealed, she covers her sex and hides her eyes in the bend of her elbow, as if in shame. Mileaf compares these images to historical representations in art of the Venus Pudica, or Venus of Modesty, showing how Muybridge’s model replicates the pose and gestures of that figure.35 In another striking example, Mileaf reads the plates in relation to Jean-­Léon Gérôme’s painting The Slave Market (1866), a theme to which he returned in 1884.36 Although Muybridge would finally name plates 427 to 429 Woman Disrobing Another, in his notebooks he records plate 429 as Inspecting a Slave (White)37 (see figure 3.10). The racialized sexual history that informs Muybridge’s imagination is pervasive. The display of the enslaved woman’s body in the slave market has long been understood as a spectacle that makes apparent the sexualized nature of the slave owner’s power. The overt eroticism of this display was often couched in the performance of a degrading inspection of physical strength and health, the enslaved woman’s nakedness made “acceptable” through a logic of dehumanization. And yet it was also well known that an enslaved woman’s “fitness” was measured in part by her child-­bearing capacity, her ability to increase the master’s property through her body, and often at the master’s will. Evoking the history of rape in slavery, Muybridge’s “slave” is nevertheless coded “white.” Accentuating the overall whiteness of his 90 — Chapter 3

archive, the racial marking of this slave as white also demonstrates how whiteness is made visible against a black register in Muybridge’s studies. Further, in the late nineteenth century, white slavery was a synonym for prostitution, and thus Inspecting a Slave (White) is imbued with several overlapping layers of sexual connotation, all of which link the visibility of the woman’s body to sexual mastery over her. Once she arrived early and caught a glimpse of the men. As the two athletes squared off, the tall one smiled at his opponent. And then, at the photographer’s signal, he grabbed the slighter man so forcefully, it knocked the wind out of him. Staggering back on his heels, the latter struggled for a brief moment to regain his balance, but with one great push the taller man overwhelmed him and threw his shoulders to the ground. His feet flew up in the air. He came crashing down on the mattress the photographer had laid out beneath them. He tried to twist out of the stronger man’s grip but only made matters worse. Finally, he lay face down, his body crushed by his opponent. Gender differentiation serves not only as a sign of race, but also as a sign of class in Muybridge’s archive, and the two hierarchies overlap and intersect. Indeed, as Kevin Gaines has shown, gender differentiation was understood as a sign of class superiority within, not just between, racial groups in the late nineteenth century.38 Muybridge strove to depict ideal white types, and for him that meant men and women of the upper classes. He had no trouble finding upper-­class men for his work in the students and athletes at the University of Pennsylvania. Devoted to science and athleticism, these young men were willing and able to strip down for Muybridge’s camera. Securing upper-­class female models, however, proved much more difficult, as the social mores of respectability barred them from appearing naked. Therefore, the women Muybridge employed were primarily working-­class artists’ models, and according to Elspeth Brown, Muybridge “was frustrated that their working-­class origins prevented them from producing the class-­inflected poise that he sought from his female locomotion studies.”39 Muybridge complained to a reporter: “I have experienced a great deal of difficulty in securing proper models. In the first place, artists’ models, as a rule, are ignorant and not well bred. As a consequence, their movements are not graceful and it is essential for the thorough execution of my work to have my [female] models of a graceful bearing.”40 If grace and poise marked for Muybridge the upper-­class feminine equivalent of masculine The Space Between — 91

physical agility, that same gendered class attribute prevented respectable upper-­class women from disrobing for Muybridge’s camera. Working-­class women, whose bodies had always been more readily available to men of higher rank, were employed to enact a fantasy of visual access to the protected, white upper-­class woman’s body. Although the sheltered, upper-­ class white woman was not to be seen bathing, dressing, or getting into bed, her working-­class surrogate might be. In this way, Muybridge’s motion studies reenact a gendered class hierarchy in which upper-­class white women are protected from sight (and assault) at the expense of working-­ class women. Once again, Muybridge’s subject is actually absent from his images—like motion itself, the elite white woman can only be imagined. Many of Muybridge’s photographs of women have an undeniable eroticism. While men are depicted performing public tasks, manual labor and athletic feats, women are depicted in their private moments, at their toilet, at their leisure, in their bedrooms.41 One woman is photographed drying her face and breasts, another smoking with obvious enjoyment. Yet another pulls on stockings (see figure 3.11). A woman gets into bed and covers herself with a sheet in one series and uncovers herself and rises from bed in another (see figure 3.12). In one of the most striking series, a woman falls suggestively onto all fours on a mattress, exposing her sex to the viewer. The scientific value of these photographs is specious at best, and even claims for their artistic merit seem far-­fetched. They make sense only when viewed in an erotic register. Many of Muybridge’s tableaux borrow directly from the tropes and scenes of photographic erotica at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pictures of women in private moments in their bedrooms, at their toilet, were especially popular in this genre. Staging the sheltered private sphere, making that gendered space visible, was central to the voyeuristic pleasure inscribed in such scenarios. William H. Rau, a portrait photographer from Philadelphia well known for photographing the planet Venus, the terrain of Egypt, the Western American landscape, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, also made erotic fantasy photographs of showgirls in their private rooms. A series of “Chorus Girls” produced in 1901 follows two young women in various states of undress through the private tasks of studying, rehearsing, sleeping, bathing, eating, drinking, reading novels, trying on new shoes, and admiring themselves in mirrors (see figures 3.13 and 3.14). The girls hitch up ruffled skirts or straddle the backs of chairs to reveal petticoats, stockings, and garters, or they lounge in their elaborate underwear, show92 — Chapter 3

Figure 3.11 Eadweard J. Muybridge, toilet, sitting and putting on stockings, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 418, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 3.12 Eadweard J. Muybridge, getting into bed, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 263, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

ing off lacy chemises and tightly drawn corsets. Mirrors reflect the lamps, brushes, powder jars, and other delicate things laid out on dressing tables, as well as the curves of girls’ backs and bare shoulders. The classic fetishes of stockings, garters, and shoes are in constant display. Shoes are put on and taken off, tossed aside, and yet are prominently on view in their disarray.42 At the turn of the century, the chorus girl was a new social type. She was glamorous but not quite respectable, a young woman of newfound social and economic independence, celebrated as an erotic spectacle on The Space Between — 93

Figure 3.13 William H. Rau, After the Opera: Dropping the Skirt, c. 1900. Photographic print. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 3.14 William H. Rau, Chicken Salad and Oysters after the Matinee, c. 1901. Photographic print. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

stage. In 1899, Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, scandalous at the time, reinforced the association of chorus girls with illicit liaisons. Refusing the country farm of her father and the dreary domesticity of her sister’s urban life, Caroline Meeber finds her fortune in Chicago and New York on the stage, with the help of two older “boyfriends,” one of whom is married. Carrie’s growing success is marked by her ability to arouse the desire of her audience and her suitors, which she does through her performance of femininity on stage and off. She is part of a new class of city girls, with shared apartments, nice clothes, and a little money, looking for more money and a good time.43 Having removed themselves from the direct surveillance of family life, these young women sought new kinds of pleasure, freedom, and independence. Rau’s chorus girls receive letters from home, and letters from boyfriends, marking their distance from traditional parental control and their participation in other kinds of gender exchange. More available for dating and sexual liaisons, they were also more available to fantasy. Already spectacles on the stage, in erotic photography their private moments of undress could also be imagined and made visible. In Muybridge’s photographs, several series of young women recall Rau’s “Chorus Girl” erotica, even surpassing them in raciness. A woman serves her companion tea (see figure 3.15). Another holds the back of a wooden chair for her friend. As the latter crosses her legs and smokes, the former leans in over her, as if adoringly (see figure 3.16). Another pair of women dance together (see plate 4). All of them are naked, and all of this is performed against Muybridge’s grid. In an apparent concession to moral censors, Muybridge’s series were described in a catalogue for potential buyers, and the models’ various states of dress and undress were carefully noted.44 According to Janine Mileaf, “Muybridge’s Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates notes whether the models are nude, semi-­nude, wearing a pelvis cloth, or draped in transparent fabric.”45 While purportedly offered as “warnings,” so as not to shock or offend viewers, when read within the register of photographic erotica, such descriptions become titillating promises. Further heightening the potential for erotic fantasy, Muybridge also provided the age and marital status of his female models: “4 to 13 inclusive, 15 and 19, are unmarried, of ages varying from seventeen to twenty-­four; of these, 11 is slender; the others of medium height and build.”46 In perusing and ordering prints, one could choose female models according to age, build, marital status, and relative state of undress.47 The Space Between — 95

Figure 3.15 Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, eight brings cup of tea, one takes cup and drinks, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 450, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 3.16 Eadweard J. Muybridge, two models, one standing, the other sitting, crossing legs, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 239, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 3.17 Eadweard J. Muybridge, wrestling, Graeco-­Roman, 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 347, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

While Muybridge’s photographs of women solicit an erotic reading, his photographs of men lack suggestive props and promptings. Nevertheless, they too might be seen in an erotic light. Although framed through the lens of a new discourse of physical fitness, and always performing public athletic or laboring tasks, the men acquiesce to a striking intimacy in the acts they perform.48 They do not replicate the supine poses of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s nearly contemporary homoerotica, or of Day’s homoerotic mythological art, but they embrace one another fiercely.49 They are naked. Arms enclose shoulders. Chins brush against cheeks. Mouths open. Eyes close. Genitals push hard against buttocks (see figure 3.17). She watched as the photographer and other athletes cheered as the two of them lay there, waiting for the signal to stand up, to separate. For one final moment the victor pressed his chest into the back of the defeated, pinning him with his hairy legs. Afterwards the victorious one cuffed his competitor on the chin and offered to buy him a beer. The latter flushed, nodding, and accepted. Despite their technological invention, their obsessive repetitions, and their grids, Muybridge’s photographs beg to be read against the grain of science. Upon analysis, their central subject, motion, disappears. Further, looking beyond the frames and forms that authorize them—the grid, the sequence—one finds a vast archive of erotic, playful, irreverent images. What can it mean that the photographs Benjamin called upon to define the optical unconscious are so unstable? Benjamin seized on Muybridge’s motion studies for their ability to show how photographic technologies The Space Between — 97

supersede human sight, but the images ultimately show the limitations of photography itself. The promise of photographic evidence is perpetually unfulfilled. It remains invisible, just out of sight. As photography reveals the optical unconscious, it shows us how much our photographic visions depend on the labor of imagination. And that imagination might also enable us to see more than the logic of the scientific sequence, to see the gaps in which the series trips, to see the dark, in-­between spaces where motion resides, but also to see beyond the scripted “blind spots” of systematization to the pleasure and fantasy that is evident in these frames.

98 — Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Preparing

Andrew J. Russell

the Way for the Train

The train changed everything. It moved people, information, and goods across the nation at ever-­accelerating speeds. Bringing diverse people and products into collision, it helped unify the nation both practically and conceptually, and as an infrastructure for tourism, it helped advertise the nation to itself. The train centralized manufacturing and organized cities around the distribution and exchange of materials and commodities. It linked faraway towns to a single route, and measured the space between them in days, hours, and minutes. Maintaining train schedules required people across the country to keep the same time, to mark the same hour, and to coordinate watches to regional and national standards. The train changed time and space.1 Several decades after the advent of the train, the cinema also transformed perceptions of time and space, and as Lynne Kirby has demonstrated, the two technologies were linked. Many of the early “actualities,” which dominated film between 1895 and 1902, before narrative fiction film became popular, featured trains. “In a most elementary sense, shooting a moving train, the fastest vehicle in the world in 1895, gave filmmakers an opportunity to show off film’s powers of registration, its ability to capture movement and speed.”2 The train served as the ideal subject with which to demonstrate film’s unique capacity to represent motion. But the train served not only as subject, but also, in some ways, as analogue to cinema, as a perceptual technological paradigm for film. As Kirby argues, the train paved the way for cinema’s virtually mobile viewer by institut-

ing a form of “panoramic perception” defined by the viewer’s separation from the view, the framed aspect of the scene, and a montage of images, several decades before the invention of film.3 If the train prepared the way for cinema, photography prepared the way for the train. In 1868 and 1869 Andrew J. Russell made hundreds of photographs of the westward progress of the Union Pacific Railroad, culminating in the famous Wedding of the Rails photograph at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, which marked the realization of the first transcontinental railroad. Russell’s photographs were circulated as stereograph cards, shown as lantern slides, and published in The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska (1869). Framing the construction of the train tracks and their path, his images also helped shape the view of the west that would be incorporated by the nation. Russell photographed what would soon disappear from view, the foreground relegated to the unseen by the train. Many of his images focus on the tracks themselves and what is close to them, showing the view that is impossible for actual train passengers to see, as things nearby whiz past at an imperceptible speed when the train is in motion. What lies along the tracks becomes a nauseating blur. In other words, documenting the path prepared for the train, Russell’s photographs record what can’t be seen from the train itself. As a visual technology, the train radically altered the view, and Russell’s photographs make that transformation apparent, recording the optical unconscious of the train. As Russell’s images show what would soon be made imperceptible, they also perform their own obfuscations. Through their omissions, the photographs reinforce a racial blind spot in American nation-­building, participating in the whitening of the West. Russell’s images do not show, for the most part, the Native Americans who claimed the lands across which the train progressed, nor do they show the famous Chinese laborers who built the tracks from West to East. Focusing on Irish tracklayers, Russell’s photographs help to whiten those men as they also whiten the terrain they traversed. His images present the view relegated to invisibility by the train, but his revelations also participate in larger obfuscations.

Russell was born in New Hampshire but raised in Nunda, New York, where his family worked in canal and railroad construction. As a young man in 100 — Chapter 4

the 1850s, he worked as a landscape and portrait painter, and in the early 1860s he made a huge composite painting, Panorama of the War for the Union, and exhibited it in several towns in upstate New York. In 1862, at the age of thirty-­two, he enlisted in the Union Army and was assigned to General Herman Haupt’s U.S. Military Railroad Construction Corps as an artist. Egbert Guy Faux, a photographer who had trained with Mathew Brady, taught Russell the collodion wet-­plate photographic process, and thus began the photography of railroads that would dominate Russell’s career.4 After the war he worked as a photographer for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated magazine, and from 1868 to 1870 he served as official photographer for the Union Pacific Railroad.5 The Union Pacific Railroad Company was chartered by the Pacific Railroad Act, and signed into law by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862. The act itself aimed to attract private investment for the transcontinental railroad by granting the corporation government lands and a loan of government bonds; in other words, it gave the company important seed money and incentives from the state. The official groundbreaking for the massive construction project began on December 2, 1863, in Nebraska, but the project advanced slowly due to the Civil War’s huge drain on resources and labor. In 1864, the government doubled the land grant, and finally, with the end of the Civil War, in 1865, the construction of the railroad continued in earnest, with a surge of laborers, capital, and iron. The Union Pacific Railroad would be built west from the Missouri River, across the plains, over the Rockies, and through the Great Salt Lake Basin, until it joined the rails of the Central Pacific Railroad, built east from Sacramento.6 In the end it would constitute a single track, eighteen hundred miles long.7 “It was an undertaking so vast for the time that few people thought it could be accomplished at all.”8 The journalist Samuel Bowles, who traveled with Russell on a trip sponsored by the Union Pacific, declared that the construction of the transcontinental railroad “in so short a time was the greatest triumph of modern civilization, of all civilization indeed.”9 The enterprise captured the imagination of a nation exhausted and divided by the war, unifying north and south in a national quest from east to west.10 In early 1868, when Russell began his publicity work for the Union Pacific Railroad, the rails had already reached beyond Cheyenne, Wyoming, but he was able to photograph over six hundred miles of the construction, from Cheyenne to Promontory, Utah.11 He personally made over two hundred wet-­plate collodion negatives, ten by thirteen inches, and with the Preparing the Way for the Train — 101

Figure 4.1 Andrew J. Russell, 59 No Construction Train at End of Track Gen Casement’s Outfit Gen in Foreground, c. 1868. Imperial plate collodion glass negative, 10 × 13 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum Purchase.

combined efforts of his four assistants, six hundred stereographic views.12 Russell’s photographic adventures out West were a kind of engineering feat in and of themselves. His view camera weighed approximately thirty pounds, and he also transported a stereo camera. With the cameras he had to pack lenses, ten-­by-­thirteen-­inch and four-­by-­eight-­inch glass plates for negatives, chemicals to process the plates, and tents for darkrooms. He conveyed all of these materials in a covered wagon that had to traverse the rough terrain his photographs document.13 Russell announced his technological prowess in a photograph of General John S. Casement, the famous commander of the Union Pacific tracklayers (see figure 4.1). As an image of Casement, the photograph is notably awkward. The commander stands just to the left of center, isolated in a vast field of dry earth that dominates the foreground. A group of men, presumably his tracklayers, stand at the far left edge of the frame, behind and to the side of Casement, some of them leaning on train cars. They clearly pose for the camera but are placed so far to the left as to seem cut out of the view. 102 — Chapter 4

In the left foreground, a large wooden wagon wheel juts into the frame, a seeming anomaly in Russell’s carefully composed scenes. A closer framing, shifted toward the left, would have highlighted Casement and the men and train behind him, without including the distracting wheel and wide expanse of visually uninteresting soil. But such an image also would have excluded Russell’s darkroom wagon, included prominently in the photograph on the right side of the frame. I imagine the wagon was a conscious afterthought. It is as if Russell set up the scene with Casement, and then moved the camera back and shifted it to the right to capture his traveling darkroom. Ultimately, Russell crafted the view to include his own technology. The photograph shows the wagon draped in dark cloth, supported by huge wooden wheels that seem no match for the rugged landscape depicted in other images. A large wooden box for glass plates, nearly the width of the simple vehicle, rests on the ground below it. The dark, heavy cloth that seals out light and dirt in the mobile darkroom has been drawn back, as if to theatrically reveal the dark space it shrouds, but the eye cannot penetrate this enclosure. The image would seem to highlight the photographic production process generally obscured in photographs themselves.14 Here Russell calls attention to his technology and labor. As he photographs the commander of the tracklayers, he poses his own labor as director of photography on a parallel track, situating his wagon literally parallel to the train. Standing almost directly in front of Russell’s camera, framed by the train and the traveling darkroom, Casement becomes a kind of stand-­in for Russell himself. While this image is about the laying of the tracks, about the labor and technological invention that precedes and enables the course of the train, it is also about the photographic preparation made for the train, and about the photographic labor and technological invention generally hidden in photographs. The photograph is a commodity that conceals the labor that produces it very effectively, obscuring photographer, camera, darkroom, and chemistry, and giving one the illusion that it magically or mechanically self-­manifests. Just as Russell photographs the foreground that will disappear from view for the passengers on the train, documenting the blind spots in the panoramic vision afforded by the train, here he also photographs what his own images will make difficult to see, namely the process of photographic production itself.15 Russell would endeavor to highlight his visual labor in the West through other venues as well. In a stereoscopic view, the photographer presents Preparing the Way for the Train — 103

Figure 4.2 Andrew J. Russell, Major Russell’s Bedroom, Uintas, number 240, 1869. Stereocard. Union Pacific Railroad Museum, Council Bluffs, Iowa.

himself as an adventurer at home in the terrain: one sees him asleep, nestled under a rock outcropping in the Uinta Mountains (see figure 4.2). He has not pitched a tent, and his comforts are minimal. He is wrapped in a blanket but otherwise protected from the elements only by the massive rock under which he has stretched himself. Just outside his cave-­like shelter a canteen is perched on a ledge, and a long rifle leans against the rock wall.16 This is presumably stereocard number 240, Maj. Russell’s Bedroom, Uintas, included in his Uintah Series of the Union Pacific R. R. Stereoscopic Views, across the Continent West from Omaha.17 Russell described this scene and his experiences “on the mountains with the tripod and camera” in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, a trade publication for professional photographers that began in 1870. Of his campout Russell says: “I arrived here the evening of the 14th of August, with my camera, selected a good cover under a huge overhanging rock, cut a few balsam bushes, made a good mattress, spread down my blankets, threw a few armsful of wood on the fire, and turned in (as the saying goes) for the night.”18 Russell tells his story with the aims of entertaining readers and promoting his own hardiness as an image-­maker in the rugged West. In his story for Anthony’s, after an amusing description of the varied wildlife that the photographer and his crew find to eat in the Rocky Mountains, Russell turns to “the tripod,” and anthropomorphizes his camera as a self-­ satisfied viewer chuckling at the scene before it.19 The camera “is looking at a wonderfully romantic scene; the background a magnificent mountain 104 — Chapter 4

peak, snow-­clad, and at its base a great forest of pines, tamarinds and balsams, a beautiful lake filling in the middle distance, and in the foreground, huge masses of rock, piled up in grotesque and fanciful shapes.”20 Russell directs his readers to see the landscape through the “eye” of his camera, and he presents the natural environment in terms of background, middle distance, and foreground. The view is framed through the lens and language of photography. Further, Russell actually praises the wonders of the natural world for resembling the views he has seen in photographs: “The stars appear like little globes, not points of light; and the moon seemed larger, and we could trace lines on its surface, that I have never seen before, except in the Rutherford pictures of it.”21 Whereas Russell anthropomorphizes his camera in his first story for Anthony’s, in a subsequent tale he does the opposite, objectifying himself and his crew in photographic terms: he calls himself and his colleagues “photos,” and deems one “Tom Tripod” and the other “Jim Focus.”22 Everything in his stories is seen through cameras and photographs, and the photographer himself is part of the picture.

One of the most remarkable things about Russell’s photographs of the Union Pacific Railroad is the relative absence of trains in the images. Although a couple of them do focus on impressive engines, by and large the photographs record instead the engineering feats and labor of laying the tracks, documenting the way prepared for the train. Cuts in rock and earth are prominent, as are bridges, tunnels, and snow sheds. Many of the images focus on the extraordinary western landscape. They depict rock formations with magical names like Eagle Rocks, Witches Rock, Monument Rock, Teapot Rock, Giant’s Club, and Hanging Rock, deep canyons named for the Devil and Echo, mountain lakes of Sounding Shores and Shadow, and Caves of the Fairies. Natural forms tower over the tiny figures that stand at their bases. Such figures, sometimes solitary, are incongruous, their presence a seeming impossibility in these strange and desolate scenes. They stand atop a bluff or beside a canyon to provide a sense of scale and heighten the effect of the overwhelming features of the landscape. An American public might have encountered Russell’s photographs in three different forms: as lantern slides, stereograph cards, and large albumen prints in an expensive leather-­bound album. Stephen J. Sedgwick, a member of the Union Pacific photographic corps, collected negatives from Russell to make lantern slides that he showed in “illuminated lectures” on Preparing the Way for the Train — 105

Figure 4.3 Andrew J. Russell, Echo City, from Witches Rock, 1868–70. Stereocard. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

the New York lyceum circuit. “Across the Continent West from Omaha” presented an imaginary trip on the Union Pacific Railroad, and the show was popular throughout the 1870s in churches, schools, and public halls in New York.23 But stereocards would have been the most widely dispersed views, the images most likely to find their way into people’s homes and imaginations. Stereographs constituted the largest market for vicarious travel, and as William Pattison has suggested, “The Union Pacific photographers, like most other professional outdoor cameramen of the period, were occupied chiefly with capturing scenes for the parlor stereoscopes of the nation.”24 Russell’s stereocards are stamped on the back with ornamental script: “Union Pacific R. R. Views Across the Continent, West from Omaha, A. J. Russell, Artist.” Many of Russell’s photographs feature a play between foreground and background, a framing choice that enhanced the 3-­D effect of his stereo images. In his Echo City, from Witches Rock, for example, a ragged rocky peak juts up into the near foreground, its rough texture dominating the lower left portion of the doubled photographs (see figure 4.3). The tip of this peak reaches up to the middle of the frame and seems to point to the small town, marked by roads in the valley beyond it. At the far reaches of the scene, a light, sloping mountain range marks the horizon, just beneath a band of white sky that constitutes the upper third of the image. Seen through a stereoscope, designed to engage the bifocality of the human eyes, the paired photographs of the card would converge in a single image, and 106 — Chapter 4

Witches Rock would pop out in the foreground, seeming to float unmoored from its surroundings. Such effects were highly sought by stereo photographers, and they composed scenes with distinct planes of foreground, middle, and distance, and especially focused on distinct foreground forms positioned in relation to a distant expanse. Indeed, John Henderson, writing about stereoscopic photography for the London Photographic News, in an essay reprinted in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, proclaims: “A good foreground is a necessity in all cases to give the proper relief.”25 Such framing is now a standard aesthetic in landscape photography, as objects in the foreground help give scale to the background, add texture and detail, and anchor point of view in an expansive scene. The foreground emphasized in many of Russell’s stereo photographs is precisely what would disappear in the actual view from the train. As early commentators noted, when looking at the landscape through the window of a train, the foreground disappears in a blur, or as Victor Hugo proclaimed, “everything becomes a streak.”26 As Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains, “Velocity blurs all foreground objects, which means that there no longer is a foreground.”27 Passengers on a train move too quickly through the landscape to see it up close, and so they focus instead on the relatively stable distant peaks and valleys of the background. The foreground is made imperceptible by the train. “Increased velocity calls forth a greater number of visual impressions” than the sense of sight can accommodate.28 The foreground rushes past the viewer’s eyes but cannot be focused on. Russell’s images, which preview the train, also document the optical unconscious of the train, showing the view that will be obliterated by the train itself. Contemplating Russell’s photographs, the would-­be traveler sees many of the very things made invisible by the train. As Russell’s photographs focus on the foreground that will be relegated to the unseen by the train, they also show the technological accomplishments and labor required to build the railroad, another feature that will not be visible to later passengers. Deep Cut, No. 1 West of Wilhelmina Pass, Weber Cañon highlights the tremendous effort required to grade a mountain (see figure 4.4). Temporary tracks prominent in the left foreground shine in the light and run directly into the dark shadow cast by the wall of dirt that impedes their progress. This wall is the first in a series of steps that recede into the distance, each level populated by men picking, shoveling, and hauling away dirt and rock. It is as if the construction anticipates and divides itself into distinct visual planes for Russell’s stereo photograph. Preparing the Way for the Train — 107

Figure 4.4 Andrew J. Russell, Deep Cut, No. 1 West of Wilhelmina Pass, Weber Cañon, 1868–70. Stereocard. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Each of the steps shown must be cut down to the grade of the tracks, and the effort appears so great as to be almost futile. Parallel to the end point of the tracks, a man pauses from his labor to pose for Russell’s camera. Beautifully lit against the dark shadow of the wall behind him, forward leg bent, one hand on knee, the other on hip, he stands as if the works behind him are the backdrop for his own formal portrait. And perhaps this image actually is a portrait of “man,” with this particular man standing in to represent the slow and steady triumph of human labor and technology over the land. Not all of Russell’s stereographs focus on labor. Some simply marvel at the view. In Shadow Lake, Uintas, two men frame a small cluster of narrow pines at the shore of a lake, an evergreen group that also seems posed for the camera (see figure 4.5). The man on the left leans against a rock, his hat pushed back on his head, revealing his face in profile, gazing at the scene beyond. His companion lies casually on another rock, his body conforming to its contours, propped up on his elbow, with his back to the lake, looking out in the direction of the camera. The large rocks spilled and jumbled in the foreground are in perfect focus, their sharp edges and cracks visible, and they dominate over half the frame (surely looking wonderful viewed through a stereoscope). The two men leaning and posing on them mark the edge of a middle plane, bordered by the level lake dropped somewhat below them. At the far side of the lake, a mountain fills the top left portion of the frame, creating an S curve against the light sky that slopes down to the level of the lake, where a river runs out of the larger body of water. At 108 — Chapter 4

Figure 4.5 Andrew J. Russell, Shadow Lake, Uintas, 1868–70. Stereocard. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

the far right, a dark row of tiny pines announces the sharp drop off of the lake’s level plane, and one imagines the river tumbling down a ledge in a dramatic fall. To the right, beyond the row of trees, sits another mountain range partially obscured by the haze that marks its distance from the lake across a wide canyon. Middle-­class matrons and businessmen, teachers and clerks, school girls and boys probably viewed Russell’s stereographs with interest and excitement. Sitting in the comfort of cozy parlors, pressing scopes tightly to their faces, they would have been transported to these rugged scenes in individual isolation. Some probably tried to imagine themselves in the places of the tiny figures that stood facing them in the overwhelming landscapes. The stereoscope makes one feel as though one is strangely in an image, by blocking out the viewer’s surroundings entirely. The technology is uncannily transportive, hence its ready associations with travel, exploration, and the train. And because the stereoscopic image is produced only through the combination and concert of the doubled image, the stereoscope device, and the viewer’s own binocular vision, the stereoscopic image is a strangely embodied one.29 It exists only as a part of one’s perception. In the case of Russell’s Union Pacific stereos, the stereograph’s capacity to transport viewers was ultimately aimed to inspire armchair travelers to become railroad tourists, to transform virtual mobility into actual mobility. Like the stereoscope, the train was a new kind of viewing technology that uniquely united viewer and apparatus. Whereas the stereoscope inspired Preparing the Way for the Train — 109

an imagined mobility, the train offered actual mobility, but both viewing technologies, paradoxically, produced (nearly) still views. The foreground-­ background play, central to the stereoscope’s illusion of depth and three dimensionality, would be dramatically transfigured as viewers observed the landscape from the windows of trains. Once again, for the train passenger, the foreground disappears in a dizzying blur; the view from the train can only be the distant view of the landscape, the slowly shifting panorama. Russell’s stereocards forestall this transformation in the view of the landscape, even as they focus on the technological interventions designed to usher in such changes. The viewer on the train is mobilized, but she actually perceives movement much as the stable diorama or panorama viewer did, fixed in place, watching the landscape shift incrementally.30 Whereas the stereoscope heightened the embodied nature of viewing, depending upon the interplay of the device with the viewer’s bifocality to produce an image, the train ultimately produced a new kind of disembodied looking, in which the velocity of the passenger’s actual trajectory through space does not register in the slow transformation of the distant panoramic view.

While Russell made stereographs for popular consumption, as did many nineteenth-­century photographers in the West, he also made large format prints with the ten-­by-­thirteen-­inch camera he constructed himself, and according to Pattison, “Russell most deserves commemoration for large single views whose production was his particular, personal concern.”31 In 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad published a deluxe album of fifty of these large views in The Great West Illustrated, which documents the progression of the Union Pacific Railroad as it moved west from Laramie, Wyoming, to Salt Lake City, Utah. The company gave the album to investors and company managers, and also presented it for sale to the public.32 The volume was apparently intended to initiate a series of subsequent volumes, but they never materialized, perhaps due to the high price of $75 for the first.33 In addition to fifty albumen prints, volume 1 includes a preface and an annotated table of contents that provides brief information pertaining to each image. The preface declares the volume “calculated to interest all classes of people, and to excite the admiration of all reflecting minds as the colossal grandeur of the Agricultural, Mineral, and Commercial resources of the West are brought to view.” First introducing Russell as an “artist,” the preface subsequently makes clear that his images are not to be appreciated for 110 — Chapter 4

Plate 1. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, “first photograph,” heliograph on pewter plate, c. 1826, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas, Austin.

Plate 2. William H. Mumler, Bronson Murray, 1862–75. Albumen silver print, 10 × 5.7 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Plate 3. F. Holland Day, St. Sebastian, 1906. Platinum print. The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Plate 4. Eadweard J. Muybridge, dancing waltz, two models (detail), 1884–87. Collotype print. Animal Locomotion, plate 196, 1887. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Plate 5. Andrew J. Russell, Mormon Family, Great Salt Lake Valley, plate 48.

Plate 6. Andrew J. Russell, Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo Cañon, plate 32. Plates 5 and 6: From The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen prints. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Plate 7. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, To Live in Beauty. Glass lantern slide, approximately 3 × 4 in. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Plate 8. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Old Pillsbury Homestead, Willowdale Farm, Kingfield, Maine, night scene. Glass lantern slide, approximately 3 × 4 in. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Plate 9. Augustus Washington, Philip Coker, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

their aesthetic value alone, but also as “data” that document and advertise the West as a resource to be mined. The images thus aim to incite an investment in the West that is aesthetic, conceptual, and financial. Russell’s Great West Illustrated presents the West as a natural and technological spectacle, a national resource, and an exciting place to explore. The fifty large images document the engineering feats and labor necessary to build the railroad tracks, highlighting cuts, bridges, and tunnels. Photographs of interesting rock formations, mountains, canyons, and rivers are also featured prominently, but in these images there is almost always some sign of human presence in the scene. Figures are spread throughout the landscape, suggesting that people, although few, are nevertheless everywhere, and in images in which they are absent, a telegraph pole or glimpse of graded road or track marks human incursion on the land. The landscape presented here is not merely scenic; it is useful and already commodified. Forests are called “timber,” men fish at streams, and rather unsightly coalfields constitute “natural” views. Cities such as Laramie, Echo City, and Salt Lake City invite visitors and propose places one might live, and a couple of the images present children and families, underscoring the possibilities for settlement in the West. The first plate in the album, which frames and introduces its narrative, presents Carmichael’s Cut, Granite Cañon, announcing (once again through “the cut”) technological mastery over the land (see figure 4.6). The manmade canyon creates a dark, graphic V against the light sky. From the left corner of the foreground, tracks run at a slight curve into the distance, disappearing behind a mass of rock in the middle of the frame. Standing just before this point, a man faces the camera in dark suit and hat, his body dwarfed by the wall of rock that juts up steeply at his right. Russell’s annotations explain: “Cut sixty feet from the surface to the level of the Railroad track, through hard red granite rock, and is nearly eight hundred feet in length.” The text gives us the precise measure of this engineering feat, and the photograph portrays its majesty. The ragged vertical rock that stretches from bottom to top on the right side of the frame reinforces its hardness and the tremendous labor that must have been required to cut through it, while the perfectly level tracks that proceed silently and gracefully through the cut suggest the quiet triumph of the men working for the advance of the train. The next image in the album reverses the cut, showing a roadbed that has been built up, the convex counterpart to the concave V of the cut (see Preparing the Way for the Train — 111

Figure 4.6 Andrew J. Russell, Carmichael’s Cut, Granite Cañon, plate 1 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

figure 4.7). Once again proceeding from the left foreground of the frame, the tracks run along the spine of the ridge that has been built for them into the middle of the view, toward a cut visible in the distance. A small cluster of buildings sits at the apex of the man-­made ridge, and two tiny figures, one sitting by the tracks, the other standing below the ridge, mark the great length and height of the fill. The Great West Illustrated thus begins with predictable views of “cuttings and embankments,” “the staple procedures of railroad construction.”34 Such engineering leveled the terrain for the train, allowing uniform tracks to rise at very low grades. Flattening the irregularities of the land, railroad construction would also ultimately transform the experience of the landscape for train passengers, creating a new experience of distance and disjunction between the view and the viewer, who was no longer required to bump along by wagon or horseback.35 The viewer’s separation from the landscape, seen through the frame of a car window, but no longer physically experienced, contributed to what Schivelbusch has called the “pano112 — Chapter 4

Figure 4.7 Andrew J. Russell, Granite Cañon, from the Water Tank, plate 2 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

ramization of the world.”36 “Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world.”37 Once again, while the train made the Western landscape vastly more accessible, it did so at a remove, paradoxically bringing it into a new kind of distant proximity. “Railway scenery was a mixture of the natural and the man-­made sublime,” as David Nye has argued, and Russell’s photographs of the Dale Creek Bridge, “one of the most famous features of the entire Pacific Railroad,” epitomize this hybrid technological sublime.38 Plate 8 shows the deep V of a canyon filled with the latticework of a gigantic bridge “one hundred and twenty-­five feet high, and five hundred feet long” (caption to plate 7, gwi ) (see figure 4.8). The landscape is a pattern of connected triangle shapes. A mountain of rock jutting in from the left of the frame is matched by the inverted triangle of the bridge. A roadway carved into the earth winds around the rock outcropping and back under the bridge, tracPreparing the Way for the Train — 113

Figure 4.8 Andrew J. Russell, Dale Creek Bridge, from Above, plate 8 from The Great West Illustrated in a series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

ing the bottom half of a dark S curve. At the lowest point in the road stands a tiny figure dwarfed by both the natural and man-­made scenery. A large, dead, twisted branch anchors the foreground and helps place the viewer in the scene. A tall, scraggly pine rises from the curve of the road, its tip seeming to touch the cables that extend from the bridge across an expanse of air and out the right side of the frame. The landscape here is almost equal parts natural and man-­made.39

Like the train itself, The Great West Illustrated connected the West to the larger nation. In the nineteenth century, the West was understood as “the place where the nation’s future would unfold,” and photographers played an important role in formulating the West as part of the United States in the national imagination.40 Russell’s photographs of the Laramie Mountains and the Valley of the Great Laramie set the scene for views of the city 114 — Chapter 4

Figure 4.9 Andrew J. Russell, Laramie Hotel, Laramie City, plate 15 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

of Laramie that highlight its industry and energy, suggest its suitability as a tourist destination or stopping point, and subtly link it to faraway places. The Laramie Hotel (gwi, plate 15) is an imposing two-­story structure with a long façade that runs parallel to the tracks (see figure 4.9). A crowd of people stands on its narrow porch and the short walkway that connects it to the railroad platform. The sun glints off its windows and sides, and the tall chimneys on the roof cast long shadows. Tracks dominate the front and right portion of the frame, and a train engine has stopped in front of the hotel. Rocks and boards along the tracks suggest on-­going construction and the debris of progress. A telegraph pole peeks out from behind the hotel, and others stretch out in the distance, connecting this city to a long line of others large and small. The huge windmill at Laramie is a massive beacon (see figure 4.10). It is located just to the side of the tracks, where it pumps water from wells into the tower behind it, which supplies water to steam locomotives like the one stopped beside it in Russell’s photograph. In another image, empty flatbed Preparing the Way for the Train — 115

Figure 4.10 Andrew J. Russell, The Wind Mill at Laramie, plate 16 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

cars parked on the tracks next to the stone buildings of the Laramie Machine Shops suggest that raw materials have been unloaded or that built machines are being prepared for transportation. The beginnings of a wood frame on the near side of the tracks promise another building on the way. A tall telegraph pole, its wires stretching at a diagonal from top left across the frame, marks the relationship between industry and information technology. The train depends on the telegraph for switching commands, but the telegraph is also a larger by-­product of the railroad. As is evident in Russell’s photographs, many different kinds of industry are built up along the tracks, both to support the train, and to be supported by the train. The entire town of Laramie and its wider web of connections are sustained by and organized around the train, which link it to the larger nation. Photographers like Russell “preceded American settlers, travelers, and tourists into many parts of the West.” And yet, as Martha Sandweiss has demonstrated, “photography did not instantly change the ways Americans understood the West. Indeed, Americans’ preexisting visions of the West 116 — Chapter 4

shaped, to some extent, how photographs of the place would be made, marketed, and understood.”41 Viewers of Russell’s images already appreciated the landscape as a source of national and technological pride. As Martin Berger has noted, “Most late nineteenth-­century Americans defined nature so that they could esteem the natural world and, at the same time, celebrate industry’s transformation of the land.”42 Painters working in the decades before Russell had established the centrality of technology’s role in civilizing the wilderness, and in making America’s divine destiny “manifest.” Asher B. Durand’s influential Progress (The Advance of Civilization), of 1853, “telescoped the discrete stages of America’s movement from wilderness to civilization into one image” by focusing on “sequential phases of the transportation revolution,” as Angela Miller has shown.43 Commissioned by Charles Gould, broker and later treasurer of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, the painting features the telltale puff of smoke that marks the train’s presence, the apotheosis of technological progress.44 Russell’s image of the “source of the Laramie River,” plate 20 in The Great West Illustrated, reproduces the formal characteristics of Durand’s Progress with striking directness (see figure 4.11). The leafy, leaning cottonwood trees on the left side of the frame, extending up into the light sky that dominates the upper half of the image, directly mirror those of Durand’s painting. The river that runs across the foreground bends at the right of the frame, extending back into the progressively lightening plains of a valley and gently rolling hills. In Russell’s photograph, two fishermen have replaced Durand’s Indians in the foreground, and they are the only figures in a seemingly pristine landscape. Symbols not of the past, but of the present, of settlement, the fishermen are new purveyors of the land, extracting its resources for subsistence and perhaps for pleasure. Like Durand’s Progress, some of Russell’s photographs proceed from “a roughly picturesque wilderness foreground to a more settled undulant middle ground to a light-­filled distance harboring towns and riverside ports.”45 They show a “middle landscape, balanced between civilization and wilderness.”46 Such resonances are not surprising given the popularity and influence of such paintings, and especially given Russell’s own early career as a landscape painter. Plate 23 in The Great West Illustrated, On the Mountains of Green River, shows six tiny figures admiring the view of the valley below from their stance high atop a rugged cliff that borders the edge of the photograph on the right (see figure 4.12). Beyond the impressive rock formations that dominate the middle and foreground of the image, a wide Preparing the Way for the Train — 117

Figure 4.11 Andrew J. Russell, Source of the Laramie River, plate 20 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

river curves through a valley, and “farther off can be seen the dim outline of Green River City” with its “two thousand inhabitants.”47 Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo Cañon (gwi, plate 32) more directly focuses on the middle landscape (see plate 6). Framed by a rugged rock formation in the foreground, its rough surface gleaming in the light, a tidy farmstead is carved out of the shrubbery bordering the river. A man, perched above this pastoral scene, seated below the overhanging rock of the title, nevertheless shares the visual space of the farm and seems to look directly at the little white house below him. He occupies both spaces, that of the extraordinary western landscape, and that of the pastoral western farm, bridging the realms of wilderness and civilization that Russell’s portfolio as a whole unites. As Russell’s photographs partake of formal conventions and themes established by landscape painting, they also draw on the scientific views of geological surveys, such as Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs of the 40th Parallel Survey of 1867.48 As Alan Trachtenberg, Rosalind Krauss, and 118 — Chapter 4

Figure 4.12 Andrew J. Russell, On the Mountains of Green River, plate 23 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Robin Kelsey have argued, to consider these photographs solely within the tradition of landscape art obscures their role in the scientific and economic imperatives of survey and privileges a modernist discourse of formal aesthetics that translates views from the field into art in the museum.49 The photographers who accompanied the four surveys of the West sponsored by the government after the Civil War participated in the mapping and measuring of the West’s natural resources, and their views helped to divide and parcel the land. The railroad was also an “essential agent of the transformation of landscape into geographical space,” a space newly and uniquely “systematized,” and the photographers who helped document the progress of the train also aided in the visual systematizing of the land.50 Russell’s photographs helped to remake the West, participating in a transformation of the landscape that took place over the course of the nineteenth century and that was largely indebted to the transcontinental railroad he documented. As The Great West Illustrated celebrated the vast Preparing the Way for the Train — 119

resources of the frontier and documented the technological taming of the land, it also framed the West as the quintessential place for tourism. In fact, Susan Danly describes the album as “landscape photography dedicated to the program of promoting rail travel.”51 Ultimately, however, the West that Russell helped to popularize was one difficult for later travelers to grasp. Those who rode the train West as tourists, inspired by Russell’s photographs, had a hard time finding his views. So much of the scenery seen (in the distance) from the train lacked the drama of Russell’s stunning images. “For most riders . . . railroad scenery and snapshot-­clear visions of station platforms, main streets, mown fields, silos, farmhouses, and shanties passing . . . meant far less than the scenery dignified in print and published photographs.”52 “Nothing compared with the parlor table folio of scenic views or the stereographs of mountains.”53 The “panoramic” view actually seen from the train rarely lived up to the wondrous spectacles promised and promoted by early railroad photographers, and Russell’s grand images, like his foreground perspectives, were views that could no longer be seen.

The racial territory traversed by the transcontinental railroad was as complicated as its geological terrain, and Russell’s photographs of “The Great West” reproduce a racial blind spot in American nation-­building by excluding local inhabitants and laborers of color. Large portions of the land traversed by the Union Pacific Railroad, including the entire territory of Utah, were part of Mexico only two decades earlier. The path of the train also stretched across Native American land, and Indian parties raided and sabotaged its construction, despite the military escort provided by the railroad company to protect workers and supplies.54 The tracks were built and laid primarily by Irish laborers moving west from Omaha and Chinese laborers moving east from Sacramento. In his personal account of his work as a surveyor for the Union Pacific Railroad, the Irish immigrant Charles Sharman describes the precision and discipline of the Irish track crew commanded by J. S. Casement (photographed by Russell), which at the time of his writing numbered about three hundred men, but would rise to nearly one thousand.55 In February of 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad Company hired fifty Chinese laborers to lay tracks for the line that headed east from Sacramento, toward Promontory Point, Utah. Satisfied with their work and work ethic, the company soon hired 120 — Chapter 4

Figure 4.13 Andrew J. Russell, 227 East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, May 10, 1869. Imperial plate collodion glass negative, 10 × 13 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum Purchase.

fifty more, and within two years, twelve thousand Chinese men worked for Central Pacific, constituting 90 percent of the company’s laborers.56 Little of this ethnic and racial diversity is visible in Russell’s photographs. The Native Americans represented occasionally in his stereograph views are absent from The Great West Illustrated, as are the Chinese laborers famous for their work laying the railroad tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad. Discussing Russell’s well-­known photograph of the “golden spike” ceremony that united the transcontinental tracks at Promontory Point in Utah, David Nye has noted: “Omitted from this image were the Chinese laborers who had chiseled and blasted a roadbed across the Sierras at wages of less than $2 a day and who had set a record by laying 10 miles of track in 12 hours”57 (see figure 4.13). The erasure of Chinese laborers from Russell’s photographs also obscures the global reach of the commerce supported by the train. Not only an engine of national incorporation, the train was also an international force, linking a worldwide network of labor, production, circulation, and Preparing the Way for the Train — 121

consumption. The Chinese men who built the tracks from west to east across the United States participated in new migratory patterns of labor. Although part of a long-­standing Chinese tradition of sons working to support their families, their circuits of mobility were expanded dramatically by the growth of international shipping companies and railroads in the nineteenth century.58 Removed from Russell’s views as laborers, the Chinese are also absent as potential passengers. Nevertheless, as Anthony Lee has demonstrated, just one year after the transcontinental railroad was completed, a group of seventy-­five very young Chinese men traveled by train from California to North Adams, Massachusetts. They seemed to confirm the xenophobic anxieties of many Americans, recorded and amplified in popular illustrations of 1870, that the transcontinental railroad would enable an influx of Chinese immigrants to spread out across the country.59 Hired as strikebreakers to work in Calvin T. Sampson’s shoe factory, the young men traveled two weeks across the United States by rail, after traversing their own country to one of the large shipping ports in China, and then surviving passage across the Pacific, a steamship voyage that might have taken months.60 Their arrival in North Adams was marked by a stereo photograph that shows the young men arranged in a tight group standing and sitting in front of Sampson’s brick factory. In many ways, this anonymous photograph provides a substitute for the absent photographs of Chinese laborers in Russell’s archive. It not only makes visible the presence of Chinese laborers in the United States, but also highlights their increased mobility, enabled by the transcontinental railroad their countrymen helped to build, and by the global circuits of commerce linked to the train. The transcontinental railroad, the great national unifier, was built by men whose racial status made their own claims on national belonging in the United States precarious at best. Although the Central Pacific Railroad Company employed its thousands of Chinese laborers years before Chinese exclusion became official U.S. policy, Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship by the nation’s first naturalization law of 1790, which determined that only “free white persons” could be naturalized.61 But as Matthew Frye Jacobson has demonstrated, despite this blanket categorization, determining exactly who was “white” in the nineteenth century was a matter of some debate. “Upon the arrival of the massive waves of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, whiteness itself would become newly problematic,” and a “powerful language of racial differentiation [would be] applied to the Irish.”62 Indeed, the same visual and rhetorical tropes used to dehumanize 122 — Chapter 4

African Americans in the popular media of the nineteenth century were also directed at the Irish. The Irishman was described as “brutish,” and depicted as “low-­browed” and “simian.” His skin was said to be of “black tint.”63 The Irish did not become fully “white” until whiteness itself was broadened from the narrow category “Anglo-­Saxon” to the more inclusive “Caucasian,” a transformation effected as race was increasingly defined according to a binary divide between white and black in the twentieth century. Eventually, the Irish became white in contradistinction to blacks.64 The terms of labor in the West were hotly debated before and during the Civil War, as Northern industry, in economic competition with the South, sought to stop the spread of slavery into the western territories. And, of course, the racial terms of labor in the West remained contested after the Civil War. Labor previously defined as “free” or “conscripted” was increasingly defined as white or black. Russell’s Civil War photographs are instructive in this regard. Several of his images of General Herman Haupt’s U.S. Railroad Construction Corps record African American laborers laying track. In the Civil War photographs, African American men are shown to be central figures in the construction of the railroad. They hammer and straighten track and use levers to loosen rails (see figure 4.14). In The Great West Illustrated, however, they are entirely absent and their absence serves to underscore the racialization of “western progress” perpetuated by the Union Pacific Railroad. The racial vision of the West documented in Russell’s Union Pacific photographs is thus complicated not only by the racially ambiguous Irish laborers who are present and the Chinese laborers who are obscured, but also by the African American laborers who are absent. In contrast to his photographs of the U.S. Railroad Construction Corps, which prominently feature African Americans, Russell’s photographs of the Union Pacific Railroad show the whitening of labor in the West. Irish tracklayers are whitened as African American laborers are excluded from their ranks. Together the two sets of photographs document the frontiers of a white and whitening nation. In Sight Unseen, Martin Berger argues that representations of the landscape are always racialized, that they conform to the assumptions and presumptions privileged by the ethnic, racial, and national groups that produce them. Russell’s Great West Illustrated participates in the whitening of the West not only by excluding men and women of color from the view, but also more subtly by privileging the industry and natural resources so much Preparing the Way for the Train — 123

Figure 4.14 Andrew J. Russell, military railroad operations in northern Virginia: men using levers for loosening rails, c. 1862 or 1863. Salted paper print. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

a part of a white “manifest destiny” in the nineteenth century. Made for the Union Pacific Railroad, Russell’s photographs follow the logic of Euroamerican maps of the West, documenting the “artificial additions to the landscape and the ‘biggest’ natural features” while simultaneously taking for granted “the right of European-­Americans to expropriate the land of nonwhites and develop it to support exclusively European-­American cultural values.”65 Making way for the train, Russell’s photographs also mark the path of white territorial expansion, making an imperial destiny visually manifest. But Russell’s vision of whiteness is a complicated one. The final photographs in The Great West Illustrated focus on the life and culture of a white religious minority, the Mormons, who were at the edge of American national belonging in the late nineteenth century. Although he did not intend for his illustration of “the Great West” to end in Mormon territory (hoping that other volumes would follow the first), it nevertheless did. Russell’s most visible western settlers are Mormons, and the final images in the volume display Mormon cities, factories, homes, and temples. The book places Mormons at the end of the line, at the furthest reaches of the 124 — Chapter 4

American frontier, and in many ways, Mormon culture did constitute a national boundary in the nineteenth century. The Mormon practice of polygamy challenged the nation’s sexual mores, as well as its legal institutions of property rights and inheritance, and impeded the incorporation of Utah into the United States until 1896. According to Sarah Barringer Gordon, the struggle over polygamy, or the “Mormon Question,” involved passionate debate about the relationship of religion to government, the religious and secular status of marriage, the relationship of state authority to federal law, and the meaning of the constitution itself.66 Although their whiteness was not questioned directly, their status as unassimilable “natives,” their nonnormative sexual practices, and the explicit links Republicans in the 1850s drew between polygamy and slavery, or the “twin relics of barbarism” in the territories, placed Mormons beyond the pale of a normative national whiteness.67 In Russell’s photograph Mormon Family, Great Salt Lake Valley (gwi, plate 48), a tiny one-­room cabin provides the backdrop for a family portrait (see plate 5). A man, sitting on a chair, framed by the dark open doorway of the cabin, is surrounded by a large group of women and children who stand and sit around him. One of the five adult women appears to be quite elderly. She sits in a chair, knitting. Another stands tall and strong at a butter churn. Yet another, on the far left, stands in profile, her protruding abdomen suggesting that she is pregnant. Russell’s caption states: “Here is represented Mormon life in the rural districts. The man is surrounded by his family of wives and children, enjoying the noonday rest.” It is difficult to imagine how all of these people fit into the tiny one-­room cabin, and one can almost hear later social reformers condemning the “promiscuity” of such a crowded home. And, of course, polygamy heightened such concerns about promiscuity and sexual practice in the nineteenth century. But this is not Russell’s only view of Mormon life. Indeed, the photographer highlights Mormon industry and wealth. His photograph of the rural Mormon family is preceded by an image of the impressive home of Brigham Young (see figure 4.15), and a view of Salt Lake City as seen from the top of the Mormon Tabernacle, followed by an image of Young’s cotton and woolen factories. Russell shows Salt Lake City to be a place of remarkably clean, wide streets, tidy sidewalks lined with trees, and neat gardens and homes bordered by rock walls and wooden fences. The city stretches from the tabernacle down through a lush valley bounded in the distance by the impressive, snow-­topped peaks of the Rocky Mountains. The Great Preparing the Way for the Train — 125

Figure 4.15 Andrew J. Russell, Residence of Brigham Young, plate 47 from The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad West from Omaha, Nebraska, 1869. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Mormon Tabernacle is the subject of the final image in The Great West Illustrated. It is a man-­made dome that rivals both the natural and technological wonders featured throughout the book. Of the tabernacle Russell says, “The building comfortably accommodates one thousand people, and has within its dome the second largest organ in the United States.” While the structural characteristics of Salt Lake City’s buildings are impressive, so are the views they afford. Russell’s annotation for plate 47 (gwi ), showing the residence of Brigham Young, proclaims: “This building occupies a commanding position, and can be seen in approaching the city from any direction.” Discussing the view of Salt Lake City as seen from the top of the tabernacle, he describes elements in the “foreground,” “middle distance,” and “distance,” literally describing the scene as a “view.” Russell’s photographs of Mormon life and industry highlight the central factors that barred Utah’s inclusion in the nation, namely polygamy and the economic monopoly of the Mormon Church’s corporation. Legis126 — Chapter 4

lators and antipolygamists understood that in order for polygamy to be effectively abolished, the unusual economic strength and power of the church would have to be dismantled.68 Many antipolygamists also argued that the Church’s practice of tithing created and reinforced economic disparity within its community, filling the coffers of the Church and making its leaders wealthy, while keeping its humbler members poor. The industry and wealth documented in Russell’s photographs of Brigham Young’s home and factories, and even the spectacle of the Mormon Tabernacle, might have troubled non-­Mormon viewers almost as much as his photograph of the rural cabin overflowing with wives and children. In conjunction with one another, the images presented a summary of the problems Mormons posed to the nation in the late nineteenth century.69 In 1896, Utah would finally achieve statehood, but only after the Mormon Church officially abandoned the practice of polygamy, in 1890, and after its corporation was dismantled and some of its property seized under the Edmunds-­Tucker Act of 1887.70 The Mormons would become Americans only after they were properly whitened within the parameters of a capitalist, monogamous patriarchy. The view of Mormon life recorded in Russell’s photographs was another of the things that would disappear, or be radically transfigured, as the train helped bring the western territories into the nation. In Russell’s photographs of the West, the view is always on the verge of change. What is visible is about to be obscured, and what is invisible is further obfuscated. The train, like photography, hides its own apparatus in its frames, concealing the process of its production. Russell’s photographs make labor visible, both the construction of the railroad and his own work as photographer, but they also hide laborers of color, as they record the racialization of labor and territory along the tracks. Further, the West that Russell’s photographs of the Union Pacific Railroad instill in the national imagination is one that cannot be seen from the train. His views of the foreground along the tracks cannot be focused on as passengers speed across the land, and his panoramic visions are always more dramatic than the slowly changing vistas seen through the window. As the train changed time and space, it also transformed the scenes that made way for it. Propelling passengers through the landscape, the train transported them through an invisible terrain once brought into focus in Russell’s photographic views.

Preparing the Way for the Train — 127

When the Train Rolls In He worked for the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1930s. He was proud of the job, and had himself photographed at his work along the tracks. In one image he leans out a car window, his face brightened by sunlight. In another he stands, wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit, cap, and work boots, resting his elbow behind him, casually and confidently, on the dark metal car. It is an image of a man at home in his body and with his machines. The train was the vehicle of my grandfather’s self-­making, and as it did for so many others, it marked the path of his movements back and forth across the West, from Nebraska to California.

Photographs by Shawn Michelle Smith

Chapter 5 

 hansonetta Stanley Emmons ’ s C Nostalgic Views

In her study of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that “nostalgia as a historical emotion . . . is coeval with the birth of mass culture.”1 Although she does not cite photography as a primary instrument of mass culture, Malcom Chase and Christopher Shaw propose that “the photograph has been identified as the paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia.”2 Chase and Shaw suggest that nostalgia emerges when one feels that “the present is deficient,” or when one senses that one has fallen from a “previously privileged place.”3 They explain that in these critical relationships to the present, the photograph can function as a powerful talisman of how things used to be, providing a measure of how much has changed. In this understanding, the photograph offers a stable and accurate representation of the past that viewers imbue with nostalgia as they long for what has been lost. But photographs can also be crafted with a nostalgic eye, staged precisely to represent an idealized past in defiance of the present, and as Nancy West has argued, the Kodak company’s mass marketing of photography at the turn of the twentieth century taught consumers “to view photography through the lens of nostalgia.”4 Photographers learned to make images with a backward look. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons made nostalgic photographs that sought to represent an earlier time, turning a blind eye on the vast structural changes of her present. In an era of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, she made images of tidy homesteads, simple farmhouses, and

Figure 5.1 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Old Pillsbury Homestead, Willowdale Farm, Kingfield, Maine. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

the rituals of harvesting, celebrating an antiquated agrarian ideal (see figure 5.1). Her photographs stage a way of life that had all but disappeared by the early twentieth century, but one that nevertheless continued, and continues, to inform ideas about an American identity founded on self-­ reliance, simplicity, thrift, and the ownership of land. Emmons’s images of small-­scale farming life in rural New England, and tenant farming in the South, participate in long-­standing and contested ideas about labor, landscape, race, and nation. An agrarian ideal was always racialized in a country established not only by the northern family farm but also by the southern slavery plantation, and Emmons’s photographs both reproduce and challenge the history of that racial divide. As Emmons celebrated the family farm as the source of distinctly Anglo-­American virtues, her nostalgic agrarian idealism also enabled her to turn a critical eye on the racial exploitation of tenant farming in the South. In other words, even as her nostalgic visions enabled her not to see changing contemporary realities, they 132 — Chapter 5

also enabled her to focus critically on persistent legacies of exploitation. In Emmons’s work, nostalgia works both to evade and to expose. Emmons also turned a critical eye on photography itself, and many of her images subtly engage debates about the nature of the technology. Even in her initial enthusiasm for the medium, she highlighted the mechanical challenge presented by the camera, and throughout her long practice she continued to work with and against its technological limitations, manipulating and expanding the range of things photographs could represent.5 While her nostalgic impulse invited viewers to see a past doubly removed, both historically and photographically, enabling a willful blindness to the present, her painted lantern slides further suggested that her own visions preceded and superseded those she produced with the camera. Emmons used photography to see not only beyond the limitations of ordinary human sight, but also beyond the limitations of photography.

Chansonetta Stanley was born in Kingfield, Maine, on December 30, 1858, the only daughter among Appiah K. French and Liberty Solomon Stanley’s seven children. The Stanleys were descendants of Kingfield’s early settlers, landowning farmers, teachers, temperance people, and abolitionists. The most famous of Chansonetta’s siblings, the twins, Francis (F. E.) and Freelan (F. O.), developed an early photographic dry plate negative, and later invented a steam-­powered automobile, the Stanley Steamer. Like her twin brothers, Chansonetta briefly attended the Western State Normal School and had an early career in teaching.6 She married James N. W. Emmons in 1887, and in 1891, they had their only child, a daughter, Dorothy. After James’s sudden death, in 1898, F. E. and F. O. supported Chansonetta, establishing her in a duplex in Newton, Massachusetts, and allowing her to pursue her work in photography until her own death, in 1937.7 An anomalous image in Emmons’s oeuvre perhaps best illuminates her habitual interests, highlighting by way of exception her choices as a photographer. A rather mundane photograph, signed and dated 1920, shows a two-­story wooden building with a sloped, shingled roof sandwiched in between two multistory buildings on a dingy, abandoned urban street (see figure 5.2). The image is unremarkable, except perhaps for the shiny, crosshatched upper windows of the building that reflect patterns of light and shadow. In the lower left corner of the photograph’s pressed paper window Nostalgic Views — 133

Figure 5.2 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, The Home of Paul Revere, Boston, 1920. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

mount, Emmons has written: “The home of Paul Revere—Boston.” What is notable about this otherwise unremarkable photograph is that it is one of the rare images Emmons made in Boston, the thriving urban center she lived near for over fifty years. Emmons’s photograph shows the home of Paul Revere after its restoration in 1907, an effort funded by the Paul Revere Memorial Association (prma). The house was at the symbolic center of a progressive preservation movement in Massachusetts intent on anchoring Yankee memory in buildings. Boston itself was in tremendous flux in this period: between 1870 and 1905 its population had nearly doubled, and by 1915, first-­generation 134 — Chapter 5

and foreign-­born immigrants made up 70 percent of the city’s population. Amid this rapid change, and in the context of a larger cultural Colonial Revival, preservationists like William Sumner Appleton Jr., secretary of the prma, sought to protect and promote traditional Anglo-­Saxon American values. By 1900 Revere’s house, built circa 1680 and owned by Revere from 1770 to 1800, was one of only four surviving examples of colonial architecture from the seventeenth century in Boston. Located in the North End, it was part of a largely Italian immigrant neighborhood at the beginning of the twentieth century, and when Appleton began his funding campaign to preserve the house, in 1905, the upper story of the building was being used as a cigar factory, the first floor housed poor families, and the building was threatened with demolition.8 Appleton and other members of the prma raised the necessary funds to preserve and restore the house in order “to inculcate patriotism, buttress Anglo-­Saxonism, and remind the immigrants that Revere’s simple life, work ethic, and willingness to Americanize were laudable virtues.”9 The banality of Emmons’s photograph of the home of Paul Revere suggests that the urban house was not a visual, but rather a symbolic, attraction for the photographer. Certainly not one of her most formally interesting images, she nevertheless regarded it as important enough to mount for exhibition and sign and date. Presumably, it was not the look of the structure, but the subject, the house of Paul Revere, an icon of the Yankee past and a patriotic hero of the Revolutionary War, that drew Emmons to the site and inspired her to select the image for special attention. Emmons was proud of her own family’s connections to the Revolutionary War, and when she applied to the patriotic organization the Daughters of the American Revolution, she claimed eligibility based on two ancestors.10 This seemingly simple photograph might, therefore, give us a lens through which to view Emmons’s larger body of work, suggesting that she was interested not only in rural life, but also in an American heritage, and it is, in part, that American heritage that she identified in the rural countryside, in farming life, and in the land itself. At a time when her contemporaries, like Alfred Stieglitz, were drawn to photograph the changing social and architectural landscapes of urban centers, Emmons retreated to the rural countryside. Rather than take a quick train ride into Boston, Emmons drove over two hundred miles to the farming country of her birth. Apparently she was not interested in new urban “types,” or in recent immigrants.11 Like other tradition-­minded city dwellNostalgic Views — 135

ers and Massachusetts progressives, Emmons took pride in the rural life of her forebears.12 Turning away from the changing urban world at her back door, she returned to her childhood haunts, and tried to capture visions of an agrarian past.

Emmons made her best-­known photographs in and around Kingfield, and many of them are overtly nostalgic, seeming to look back to the time of her childhood. They depict elderly men and women performing domestic and farming tasks largely outmoded at the time. Emmons’s famous photograph of Lucy Butts Carville spinning in her parlor shows the elderly woman standing by her wheel, her head slightly blurred by the motion of her task (circa 1910) (see figure 5.3). The parlor in which Carville spins subtly reinforces the antiquated nature of her craft. The furnishings in the spare room show the increasing industrialization of domestic products: Although the chair on the right appears homemade, and the rag rug would have been produced out of scraps of worn-­out clothing, the calico on the rocking chair that faces the viewer is factory-­made, and Carville’s wallpaper was sold in a Sears Roebuck catalogue.13 A photograph of the attic of an old farmhouse in West New Portland, Maine (circa 1909), further gives the lie to Emmons’s image of Carville (see figure 5.4). In the attic one finds a broken chair, worn shoes, a rifle, hanging ears of dried corn, and a large spinning wheel. Indeed, by the time Emmons photographed Carville, spinning wheels would have been largely relegated to attics, and Carville’s may have been pulled out of storage to stage the image, to recreate a scene that would have been familiar decades earlier. Emmons’s nostalgic image of Carville spinning stages a scene from the past, making visible in the photograph what is doubly absent, presenting a moment twice removed. Even in the instant she opened the shutter, the scene in front of her camera was a performance that replicated the activity of another time. With a nostalgic impulse, Emmons photographed an image from the past, amplifying photography’s temporal confusion, and inviting a willful blindness to the present. Emmons’s photographs of life in Maine often focus on the very elderly, capturing the last days of a dying generation. During her sojourn in Kingfield immediately following the death of her husband, Emmons photographed elderly “aunt” Hannah and “aunt” Abigail (1898–99) seated between a wood-­burning stove and a window that bathes them in sunlight 136 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.3 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Lucy Butts Carville spinning, West New Portland, Maine, c. 1910. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.4 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, attic view, West New Portland, Maine, c. 1909. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.5 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, aunt Hannah and aunt Abigail, 1898–99. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

(see figure 5.5). The two women sit with knitting and stitching in their laps, and aunt Abigail’s head stands out distinctly against the white shawl that has been draped across her rocking chair. The open door behind and between them divides the photograph with a bar of light, and opens what would otherwise be a static space onto another passage, seeming to foreshadow the passing of the two women into another realm the following year. Emmons also made quiet, formal images of elderly men performing the tasks of harvesting. In one photograph, her eldest brother, Isaac, husks corn in a shed (circa 1901) (see figure 5.6). Sunlight enters through the door and touches Isaac, seated amid piles of cornhusks. The light just reaches strings of hanging corn and a mass of corn stacked in a wagon and then fades into the dark depths of the shed that provide the striking background for this scene. In another image “uncle” Tristram G. Norton, ninety years old, shells corn into a basket (1901) (see figure 5.7). He sits in a chair in the middle of the frame, his impressive white beard accentuated by the light that glows at the window.14 Seated on the floor, Dorothy (Emmons’s daughter) makes a little cabin out of the discarded cobs. Emmons did not entirely deny “the coming of mechanization” to rural Maine, and a photograph of a steam-­powered tractor alongside wooden 138 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.6 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Isaac husking corn, Kingfield, Maine, c. 1901. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.7 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, uncle Tristram G. Norton shelling corn with Dorothy, 1901, Kingfield, Maine. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.8 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, The Coming of Mechanization, Kingfield, Maine, 1906. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.9 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, loading hay. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.10 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, plowed field. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

carts in a haying scene marks the changes taking place in the rural surroundings she admired (see figure 5.8).15 But she did clearly prefer to photograph simple ways of work and life that were dying out with the passing generation. Her photographs recall pastoral paintings made in the nineteenth century that depicted farming as a romantic retreat from the pressures and instabilities of urban life (see figure 5.9). As the art historian Sarah Burns has argued, such paintings contributed to the romantic ideas about farm life that the urban consumers of pastoral images desired.16 The nostalgic, pastoral imagery Emmons crafted was central to a long-­ standing agrarian mythology in the United States that posed the self-­ sufficient yeoman farmer as an American ideal. Described in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the agrarian ideal heralded the family farm, owned by the farmer, as a model social order based in private property and self-­reliance that fostered thrift, independence, health, and moral virtue. Private ownership of land was seen as the root of Republican values and the basis for American citizenship. But the agrarian ideal was always at least partially imagined, even when it most closely corresponded to a lived reality. The market on which the farmer depended to sell his products compromised strict self-­sufficiency, and the family farm was vulnerable to economic swings, despite its celebrated independence. Nostalgic Views — 141

Emmons’s photograph of a man and a pretty white horse in the middle of a freshly plowed field extols an independent, self-­reliant farming life (see figure 5.10). The man, neatly dressed, standing with his harnessed horse, is dwarfed by the field that dominates the foreground of the image and stretches behind him to a fence that encloses large buildings, presumably a house and barn. The image encourages one to imagine that he and the horse alone have plowed the expanse of field. Just behind them, several large trees appear to be in bloom, suggesting spring and the bounty that will soon come from the prepared field. The photograph presents an image of promise and prosperity, one founded in the land that is so visibly prominent and springing from the solitary labor of a man and his horse.

Emmons’s idealized pastoral views participated in the celebration of “Old America” popularized by Wallace Nutting and others in the Colonial Revival of the first decades of the twentieth century. Nutting, a one-­time minister turned amateur photographer and then savvy commercial entrepreneur, traded in staged views of colonial American life. He produced millions of photographs, platinum prints hand-­colored by a team of up to twenty young women.17 His Expansible Catalog of 1915 showcases over eight hundred views of country roads in springtime, rivers shaded by trees, ancient European bridges, castles, and churches, livestock, country cottages, and countless domestic interiors showing women in colonial dress, performing traditional tasks, all subjects that Emmons would explore in her own photographs.18 Finding that “those who know the pictures want the chairs,” Nutting also manufactured reproductions of colonial furniture in three factories and marketed his products for twenty-­ eight years.19 But his furniture line was never as successful as his image production in part because his built replicas were so much more expensive than his prints, which appealed to a broad consumer base (see figure 5.11). Understanding the commercial potential of his photographs early on, he began to copyright them as early as 1897, and they were reproduced widely in calendars and popular magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Home Companion.20 Emmons would have almost certainly known Nutting’s images and understood her own photographs to be in dialogue with them. Whereas Nutting sought explicitly to stage a privileged colonial past, 142 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.11 Wallace Nutting, from Vermont Beautiful (Framingham: Old America Company, 1922). (Note in the right foreground the Windsor Chair, which Nutting would reproduce in his furniture factories.)

Emmons sought to recreate glimpses of a more rural, rustic, agrarian past. Emmons rarely dressed her subjects in colonial costumes, and she preferred to photograph people in their own homes, gardens, and places of work, rather than the colonial house museums, outfitted with colonial furniture and props that Nutting favored.21 Although both crafted nostalgic images, Nutting’s photographs of colonial domesticity announce themselves as staged performances, while Emmons’s photographs purport to still present moments steeped in the past as they slip out of sight. The difference is subtle, and both sets of images are staged, but Nutting’s photographs celebrate a past that is acknowledged as past, through museums, antiques, and reproduction furniture and clothing, while Emmons’s photographs seem to mourn a moment that is passing. In this way, Emmons’s images are more avowedly photographic, seizing upon the photograph’s temporal disruption to frame a moment that forever oscillates between the past and the present. Emmons was not alone in her attempt to capture ways of life on or past Nostalgic Views — 143

the verge of modernization in the early twentieth century. But Nutting’s nostalgic views are not the only useful point of reference in this regard. Comparing Emmons’s photographs to those of another of her contemporaries, namely Edward Curtis, draws out and makes explicit the racialized view of Old America that Emmons, Nutting, Appleton, and other white, middle-­class Americans celebrated in the early twentieth century. In the same years Emmons was “preserving” and staging an old-­fashioned, premechanized way of life in rural New England, Edward Curtis was photographing Native Americans as if their lives had remained untouched by Euroamerican culture and industry. Curtis proclaimed his interest in “the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manner,” and he removed items of modern manufacture from the scenes he photographed, encouraging his subjects to dress in outmoded or strictly ceremonial attire, rather than the Western hats, shirts, and pants that were popular among many Native Americans at the time.22 Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans have been associated with “salvage” ethnology, an effort to document ways of life and forms of knowledge and production threatened by the encroachment of Western imperialism.23 Participating in a racial discourse that deemed the rapid decline of native populations an effect of the “natural” progression of white, Western civilization and “manifest destiny,” Curtis’s photographs of “vanishing” Indians represent them as already gone, celebrating them as if in the moment of their passing (see figure 5.12). With his images of receding Native Americans, Curtis crafted a new (white) American modernity. Arriving from her home on the outskirts of Boston with her imposing camera in hand, Emmons would have represented a modern, urban, elite class, even though she was known to most of her subjects as a child of Kingfield. Her interest in the extremely elderly and in outmoded forms of production demonstrates a desire to capture people and practices almost or already gone. In this way, her early work is a kind of “salvage” photography not unlike that of Curtis. Emmons was also interested in old-­timers, recreating and photographing ways of life vanishing in the face of mechanization, industrialization, and urbanization. And like Curtis’s, her vision of the nation was ultimately racialized. While Curtis celebrated the Native American “origins” of the nation as they were “fading” under the advance of white, Western imperialism, Emmons celebrated the Anglo-­Saxon and agrarian origins of the nation as they were increasingly overcome by modern manufacturing and commerce, and an influx of new immigrants.24 144 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.12 Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race—Navaho, c. 1904. Platinum print, sepia toned, 15.7 × 20.3 cm. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Emmons’s photographs reproduce a vision of America founded by Anglo-­ Saxons who shaped the nation by tending the land they owned. Emmons celebrated early Anglo-­Saxon traditions and ways of life, and valued them as a genuine American heritage. As Curtis’s “vanishing Indians” supported discourses of white racial strength, growth, and prosperity, Emmons’s nostalgic photographs participated in anxieties about white racial death at the turn of the century. While many believed that Native Americans were destined to disappear in the wake of white, Western expansion, others believed that Anglo-­Saxon American culture was itself threatened by the tide of new immigration at the turn of the century. Indeed, this was the period in which popular patriotic societies based on bloodlines, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, were founded, ideologically shoring up a racialized American identity many perceived to be diminishing. Only direct descendants of white men who had served in the Revolutionary War could gain access to the society. It claimed a privileged white patriotism founded on heredity and blood, which were popularly and scientifically regarded as the sources of racial characteristics.25 The Daughters deemed Anglo-­Saxon revolutionary heroes the truest AmeriNostalgic Views — 145

Figure 5.13 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Appalachia cabin, 1897 album. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

cans, and as noted previously, Emmons proudly proclaimed her membership in this elite racial and national society. Emmons’s investment in a “pure” Anglo-­Saxon American heritage probably also sparked her fascination with the white mountaineers of Appalachia, whom she photographed on her first trip to the Carolinas, marking her earliest experiments with the camera (see figure 5.13). At the turn of the century, many saw in the Highlands an isolated and “pure” Anglo-­Saxon culture unchanged from the days of colonial settlement. As the American Studies scholar John Hensley has shown, many Americans considered mountain people “contemporary ancestors,” living relics of a racial and cultural Anglo-­Saxon past.26 Further, as Jane Becker explains, “In the 1910s and 1920s, this identification of Southern Appalachia as the locus of an American folk culture gained nativistic overtones that upheld the nobility and supremacy of America’s Anglo-­Saxon citizens in response to the waves of southern and eastern European immigrants that filled the nation’s cities and factories.”27 Folksong collectors in the Appalachian South “added legitimacy to the idea that the region did in fact harbor a unique 146 — Chapter 5

folk culture that resided in white, Anglo-­Saxon natives who had maintained the traditions of centuries-­old ancestors.”28 Although many mountain people increasingly worked in factories and coal mines in the early twentieth century, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer persisted in white, middle-­class ideas about the region.29 Represented as preserving the “old ways” and living in self-­reliant isolation, white mountain people likely intrigued Emmons as they seemed to inhabit a (racial national) past in the present. Such racialized agrarian values also informed the assimilation policies that threatened Curtis’s “old time Indians.” The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to undercut Native American collective ownership of land by establishing individual allotments and private property. As decreed by the Dawes Act, Native Americans were to “vanish” into American culture by adopting the agrarian principles of private land ownership and cultivation. With this in mind, one might say that American agrarianism was a racialized social structure, an implicitly Anglo-­Saxon ideal. But it was not the only form of farming dominant at the founding of the nation. Plantation slavery in the South, with its overtly racialized labor, challenged and haunted an agrarian ideal. Slaves, who had no claim to the property and independence Jefferson celebrated as the bedrock of an agrarian republic, cultivated Jefferson’s own land.

Emmons celebrated an agrarian ideal well beyond the point of its eclipse. But her nostalgic impulse was not only a refusal of the present. Her commitment to pastoral imagery also enabled her to turn a critical eye on tenant farming, the legacy of plantation slavery in the South. While her early photographs of elderly New England farmers celebrated and mourned the loss of an (Anglo-­Saxon) agrarian ideal, those nostalgic images in turn provided the background against which her photographs of tenant farming emerge as critiques of racial and economic exploitation.30 Emmons’s photographs of tenant farming life, especially those made in 1897, on her first photographic trip to the Carolinas, are quite rare.31 She made these images two years before Frances Benjamin Johnston, her more famous contemporary, was commissioned to photograph the modern farming methods taught at the Hampton Institute, an industrial arts school in Virginia founded after emancipation to teach the formerly enslaved. Johnston’s images for the Paris Exposition of 1900 displayed the Nostalgic Views — 147

“uplift” program of Hampton, which promised wealth as a result of study and discipline and the practice of modern farming techniques. Although criticized by some, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, for keeping African Americans tethered to physical labor rather than encouraging intellectual pursuits, Samuel Chapman, the founder of Hampton, and later Booker T. Washington, Hampton’s most famous graduate and the founder of Tuskegee Institute, would argue that because over 90 percent of African Americans in the South worked in farming at the turn of the century, improving their lot with modern methods would help the greatest number of people advance most quickly. What both Washington and Du Bois were reluctant to show were the devastating conditions under which most African American farmers actually worked and lived at the time. For them, rural poverty and tenant farming recalled slavery, and both hoped to screen such realities from their image campaigns by relegating them to the past. Du Bois and Washington also knew that eugenicists held up African American poverty as evidence of inferior racial capacity. In Johnston’s photographs, only the very elderly, those who would have experienced slavery firsthand, are depicted as impoverished. Hampton students are young and modern and on the way to prosperity.32 In contrast to this institutional visual propaganda, Emmons allows the extreme poverty of tenant farmers, including the young, to be evident in her photographs, and in doing so, she turns a critical eye on tenant farming. This is not to say, however, that Emmons’s photographs of African American farm laborers in the Carolinas are devoid of racialized power dynamics. Some of her early photographs replicate popular caricatures of the “Sunny South,” in which poor and often elderly African American men and women are depicted as slightly humorous, quaint relics of the old plantation days. On Sunny South souvenir postcards from the 1890s, elderly men play music and women smoke pipes. They are poor, but content. One of Emmons’s early photographs, which she called Private Carriage, almost exactly replicates a Sunny South photographic postcard of a man driving an ox cart, proclaiming “I’se gwine back to Dixie.”33 Emmons’s photograph shows a man seated at the reigns of a rustic wooden cart pulled by an ox (see figure 5.14). As in the postcard, the cart is situated perpendicular to the camera, emphasizing the huge wooden wheels, and presenting the ox in profile, as the man turns to face the camera. Focused on antiquated “technology,” the image might be considered another effort at salvage; but here the “old times” would evoke slavery, an economic system fundamentally at 148 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.14 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Private Carriage, 1897 album. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

odds with Emmons’s agrarian idealism. While it is possible that Emmons was content to entertain the same contradictions Jefferson did, her images of labor and of poverty, especially those she made on her subsequent trip to the South, nearly three decades later, suggest a critique of tenant farming rather than nostalgia for its roots in slavery. Emmons would return to the Carolinas in 1926, and again she would photograph African Americans, including many of these later images in her lantern slide shows (discussed below). These images present run-­down and patched-­together cabins, bare dirt ground, men and women working in the huge fields of plantations, African American churches tucked away in the woods, African American cemeteries, and occasional portraits of African American men, women, and children. The images offer a rather unwavering view of African American poverty, but if read in relation to Emmons’s other rural photographs, they begin to formulate a critique of tenant farming. Emmons’s photographs of land-­owning farmers in New England depict a life that is simple and homes that are sometimes nearly bare, but nevertheless clearly invested with the pride and care of ownerNostalgic Views — 149

Figure 5.15 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, plantation cabins, South Carolina, 1926. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

ship. Compared to these, the Southern farming images read as records of exploitation. People at home are shown cooking and cleaning, and posed in their Sunday best, but the environment they inhabit is stark and barren and their ramshackle cabins are cramped together on the edges of plantations (see figure 5.15). While they strive to make improvements in their conditions, the structures they rent are falling apart. The fruits of their labor, both literal and metaphorical, do not enrich their own lives, but that of the invisible owner of the land. Unlike most of her images, Emmons’s photographs of African Americans taken in 1926 have a relatively spontaneous air, and some were probably made with a portable, roll-­film camera. A couple of them document interactions between Emmons and her subjects. Indeed, two images of a woman picking spinach suggest that not all of Emmons’s photographic subjects were willing. In the first, an African American woman wearing a hat, bent over slightly in the task of harvesting spinach, looks up, her attention caught by Emmons and her camera. In the second, the same woman is standing, hands on hips, with her mouth open in an address to the photographer. Emmons supplied as caption to this second image the exclamation: No Maam! I don’t want my picture taken (see figure 5.16). The photographer clearly marks resistance to her presence and her practice here, but in doing 150 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.16 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, No Maam! I Don’t Want My Picture Taken, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.17 Anonymous, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons photographing the Felder family, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

so she also marks her mastery over the situation and the woman, for she has her picture, and in fact displays it in a lantern slide show.34 As the exchange with the woman who shouted “No Ma’am!” suggests, Emmons herself was a kind of spectacle on the plantations. There are a couple of rare snapshots of Emmons at work behind her camera at the plantation cabins, images that contrast rather dramatically with her carefully composed self-­portraits. Given their scarcity, these snapshots of the artist in action lend a heightened theatricality to the scenes in which she photographed African Americans. The snapshots, made by an unknown photographer, make photography itself visible, troubling the medium’s purported transparency. They also make the photographer visible behind her camera, revealing the mostly unseen presence on which photography depends. They remove what might be called photography’s “fourth wall,” showing us what usually remains invisible on the other side of the camera. One of these snapshots shows Emmons making a photograph of the family of a man named Mr. Felder (see figure 5.17). In the image, Emmons stands just to the side of her camera, between the wide-­set legs of her tri152 — Chapter 5

pod. She is dressed in a long, dark skirt, light sweater, and dark scarf, and has an odd-­looking hat perched on her head, which appears to be adorned with Spanish moss. Focused on her camera, she adjusts the lens in front of three people arranged outside a rustic cabin. To the right and in the foreground of the image, one sees an African American man, probably Felder himself, observing the scene. The snapshot shows the wider frame surrounding Emmons’s photograph, and shows her photographing, highlighting the staging of photography itself. The exhibition print Emmons would later make from this session shows the three members of Felder’s family carefully posed (see figure 5.18). A woman sits in a chair out front, contemplating the guitar she holds across her lap. She wears a light dress and a dark, fur-­trimmed coat, and the light shines off her stockings. She crosses her legs at the ankles, and one sees the dust clinging to the soles of her shoes. Just behind her stands a young boy, his hand curved against the back of the woman’s chair. He wears a long jacket in a state of disrepair, and stares out beyond the camera, his eyes just visible under the visor of his cap. Behind and above this pair a young woman stands in the doorway. She wears a white dress and a small, dark hat, and holds her hands demurely in front of her body as she leans against a vertical support beam. The light catches much of the somber expression on her face, as she looks wistfully over and away from both the camera and her family. The photograph is formally staged and carefully composed, lacking the spontaneity and excess of the snapshot’s larger frame. Some of Emmons’s formal images highlight the process of picture-­ making explicitly. In one, a man on a horse has stopped for the photographer, to pose for her (see figure 5.19). He is situated nearly in the center of the frame, holding his horse still, perpendicular to the camera. His expression is caught in a smile or making a comment. Just in front of the man and his horse a narrow footpath intersects the wide dirt road on which he travels, extending back into the deep space of the image. At the end of the path sits a slightly crooked cabin with windows that seem to peer out at the viewer. Part way down the path, to the extreme left of the photographic frame, stands Dorothy at her easel, sketching. She seems oblivious to her mother’s photographing, but she has clearly been framed to be included in the image. Dorothy figures as a tiny icon of the artist and of art making, underscoring the constructed nature of this scene and the artist’s role in producing it. The snapshots of Emmons at work photographing, and Emmons’s pho‑ Nostalgic Views — 153

Figure 5.18 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, the Felder family, Charleston, South Carolina, 1926. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.19 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, man on horseback, Dorothy in the background (cropped), Charleston, South Carolina, 1926. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

tograph of Dorothy sketching, draw attention to the act of picture-­making, to the conscious production of a visible world. They highlight the construction of photographic scenes, showing how the world is made into pictures. The snapshots also reveal what Emmons’s own photographs obscure, namely the photographer behind her camera. Together these images show how the visible world is crafted and conjured, how it is drawn out of invisibility and presented in photographs.

Emmons’s investment in rural American places was not confined to the republican ideals associated with agrarianism or the poverty wrought by tenant farming. As is evident from her photographs, she also simply loved the Nostalgic Views — 155

Figure 5.20 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, landscape view, river and mountains. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

land itself. Some of her most beautiful photographs are her landscapes, in which rivers glow, trees are dappled with light, and mountains loom in the background against the sky (see figure 5.20). In addition to agrarian idealism, nature has also had a central place in American national mythologies; romantic and transcendental philosophers and poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman celebrated nature as a place of spiritual communion and manly independence, and Frederick Jackson Turner posited the wilderness as a powerful force shaping American character.35 Emmons’s landscapes also pose nature as a place for spiritual communion and a unique part of an American heritage. However, although some of her landscapes are quite dramatic, they typically depict natural scenery as somewhat domesticated, the forest just beyond the bounds of the farm. It is the countryside that fascinates Emmons—the nature of walking paths, fishing holes, and picnics—not the wilderness of the sublime.36 A photograph of Dorothy in the woods, made when she was a young girl, exemplifies Emmons’s reverence for the forest (see figure 5.21). Dorothy is placed to the right of center, at the bottom of the photograph. She appears tiny at the bottom of the image, offering scale for the tall trunks that ex156 — Chapter 5

Figure 5.21 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Dorothy in the woods, c. 1905. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

tend well beyond the upper edge of the photographic frame. In her white dress, she looks like one of the patches of light that dapple the forest floor and illuminate the trunks of a number of trees in the foreground. She has stopped in the path and turned back, away from the viewer, to reach up and touch a tall trunk. The gesture suggests a kind of romantic communion with nature. In an image Emmons mounted and signed for exhibition, a cluster of tall trees clings to the bank of a river (see figure 5.22). The trees, leafless in the winter, fill the upper portion of the frame like a delicate latticework, long, straight trunks supporting an intricate pattern of smaller branches. They spring from a rocky outcropping of land, around which bend the smooth waters of the river. Beyond this curved point, the river flows into the distance, reflecting the light of the pale sky and drawing the viewer’s eye back into the deep space of the image. One or two trees still clinging to their leaves stand out on a peninsula in the distance. Emmons made many of her landscapes close to home, in the forests surrounding her birthplace in Kingfield, Maine, and in the woods owned by her own family. She made “portraits” of stately old trees, providing names for some of them, such as Isaac French Willows. Many of these trees grew Nostalgic Views — 157

Figure 5.22 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, landscape view, trees and river. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

on Stanley Hill, and thus there is a sense in which, for Emmons, family and natural history were woven together. Such commingling of human and natural time is explicit in one of Emmons’s playful tree portraits, in which Dorothy and Berenice (a niece) stand in “Old Patriarch,” perched at the spot where the huge branches meet the trunk (see figure 5.23). The tree looks like a giant hand holding the two young women. In reverse relation to one another, the trunk expands out into a wide, inverted cone of branches, as Dorothy’s dress flares out from her impossibly tiny waist into a full skirt that reaches down to the crotch of the trunk. Naming the tree Old Patriarch, Emmons establishes a familial relationship between the tree and the two young women who appear as offshoots or branches of the family line. Emmons photographed the trees that marked her connection to the land, its past and its future. As an artist, she did not cultivate the land, but instead composed the landscape, ordering and perfecting nature according to her vision of balance and beauty. Like her forebears who grew the trees on Stanley Hill, Emmons domesticated nature and invested in the land as a source of family and national pride. Through her photographs she situated herself in the landscape, and laid claim to an American identity rooted in the land.

Emmons used her camera to express her devotion to the land and the flora of her native Maine, but she also struggled against the restraints of her chosen medium. In an inscription she penned on the back of one of her photographs, she declares, “No human device could ever represent what we saw among the old beech trees on the Stanley Hill after the leaves turned. All the foliage was burnished gold with rose and lavender shadows. To see it was to live in beauty. C. S. E.”37 Emmons wrote this tribute noting the shortcomings of the camera, her “human device,” and celebrating the colors of the fall foliage, on a beautiful black and white photograph (see figure 5.24). The print shows a dense, leafy, forest; it is oriented vertically, enhancing the length of the tall, dark tree trunks that fill the left side of the frame. In the right bottom corner, a small figure looks up into the leaves, dappled with light. She is engulfed and dwarfed by the forest. With her back to the camera, she serves as a stand-­in for a later viewer, allowing one to imagine oneself in this scene and to see it through her eyes. The composition of the image is effectively off balance, and the play of light and shadow filtering through the trees is gorgeous. One gets a powerful sense of the beauty of Nostalgic Views — 159

Figure 5.23 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Dorothy and Berenice in Old Patriarch. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

Figure 5.24 Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, To Live in Beauty. Courtesy of the Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.

the scene, but one can only imagine the “burnished gold” of the leaves and the “rose and lavender shadows.” Emmons’s images, like all photographs, both expand and narrow a visual field. They bring the unseen to light by staging nostalgic scenes of a former time, drawing into view what is no longer present, a referent doubly removed, from both the time of viewing and the time of making the image. But Emmons is also aware of the limitations of her technology, and she contends with what her images cannot re-­create, in this instance color. Therefore, she enhanced many of her black and white images by reproducing them as hand-­colored glass lantern slides. She painted the slide made from the “To Live in Beauty” negative boldly, even garishly, in gold, rose, yellow, and orange, and tinted the hat of the woman admiring the scene a bright red (see plate 7). She transformed her black and white image into a colorful glass gem. Chansonetta and Dorothy Emmons together made hundreds of hand-­ colored glass lantern slides. One set of one hundred focused on Maine and New England, and another, larger set focused on South Carolina. The latter collection includes many architectural images made in Charleston, plantation views, garden scenes, and images of African American life in both urban and rural locations.38 The New England set reproduces Chansonetta’s most famous images of Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, including her early nostalgic scenes of elderly farmers in Kingfield and New Portland, Maine. The New England collection spans all four seasons, and presents quiet, formal landscapes, as well as some sentimental, and even saccharin, images of children (and one of kittens). The series is numbered and begins with two views of small towns and a third of a stream, to then focus on the workplaces, homes, and practices of daily life in rural New England. Chansonetta sets the stage by situating her subjects and viewers in specific locales, small towns and natural settings, drawing attention, once again, to the relationship of people to the places, both natural and communal, that they inhabit. The slides themselves are bright jewels, small glass plates, approximately 3 by 4 inches. They fit into the palm of one’s hand like intimate objects. All are hand colored on the back with bold painted strokes and washes.39 The glass lends the images heft and adds to their objecthood, even as it also gives them a noted fragility (a number of Emmons’s are cracked). As hand-­ colored artifacts, they bear the touch of their maker, caught in the brush strokes that bathe them in blues and greens and golds. They also register 162 — Chapter 5

several different time frames, including that in which the original exposure was made, the image was transferred to the slide, the artist painted the slide, and finally the moment when the viewer sees the composition projected.40 Lantern slides bring the relatively solitary act of photography into a communal realm, anticipating audiences that will view them collectively.41 The lantern slide projector is a long, narrow device that looks like an antiquated mechanical bug. The entire machine, approximately half a foot wide and two and a half feet long, rests on a small base that lifts it off the tabletop. A bulbous metal body at the back houses the light source, initially oil or gas and later an electric bulb. Circular holes help vent the heat that builds in the metal chamber, and two large lenses condense and focus light on the slide. The slides are manually inserted into the projector on a metal or wooden sleeve that slips in perpendicular to the light source. A long bellows allows one to adjust the size of the projection, and a dial on the large front lens allows one to fine tune the focus.42 Projected, the images of the lantern slides become immaterial. They seem to glow as apparitions, fleeting and intangible. Indeed, many early practitioners seized upon the ephemeral nature of the projected lantern image, transforming it through a play of mirrors into pure projection. Such “magic lantern” shows hid the apparatus of the camera from view, giving the impression that their visions magically appeared. Heightening the already fleeting qualities of the slide projection, they seemed to extend the reach of photography beyond the natural world, into the realm of the supernatural, much like spirit photographs. Playing on the idea that photographic technologies revealed unseen worlds, they suggested through an optical illusion that the magic lantern might act as an (invisible) medium through which spirits materialized in auditoriums, “projecting” themselves into the realm of the living. Chansonetta’s lantern slides do not grasp overtly at the otherworldly, but they do include a surprising number of night scenes. These images are painted with a deep blue wash, and tiny flecks of emulsion have been scratched out of the sky to suggest stars. When houses are present in the scenes, a window or two is scratched so that it appears illuminated when projected, and sometimes a crescent moon peeks through the branches of a tree. In the New England show, the second slide presents a night scene of the town of West New Portland, Maine. Such novelty images draw further attention to the limitations of photography at the time, even as they Nostalgic Views — 163

show Chansonetta and Dorothy maneuvering around them. What Elizabeth Siegel has said of nineteenth-­century photocollage might also be said of hand-­colored lantern slides: When makers “combined the facts of photography with the fictions of painting, they created a new kind of representation.” Such practices “allowed—even encouraged—them to expand the limitations of photography.” The manipulation of hand coloring also “provided a way to depict scenes that would have been technically impossible for photography at the time,” such as “moonlit nights.”43 The slide showing “Old Pillsbury Homestead, Willowdale Farm” presents a nighttime scene of a homestead by a pond (see figure 5.1), a touch of light in the window (see plate 8). The image is dark and mysterious. When projected, its deep blues bleed into the darkness of the viewing room. Light passes through tiny holes in the emulsion, giving the illusion of bright little stars in the sky. The stars remind one that the slide both passes and blocks light, drawing attention to photography’s play with light and shadow. The slide requires light to be projected through it, even as it must also block light in order to be seen. Once again, what is visible depends upon what is not seen.

Many of Emmons’s photographs are about photography—they are about time and the practice of picture-­making, and seeing and not seeing. Even as they reveal the limitations of photography, its inability to represent everything, they also highlight photography’s call to visibility, showing how photographs conjure and craft the visible, drawing what was unseen into view. The images demonstrate the constructed nature of photographic images, making apparent the conscious choices that pull some things into visibility, while leaving others invisible. Emmons’s nostalgic images allude to all that can no longer be seen—the vast undocumented past—and they also invite viewers to participate in a willful blindness toward the present. In calling attention to their constructed nature, the photographs also call attention to their producer—to the photographer behind her camera. The snapshots of Emmons at work make her undeniably visible. But even Emmons’s photographs of Dorothy sketching and painting highlight the practice of image-­making, pointing to the photographer’s own picture-­ making. Her lantern slides, with their bright color washes and broad painted strokes, register her physical touch. Thus, even when we can’t see her in her photographs, Emmons marks her (invisible) presence in these scenes, registering her play with the unseen. 164 — Chapter 5

Chapter 6 

Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography

The man’s eyes rivet one’s attention. Large and light and piercing, they look directly out at the viewer from under the deep creases of a furrowed brow. A thick shock of hair stands straight up from the wide expanse of the man’s forehead. The thin line of a mouth and a squared jaw anchor his intense expression. Clad in a dark suit, standing straight and thin, the man grasps a flag with one hand and lifts the other, palm turned out to face the camera. Leveling his solemn stare at the viewer, with hand raised, the man seems to be swearing an oath, performing his pledge to abide an unspoken contract (see figure 6.1). This is Augustus Washington’s daguerreotype portrait of John Brown. Made in 1846 or 1847 in Washington’s studio in Hartford, Connecticut, it is the visual record of an encounter between two men who would radically challenge the terms of American citizenship. Rejecting slavery and the denial of full rights to free blacks, Washington and Brown would ultimately renounce their own claims to an American citizenship: in 1859 Brown would make his famous raid on Harpers Ferry, in armed rebellion against slavery, and six years before that, Washington would emigrate to Liberia to help found a new black nation. Inspired by his striking portrait of John Brown, this chapter explores Augustus Washington’s daguerreotypes as propositions about and performances of citizenship, as claims on full participation in an imagined nation. As Nikhil Singh, following other scholars, has proposed, nations are “social creations engineered and lived primarily

Figure 6.1 John Brown. Daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, c. 1846–47. Image purchased with major acquisition funds and with funds donated by Betty Adler Schermer in honor of her great-­grandfather, August M. Bondi. NPG.96.123. Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

through the techniques of narration and representation.”1 Although scholars have privileged the novel and newspaper as national representational forms since Benedict Anderson’s influential study, photography was also an important site through which the nation was imagined and contested in the nineteenth century.2 Landscape photographers directed viewers how to see and invest in the terrain, transforming land into nation by framing the view. Portrait photographers like Washington established standardized rituals of photographic self-­representation, codifying the portrait form and permitting subjects to represent themselves in relation to their anonymous fellow citizens, to imagine themselves as part of a vast community whose individual members they would never know.3 Photographs allowed individuals to conceive of the nation as a collective, and also to place themselves visually within it. But the nation was not a seamless collective as imagined or practiced in the nineteenth-­century United States, and as Washington’s work underscores, not all Americans had access to the rights of full citizenship. The state effectively divided national subjects into citizens and noncitizens along the lines of race, gender, and class. Photography enabled the nation to be imagined, in Anderson’s terms, but photography also empowered men and women to stake claims to a contested citizenship, and to establish what Ariella Azoulay has described as a “civil contract.” According to Azoulay, photography allows photographers and subjects to forge a civil contract of mutual recognition in which citizenship is claimed and authorized through participation in a photographic encounter, rather than by the dictates of the state.4 Washington’s daguerreotypes negotiate national affiliation and perform a civil contract in a number of different ways. They contest the exclusion of African Americans from the rights and privileges of full citizenship, while also making claims on those rights. Specifically, Washington’s portraits display his subjects’ self-­possession, a racially circumscribed social status thought to determine one’s capacity for self-­governance, and thus for full citizenship, in the nineteenth century. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has demonstrated, the American democratic order presumed citizens to have “self-­possession—a condition already denied literally to Africans in slavery and figuratively to all ‘nonwhite’ or ‘heathen’ peoples in prevailing conceptions of human capacity.”5 Washington variously represents, challenges, and claims self-­possession in his daguerreotype portraits. Further, his images work to reformulate the very terms of national belonging by The Civil Contract of Photography — 167

creating a space for the mutual recognition of subjects who see themselves as equal citizens, regardless of the state’s categorizations. His images register a new kind of social contract, one formed in and through photographs.6 Washington’s daguerreotypes bring into view many things unseen. His portraits represent what they cannot actually depict, namely the nation itself. Always imagined, in Anderson’s words, the nation is the aggregate of practices that attempt to conjure and reproduce it. The nation is the intangible evoked in photographic encounters and promised through photographic contracts. Washington’s portraits, especially his daguerreotype of Brown, also uniquely evoke the photographer’s presence in the studio, highlighting his role in orchestrating the photographic encounter. Although never actually visible behind his camera, as Emmons was, Washington nevertheless made his presence palpable. He thereby highlighted photography’s own blind spot, the photographer himself, the unseen seer.

Like most early daguerreotypists, Washington came to his career in photography via a circuitous route. He was born in freedom in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1820 or 1821. His father was a former slave and his birth mother was a South Asian woman, but he was raised primarily by his stepmother, a former slave like his father. He was educated, and as a young man he worked as a teacher. In the fall of 1843, he enrolled at Dartmouth as the college’s only African American student, and in the winter of 1843 he took up daguerreotypy in the hopes of earning money to pay for his education. His early experiments in photography went well, but they were not lucrative enough to enable him to continue his studies at Dartmouth beyond the first year. Hoping eventually to return to college, he taught in Hartford for two years and in 1846 took up daguerreotypy again, this time with sustained success.7 Washington operated a daguerreian studio in Hartford from 1846 to 1853, the year he emigrated to Liberia.8 He advertised his photographic services to a diverse clientele, offering daguerreotypes of different sizes, mounted in different frames, and ranging in price from fifty cents to ten dollars. In a broadside advertisement published in 1851, he noted, “In some instances, watches, jewelry and country produce will be received in exchange for Likenesses.”9 His services included portraiture, copying, daguerreotype jewelry, and postmortem photography. Washington’s advertisements appear to have been successful in draw168 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.2 Augustus Washington, Sarah Taintor Bulkeley Waterman, c. 1853. The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

ing a clientele of mixed means: some of the daguerreotypes are presented in the simplest brass mats and secured in folding leather cases lined with red satin, while others are ornately framed in embellished, gold-­toned windows and enclosed in silver cases lined with embossed velvet. A similar range of display marks his subjects. Elderly women wear modest white bonnets and plain dark dresses, while fashionable young women with elaborate coifs wear pleated and ruffled dresses, jewelry pinned at lacy necklines, and gloves or bows tied at their wrists (see figure 6.2). The Civil Contract of Photography — 169

Washington’s Hartford portraits are fairly typical, if expert, examples of mid-­nineteenth-­century daguerreotypy. They present white men and women, seated, in two-­thirds poses.10 The attributes of their clothing, the manner of their poses, and the props they hold all serve to signal their education, their piety, their social standing, their possession, and their self-­ possession. The men typically face the camera squarely, with legs spread for extra stability and one hand nestled in the fold of a hip. Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, a Hartford insurance company executive, clasps a rolled document in his hand, presumably a sign of his professional status (see figure 6.3).11 Some of the women hold books in their laps, a sign of their literacy, and perhaps of their piety. Others hold daguerreotype cases, adding a self-­ reflexive note to their portraits that highlights the picture-­making process and underscores the performative nature of the daguerreotypes.12 The poet Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney is photographed in street attire (to signal, perhaps, her public prominence): a large, architectural bonnet frames her face, secured under her chin by long ribbons that cascade down her chest (see figure 6.4). A lace veil has been pulled back from her face and hangs off the bonnet, and a heavy, patterned shawl is wrapped around her shoulders. Her hands clasp an umbrella, displaying her delicately patterned gloves, or mitts, for the camera.13 Men and women alike rest an elbow on the small, tapestry-­covered table that both provides support and signals the middle-­class parlor, the social space where possession and self-­possession were regularly put on display. Despite their efforts to stage and frame normative middle-­class subjects and self-­possessed citizens, Washington’s portraits, as daguerreotypes, were also rather unnerving representations. Even as they evoked the domestic sphere, daguerreotypes were also “unhomely,” or uncanny. Unlike most photographic forms, daguerreotypes are nonreproducible, positive images. They are also unusually material artifacts, burnished, silver-­coated copper plates, polished to achieve mirror-­like reflective surfaces. Because of their mirrored surfaces, daguerreotypes capture fleeting reflections of their viewers, enabling them to see themselves within the frame, as if occupying the same time and place of the photographic subjects. In this way, daguerreotypes amplify the impossible presence, or present-­absence of their subjects, drawing viewers into uncanny proximity with them and heightening photography’s temporal and spatial disruptions. Reflected within the same frame, viewers are encouraged to see themselves in relation to photographed subjects, both literally and symbolically. The mir170 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.3 Augustus Washington, Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, c. 1853. The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

Figure 6.4 Augustus Washington, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, c. 1852. The Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

rored surface of the daguerreotype underscores photography’s invitation to imagine a social contract. While Washington’s technology was inherently unsettling, his social practice as a daguerreotypist was also disruptive. A closer examination of the broadside advertisement of July 20, 1851, reveals the complicated nexus of gendered and racialized relationships within which Washington operated (see figure 6.5). The broadside situates the daguerreotypist and his gallery in the center of Hartford, at 136 Main Street, “a few doors north of the centre church,” and positions him figuratively in the middle of national debates, including those regarding slavery.14 “While others are advocating every man a house, free soil and free speech, it remains for Washington to advocate and furnish free Daguerreotypes, for the next 60 days.” Driven largely by northern industrial economic interests, the free soil debates were, at their root, about the spread of slavery into the western territories. Thus, not unlike Frederick Douglass, who, ten years later, would locate photography at the heart of the national struggle over slavery in his lectures on “Pictures and Progress,” Washington places visual representation on a par with political representation and property rights, linking his art to larger issues of citizenship and self-­ownership.15 The image that illustrates the top portion of the broadside is a small, framed view that gives one the illusion of peering into a daguerreotypist’s studio. Windows along the far wall and skylights overhead bathe photographer, sitter, and patterned carpet in light. To the right, partially cut off from view, that ubiquitous nineteenth-­century parlor prop, a pillar, pokes its head into the frame. In the center, the male photographer stands behind his camera, which he has aimed at the woman who sits, slightly elevated on a platform, in front of him. The two face each other alone together in the studio. Both are notably white. Almost certainly a stock image sold to printing presses, the illustration illuminates the gendered and racialized expectations that govern the photographic studio in the nineteenth century. Photographers are male and white, and their most coveted clients are female and white. Entering this space and commanding it, Washington, by virtue of his race, also disrupts it. Many white people would have been made nervous by the thought of an African American man and a white woman in this cozy scene, and especially with the idea of a black man directing his gaze, technologically enhanced, upon a white woman. One wonders if the particular address to “ladies,” highlighted in capital and 172 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.5 The Washington Daguerrean Gallery, broadside, 1851. The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

bold relief on the broadside, is not meant to quell the anxieties of a white consuming public. The advertisement assures them “that this is the only gallery in Hartford, that has connected with it, a Ladies’ Dressing-­Room, and has a female in constant attendance to assist in arranging their toilet.”16 Presumably Washington’s gallery was also the only one in Hartford that featured an African American daguerreotypist. One of a very few phrases in the advertisement that is italicized, the statement assures customers that (white) “ladies” will not be left alone with the black photographer. Washington “advocates” and “furnishes” free daguerreotypes for his clientele, promoting the “right” to self-­representation for his white customers. But as he does so, he also subtly claims his own right to a black masculine gaze that was highly circumscribed at the time. As bell hooks has argued, “slaves were denied their right to gaze” by white slave owners who “punished enslaved black people for looking.”17 Although Washington was a free African American man, prohibitions against his gaze, especially upon white women, would have been profound. Decades later, at the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois would argue that double consciousness is the effect of a cultural struggle over a racialized and gendered gaze. For Du Bois, double consciousness is, in part, the result of a traumatic realization that his gaze is challenged, dismissed, and disregarded by a white girl. The “gift” of second-­sight is figured as his reclamation of an empowered black masculine gaze.18 Washington’s portraits do not announce a politics in any explicit way, but they clearly demonstrate his gaze upon all manner of white subjects, including young ladies. Through his daguerreotypes he asserts his right to look, and further to observe the privileges of citizenship from which he is excluded. As a free and educated African American man, Washington was technically accorded full personhood by the constitution (unlike the enslaved), but was barred from full citizenship. Further, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made his self-­possession (and that of all free African Americans) precarious at best. His daguerreotypes thus frame and focus on the normative racial, class, and national privileges largely denied to their maker.19 Washington’s portrait of Brown diverges rather dramatically from his typical visual repertoire.20 Here Brown is posed standing (see figure 6.1). The scene is devoid of objects except for the flag he grips, which some have surmised to be the standard of his alternative Underground Railroad.21 His gaze bears none of the placid vacancy that so many early photographic sub174 — Chapter 6

jects have as a result of long exposures. The abolitionist’s face is expressive; under his furrowed brow, his eyes seem to sear the daguerreotype plate. Most strikingly, Brown makes a gesture toward the photographer, raising his hand as if swearing an oath. This gesture draws attention to the engagement—the encounter—between Brown as subject and his photographer. In so doing, it highlights Washington’s position behind the camera, and registers, perhaps, his own demand for social and political recognition. Washington’s portrait of Brown enacts the civil contract of photography. According to Azoulay, photographs inspire recognition between subjects, and in this way they can create an imagined community of citizens beyond the boundaries dictated by a sovereign ruling power. In her provocative reading, photography creates a “new conceptualization of citizenship as a framework of partnership and solidarity among those who are governed, a framework that is neither constituted nor circumscribed by the sovereign.”22 Washington’s daguerreotype of Brown explicitly gestures toward a political community of insurgent citizens—of abolitionists—who acknowledge each other as subjects across the color line. The daguerreotype becomes a space in which two subjects meet as citizens through a process of mutual recognition, rejecting the dictates of the state, which would include one and dismiss the other. As the record of this encounter, and the marker of reciprocal identification, Washington’s portrait of John Brown also becomes a portrait of the photographer himself. Washington’s daguerreotype of Brown highlights the conscious performance of the civil contract, the knowing collaboration between photographer and subject. For daguerreotypes, like the mirrors to which they were often likened, reverse their subjects. Early photographers could overcome this optical flipping by reversing the image again with the use of another mirror (and actually photographing sitters as reflected in a mirror). However, as Ann Shumard has argued, Washington did not employ such a mirror when he photographed John Brown, a fact made visible in the reversal of the buttons on Brown’s jacket.23 Instead, anticipating the visual reversal of the daguerreotype, and also anticipating the image he and Brown hoped to create, Washington must have instructed Brown to raise his left hand toward the camera so that it would appear that he was raising his right hand in the daguerreotype.24 Washington’s knowing manipulation of the daguerreotype technology demonstrates the intent of the photographer and his subject in making this image of the civil contract. As Brown’s gesture makes one aware of his performance in collaboThe Civil Contract of Photography — 175

ration with the photographer, thereby underscoring the photographer’s presence behind the camera, it also makes one aware of her own presence as viewer, drawing attention, once again, to the uncanny nature of the daguerreotype’s reflections. Observing this image, one has the sense that Brown is swearing an oath to the viewer.25 It is an unnerving feeling, as Brown’s blurred hand evokes the spirit photographs that conjured worlds beyond what the photograph could record. Brown’s doubled hand suggests that despite the careful staging of this image, neither photographer nor subject could fully control its making. The blur registers photographic excess and accident. It is what Miriam Hansen, in her reading of Walter Benjamin and the optical unconscious, describes as an arbitrary moment of chance, a contingent moment that remains free from human intention and the narrative of history as progress.26 According to Hansen, “Benjamin develops the notion of an ‘optical unconscious’ from the observation that the temporality of some early photographs, despite all preparation and artistry on the part of both model and photographer, compel the beholder to seek the ‘tiny spark of accident,’ the ‘here and now’ by which the image is branded with reality, and thus to find the ‘inconspicuous spot’ which might yield, in the quality of that minute long past, a ‘moment of futurity responding to the retrospective gaze.’”27 Paradoxically, the photograph, which represents a present moment always already past, may also register a spark of futurity that it cannot fully contain, and Benjamin’s understanding of the optical unconscious is, in part, a recognition of the photograph’s radically disruptive temporality. Washington’s striking daguerreotype of Brown, with its unintended blur, calls out to viewers across time to witness and engage the civil contract of photography.

Washington informally announced his momentous departure for Liberia in an advertisement for his daguerreian gallery in the Hartford Daily Courant, published October 8, 1852 (see figure 6.6). The image shows a photographer bent over his camera, which he has aimed at the “world.” Perched on a stool in front of him is a “man” whose body, except for limbs and head, is a giant round globe, complete with longitudinal and latitudinal lines and the rough outlines of continents. The advertisement locates Washington’s studio at no. 136 Main Street, and declares, “Washington is at home, and daily executing beautiful and correct Miniatures, equal to any in this country, at his uncommonly cheap prices.” Running about a year after Washing176 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.6 Advertisement from the Hartford Daily Courant, October 8, 1852. The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

ton settled on his course of emigration, and about a year before he actually set sail for Liberia, the advertisement’s play on “home” and “country” is amplified, for Washington is at home in this country (the United States) only so long as it will take him to make enough images to fund his relocation to Liberia. As the image somewhat humorously suggests, although he is at home in the United States for the moment, he already has his sights fixed on a transnational enterprise. Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (acs), an organization established in 1816 with the purpose of removing free African Americans from the United States and relocating them to a colony in Africa.28 In 1821, representatives of the acs “bought” Cape Mesurado from King Peter at gunpoint.29 In 1824 the colony was named Liberia, for liberty, and its largest settlement, Monrovia, after the American president James Monroe. According to Allan Yarema, “By 1836, Liberia had a population of about three thousand people. Monrovia alone contained about five hundred houses, many built of stone. Docks, public offices, and a light house had also been constructed along with ten church buildings. The territory along the coast stretched about two hundred miles, pushed nearly thirty miles inland, and contained about 200,000 native Africans.” In 1847, Liberia declared its independence and adopted a constitution. The national The Civil Contract of Photography — 177

seal of the new republic bore the motto “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.” The acs continued to send free African Americans to Liberia after the nation declared its independence, and between 1820 and 1860, over ten thousand African Americans emigrated to Liberia.30 The American Colonization Society “brought together friends and enemies of slavery.”31 In the years before radical abolition took serious hold in the United States, many viewed the acs as a force that would eventually lead to abolition. Henry Clay and others who ultimately supported abolition saw colonization as a gradual means of eradicating slavery, but they argued for the removal of African Americans from the United States because they believed racial prejudice would prevent free African Americans from achieving true equality with whites.32 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the acs was widely supported, generating sixteen state societies and over two hundred local auxiliaries. In addition to Clay, its supporters included such prominent men as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln.33 By the 1830s, the acs came to be viewed more critically by radical abolitionists suspicious of its aims and effects, as well as its broad membership. William Lloyd Garrison attacked the acs as “a proslavery plot, designed to rid the South of the troubling presence of free Negroes.”34 Many members of the acs were, in fact, proslavery; they supported the removal of free blacks from the United States because they believed emancipated men and women would foster slave insurrections. Although many free African Americans supported emigration in the early decades of the nineteenth century, most were wary of the American Colonization Society and the colony of Liberia, and understandably suspicious of the acs’s flexible platform, which appealed to such a broad antislavery and proslavery constituency. Indeed, in a letter he published in the African Repository, the official journal of the American Colonization Society, written on July 3, 1851, Washington acknowledges the surprise with which his support of Liberian colonization will surely be met: “I am aware that nothing except the Fugitive Slave Law can be more startling to the free colored citizens of the Northern States, than the fact that any man among them, whom they have regarded as intelligent and sound in faith, should declare his convictions and influence in favor of African Colonization.”35 Washington, like other African American emigrationists, initially sought land for a black nation in North or South America, or in the British West Indies, but he eventually concluded: “I have been unable to get rid of a conviction . . . that if the colored people of this country ever find a home on 178 — Chapter 6

earth for the development of their manhood and intellect, it will first be in Liberia or some other part of Africa.”36 A number of factors may have influenced Washington’s change of heart. After Liberia gained its independence, in 1847, the new African nation began to lose the stigma of its association with the acs for many free blacks, and further, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which Washington alludes to, increased support for emigrationism in general among free African Americans.37 Washington posits the development of “manhood and intellect” as an African American project uniquely suited to Liberian colonization, holding up “manhood” as a measure of racial progress. In this formulation, African American “womanhood” is implicitly erased or subsumed in serving a singularly gendered national ambition. As Michele Mitchell has argued, “The acs also constructed colonization as a resolutely ‘masculine endeavor,’ one that would ostensibly enable black men to achieve manhood in Liberia as pioneers, heads of household, and political actors.”38 Although Washington has little to say about gender explicitly beyond his hopes for nurturing black manhood, his arguments for colonization implicitly pose Liberia as a new space for a black “national manhood.” As Dana Nelson has argued, since its founding, the United States has merged constitutional democracy with capitalist production through a discourse of white national manhood, one that has privileged white, middle-­class men as national subjects even as it has also disciplined them.39 What Washington seeks is a place to develop black national manhood, a newly racialized form of “capitalist citizenship.”40 Making his case for emigration, Washington outlined the many different ways African Americans were denied full citizenship and excluded from national manhood in the United States. He declared: “They are excluded in most of the States from all participation in the government; taxed without their consent, and compelled to submit to unrighteous laws . . . They are also excluded from every branch of mechanical industry; the work-­shop, the factory, the counting-­room, and every avenue to wealth and respectability . . . Colleges and academies slowly open their doors to them . . . They are by necessity constant consumers, while they produce comparatively nothing, nor derive profit from the production of others.”41 Washington’s understanding of full citizenship is based on participation in the government and protection under the law, but also extends beyond such civic forms of representation to include access to knowledge, production, and wealth. Washington does not separate capitalism from the practice of The Civil Contract of Photography — 179

American democracy and understands the exclusion of African Americans from both institutions as mutually reinforcing. He sees racism at the root of both and understands their imbrication. Although his critique does not go so far as to identify the slave trade and the products of slave labor as the foundation of global capitalism, he clearly marks African Americans’ lack of capital as a structural economic problem. For Washington, full citizenship requires access to capital as well as to democratic institutions.42 Washington’s thoughts in 1851 on Liberia reveal complex national affiliations and colonial ambitions. His narrative departs rather dramatically from those of later diasporic writers. As Kenneth Warren has argued, in twentieth-­century African American discourses of diaspora, “Africa is always imagined in retrospect—as the place one has come from—or in a retrospective prospect—as the home one is going to.”43 Washington’s discussion of Africa lacks the particular romanticized fantasies of “home”; his vision is much more closely aligned with a colonization scheme. Washington saw in Liberia “a colony for the free colored people, where they have an opportunity of demonstrating their equality with the white race, by seizing upon, combining, and developing all the elements of national greatness by which they are surrounded.”44 He seeks a new place for “the colored people of this country,” for the black men and women of the United States, hoping ultimately to find a place for African Americans in Africa. As an independent nation, Liberia would be a proving ground for the race, a place of self-­governance in which African Americans could demonstrate their equality with whites, and hold all positions in society, government, and commerce.45 For Washington, the success of the new nation would be proof of racial ability.46 But that racial ability would still be culturally circumscribed and framed by a colonial context. Washington has little to say of the African natives—whom he deems the “heathen inhabitants” of Africa—as he imagines a new nation for African Americans in Liberia.47 He hopes that the colonial enterprise will “send the blessings of civilization and religion to the benighted sons of that continent,” but it is clear that he believes “all positions in society, government, and commerce” will be held by African Americans.48 For Washington, it is African Americans, and primarily African American men, who will prove themselves to a white Western world, not a pan-­African coalition of “colored people.” Washington does not view African natives as fellows in a collective based on race or on a history of suppression, but as primitives wasting the riches of a vast terrain. He declares: “A continent larger than North 180 — Chapter 6

America is lying waste for want of the hand of science and industry. A land whose bowels are filled with mineral and agricultural wealth, and on whose bosom reposes in exuberance and wild extravagance all the fruits and productions of a tropical clime. The providence of God will not permit a land so rich in all the elements of wealth and greatness to remain much longer without civilized inhabitants.”49 Proposing that “colored men are more peculiarly adapted” to the task, he proclaims that it is African Americans’ manifest destiny—“our true, our highest and happiest destiny”—to effect the “civilizing, redeeming, and saving that continent.”50 The Africa to which Washington sails is a land rich in resources, waiting to be colonized and civilized, industrialized and modernized, by African Americans. Washington envisions a new America (for African Americans) in Africa. His ambitions for the Liberian nation are entirely indebted to American political and economic structures, and he defends the very idea of colonization by recalling the American model: What is Colonization? For the benefit of those who treat it with contempt, and think that no good can come out of it, I may merely remark that the thirteen original States, previous to the Declaration of Independence, were called the Colonies of Great Britain, the inhabitants colonists. . . . These colonists came from the land of their birth, and forsook their homes, their firesides, their former altars, and the graves of their fathers, to seek civil and religious liberty among the wild beasts and Indians on a foreign, bleak, and desolate shore. Oppressed at home, they emigrated to Holland, and after remaining there twelve years, returned to England, and found not the hope of rest until they came to America. That very persecution and oppression of the mother country planted in America the purest civil and religious institutions the world had ever seen. And now this powerful Republic, by her oppression and injustice to one class of this people, will plant in Africa a religion and morality more pure, and liberty more universal, than it has yet been the lot of my people to enjoy.51 Washington suggests that in removing themselves from the territories of the United States, African American colonists are only doing what the British American colonists did, leaving a mother country that suppresses them to start a new life on a new continent. Indeed, Washington depicts African American colonists as latter-­day Pilgrims, persecuted and oppressed in their country of origin, who will found another republic more The Civil Contract of Photography — 181

true to the ideals of their erring first nation.52 What Washington ultimately seeks is an African America.

In 1853, Washington renounced the nation of his birth and, with his wife, Cordelia, and their two children, Alonzo Seward (aged two and a half) and Helena Augusta (aged one), joined the thousands of other free African Americans who sought a new home in Liberia in the nineteenth century.53 He began his career in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, as a daguerreotypist, and even after his main source of income and employment shifted to agriculture, commerce, and politics, he continued to work as a traveling artist in Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Senegal during at least the first decade of his life in Africa.54 One of Washington’s early Liberian images stages a first sighting of Monrovia: View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, a wood engraving made after Washington’s daguerreotype, situates the viewer as if aboard a ship, framing Monrovia as an immigrant would see it for the first time (see figure 6.7).55 The image presents a smooth expanse of water stretching back to an inviting shore. A small boat and birds alighting from the surface of the water anchor the foreground of the image, as another boat with bright white sails draws the eye further back into the calm bay, toward the shore with its docks and buildings. Clusters of neat houses rise up a hill from the water’s edge, and a large two-­story colonnaded building and a church sit prominently on the crest of the hill. The church steeple rises into the sky to touch a bright, white puffy cloud. Dense foliage frames the tidy community on both sides. View of Monrovia from the Anchorage was published in the Twenty-­ fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New-­York Colonization Society, in 1856, and letters between Washington and Dr. James W. Lugenbeel, the recording secretary of the acs, suggest that the society commissioned this image and others.56 The view displays Monrovia as a calm harbor and haven, a planned and orderly town that has been cut out of the jungle. The terrain has been transformed and tamed by the colony: the land as well as lines of sight have been cleared out of the dense foliage that surrounds the town. In contrast to that wild tangle, decorative trees stand out in isolation on the cleared land of the hill. Monrovia is imagined as a new “city on a hill,” a community carved out of the wilderness, reaching up to the heavens—a beacon of civilization and Christianity in the “dark con182 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.7 View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, by an unidentified artist, after daguerreotype by Augustus Washington. Wood engraving, published in Twenty-­fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New-­York Colonization Society (New York, 1856).

tinent.” For colonizationists in the United States, the image suggests that Liberia is the site of a reverse pilgrimage, an image of the “land of the free” built by those rejected from the white American nation, but nonetheless modeled on its principles.57 Washington describes his actual first sight of Monrovia as follows: “We arrived in the port of Monrovia on the evening of the 18th of December, and such was the desire to see this land of promise, hope and mystery, that the noise and excitement drove [many] from [their] couch of repose. Some I think remained up all night. In the morning we took a view of the cape from our anchorage. It was a beautiful sight to look for the first time in our life on the sunny hills and verdant plains of the only land in which we can feel ourselves truly free.” Washington paints this “promised land” as a veritable Eden.58 In his first description of the land, he proclaims: “I did not know before that orange trees grew as large as apple trees in the States. Before the street door of the house in which I boarded the first week there were three very large trees bearing several barrels of the ripe sweet oranges, besides coffee trees full of coffee. In the garden were other orange trees, lemons, limes, citron, plums, cabbages, beans, and many things I know not the names of.”59 Although he notes “many things” he does not know the names for, he recognizes most of the plants and trees in this new land. That is because all of the trees Washington names (except for coffee) are transplants to Africa. The oranges he so admires are likely the legacy of early Portuguese slave traders who imported sweet oranges from India in the The Civil Contract of Photography — 183

fifteenth century, and planted them along their routes for use in warding off scurvy. This new Eden is suffused with the history and legacy of slavery, and its fruits, literally and metaphorically, are the products of the slave trade.60 And, of course, so are most of its formerly American inhabitants. Washington arrived in Liberia with “$500 worth of Daguerrean materials, cases, lockets, &c.”61 Photographing during the five or six months of the “dry season,” roughly January through June, he could make between $20 and $40 a day. In this new market, given the difficulty of securing materials, he set his lowest price considerably higher than he had in Hartford, asking “$3 for the cheapest picture.”62 In general, Washington’s extant Liberian daguerreotypes closely resemble his Hartford portraits in form and style; he carefully replicated his practiced manner of posing an elite, self-­possessed class in Liberia. The daguerreotypes are intent on showing the meticulous grooming, fine clothing, and self-­possession of middle-­ class subjects. His portraits of members of the McGill family, prosperous Liberian merchants, are salient in this regard, and they closely approximate his daguerreotypes of the Bulkeley family in Hartford. A portrait of Urias Africanus McGill (circa 1854) shows the man seated, wearing a fine dark jacket and elegantly patterned vest (see figure 6.8). His shirt has been colored blue and his cheeks are a rosy pink. He faces the camera almost squarely, as did the Bulkeley men, with each hand curled into a loose fist, nestled in the fold of his hips. A portrait of another McGill (perhaps Urias McGill’s wife) (circa 1854) presents a woman in clothes that mark the height of American fashion in the 1850s (see figure 6.9). She wears a full skirt likely augmented by a crinoline, white chemisette framed by the deep V of her dark, deeply-­pleated dress, white undersleeves, and dark, lacy gloves or “mitts.”63 She has center-­parted her hair and pulled it back in the same severe style as her American counterparts. In her hands she holds an ornate double daguerreotype case identical to the one that appears in one of Washington’s Hartford portraits. Here, however, the daguerreotype case that McGill holds in her lap is the same as the one that actually houses her own portrait (alongside that of Urias McGill).64 This daguerreotype, made in Liberia, was later held and viewed in the United States, as its presence in the collection of the American Colonization Society at the Library of Congress attests. As Dalila Scruggs has argued, “By featuring a case within the portrait identical to the one enclosing the portrait, the photograph links sitter in Africa and viewer in America through a shared possession of the daguerreotype object.”65 The case is more than simply a 184 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.8 Augustus Washington, Urias Africanus McGill, c. 1854. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 6.9  Augustus Washington, unidentified woman (McGill family member), c. 1854. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

signifier of self-­reflexivity; it is reduplicative, drawing the viewer into relation and identification with the photographed subject by making her repeat the performance of the photographed woman who holds in her hand the very object the viewer holds in her own hands.66 Among Washington’s early Liberian daguerreotypes are images of the nation’s political leaders that diverge in important ways from his typical middle-­class portraits. These include likenesses of President Stephen Allen Benson, Vice President Beverly Page Yates, Senate chaplain Reverend Philip Coker, a number of senators, as well as the secretary, clerk, and sergeant at arms of the senate.67 Washington’s daguerreotypes of Liberia’s leading men, both young and old, testify to the determination of the Liberians to demonstrate their capacity for self-­government. The portraits challenge the assumptions of the nation they left behind, which implicitly deemed them incapable of self-­governance and self-­possession on the basis of race. Here a man’s ability to render himself photographically announces his capacity for political representation.68 The daguerreotypes function as metonymic signs of the larger nation, reverberating with both the artistic and political meanings of representation, and suggesting that the two are mutually constitutive. In Washington’s hands, the photographic portrait becomes a sign of self-­ possession that establishes one’s capacity for self-­governance. Daguerreotypes of officials of the Liberian senate show formally dressed men seated beside a simple, cloth-­draped table. Vice President Beverly Page Yates sits behind such a table, his torso turned slightly away from the camera (see figure 6.10). Papers strewn on the tabletop in the foreground are blurred by the narrow depth of field, as is the simple cloth backdrop hung behind him. Yates himself stands out in sharp focus, light accenting his shiny dark vest, peaked forehead and eyes. He looks off to the side, as if lost in contemplation, and grasps a rolled document in the hand he has rested on the table. As in Washington’s Hartford daguerreotypes of white middle-­class men and women, the table in these images serves partly for support, but here it also functions as a different kind of indicator or sign. Importantly, this is not the table of the parlor room, but the table of the office, a desk, piled with papers and documents. This seemingly slight change in the nature of the table in fact alters the terms of these portraits. The Liberian senators are photographed as if at work—to display their work—not their leisure.69 John Hanson and Alfred Francis Russell rest a forearm on a stack of papers. Others, including James B. Yates, Edward Morris, and James Skivring 186 — Chapter 6

Figure 6.10 Augustus Washington, Beverly Page Yates, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Smith, pose with pen in hand, suspended over paper (see figures 6.11, 6.12, and 6.13). At the most basic level, these daguerreotypes highlight the literacy of the men so posed, displaying the mark of manhood, self-­possession, and even self-­conception that Frederick Douglass heralded as essential to the making of men (out of slaves).70 Holding pen over paper, the senators also draw attention to the legal documents they craft, recalling the constitution, the literal contract between the state and its people. In their encounters with Washington, the Liberian senators collaborate in producing images that perform the nation in several different ways. RevThe Civil Contract of Photography — 187

Figure 6.11 Augustus Washington, James B. Yates, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 6.12 Augustus Washington, Edward Morris, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 6.13 Augustus Washington, James Skivring Smith, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 6.14 Augustus Washington, Edward James Roye, c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

erend Philip Coker, seated, appears to grasp a flag (see plate 9). Edward James Roye, standing, raises his hand as if swearing an oath (see figure 6.14). They perform gestures similar to those of John Brown, but their portraits merge two competing ideals of citizenship. Theirs is both a civil contract in which subjects are called to mutually recognize one another, and a legal contract of citizenship authorized by the state. These daguerreotypes fuse the civil with the legal contract, forging a new image of black men as citizens who recognize one another within the bounds of the state they have made. The Civil Contract of Photography — 189

In contrast to the objectifying experience Roland Barthes famously described as the process of being photographed, Washington and his sitters use photography precisely to declare their status as subjects. Barthes rejected the feeling of transformation that came over him in front of the camera. As he sat before the lens in the photographer’s studio, he felt himself being transformed from a subject into an object. Once again, refusing such objectification, he declared: “It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect!”71 Augustus Washington spent much of his life fighting for his own political right to be a subject, and he did so primarily as a photographer, transforming the objects of his view precisely into subjects with political rights. For, even as the portrait objectifies, it also enables the subject to see and own her self as image in unique ways. Indeed, for Frederick Douglass, the objectification proffered through representation, and especially through photography, was a necessary foundation for self-­evaluation and critique, which in turn provided the basis for social progress.72 The encounters registered in Washington’s daguerreotypes show how the photographer and his sitters collaborated and communicated through the camera, together producing new subjects, a new civil contract, and a new nation. Washington himself would go on to represent Liberia in several different ways. He purchased land to farm on the shores of the St. Paul River, and very successfully cultivated sugar.73 In 1858 he was appointed a judge of the probate courts, and in 1863, 1865, and 1867, he was elected to the Liberian House of Representatives, serving as speaker during his last two terms. In 1871 he was elected to the Liberian senate.74 He also owned and rented two houses in Monrovia, operated stores, trading factories, and a ship, and in 1873 became editor and publisher of the New Era newspaper.75 In Washington’s career, photographic representation paved the way for political representation. With his daguerreotypes, Washington created the means by which he and his sitters could recognize themselves as self-­possessed citizens of a new nation, projecting their capacity for self-­representation in every sense of the word.

But this is not the end of the story, and Washington’s Liberian portraits cannot be framed so neatly. Today the images are housed in the American Colonization Society Records, at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. Perhaps the acs commissioned them, like Washington’s views of Monrovia; regardless, at some unknown point after Washington made 190 — Chapter 6

them, the images traced the path of their subjects back to the United States. Even without explicit documentation of their provenance, their current location highlights the constant discursive and material exchange between Liberia and the acs, between Liberia and the United States, throughout the nineteenth century.76 People, goods, letters, and images were in constant circulation back and forth. Washington’s letters from Liberia were published and reprinted in the United States in various journals and newspapers, including the African Repository, Frederick Douglass Papers, New York Tribune, Colonization Herald, Maryland Colonization Journal, New-­ York Colonization Journal, and Hartford Daily Courant.77 A notice in the African Repository published in December 1868 demonstrates that Washington himself moved back and forth across the Atlantic after he emigrated. On November 7, 1868, he sailed in the brig Samson from New York for his home in Monrovia.78 Washington understood the value of his daguerreotypes for colonization propaganda, and he also presented many of his own personal aspirations in rhetoric that accorded with the aims of the acs. To say his portraits participated in propaganda, however, is not to say that they are cynical or false, for certainly Washington believed in the image of self-­possessed, independent African American leaders. But this was not his only view of them. The self-­possession so central to understandings of self-­governance in the nineteenth century necessitated, for Washington, economic independence, and in this respect he found the leading Liberian men he pictured in his daguerreotypes lacking. He criticized “the men who see their daguerreotypes in the group [he had] pictured” for their total dependence on African natives for food and supplies: “all alike depend on the natives for their living.”79 Although Washington encouraged emigrants to bring as much money as possible with them, so that they could survive their first months in Liberia as merchants, he ultimately saw such dependence on trade, without production, as a fundamental weakness the colonists would have to overcome.80 Washington was also dismayed by the social hierarchies and discriminations he found in the new nation. Writing from Monrovia during his first year in Liberia, Washington reported that poor “Southern emigrants,” most likely recently enslaved men and women (as opposed to long-­standing free blacks), suffered mightily from the fevers that plagued all new arrivals, especially because illnesses were exacerbated by poor living conditions. He The Civil Contract of Photography — 191

also noted a distinct difference in the medical attention emigrants of different classes received, criticizing doctors for prioritizing the health of those with means.81 In other words, Washington saw class and caste prejudice at play among African American emigrants. There were also troubling discriminations between African American colonists and African natives. As noted above, Washington, like other members of the acs, believed that colonization would be the means of “civilizing, redeeming, and saving” Africa, bringing “the blessings of the English language, free government, civilization and religion over a continent!”82 In reality, Washington found natives barred from colonial schools and churches in Liberia.83 It would seem that the very prejudices that fueled the colonists’ grand “civilizing” and “Christianizing” schemes would also prevent them from being enacted. A mere six months after his arrival and initial exuberance, Washington warned: Liberia “is no Paradise, no Elysium, no Eldorado.”84 Washington’s critique of Liberia’s leaders, of the men he pictured, calls attention to the blinding effects of photography, to the ways photographs create blind spots by encouraging viewers to focus on what is portrayed at the expense of what is not, or cannot, be represented photographically. Even Washington, so attuned to the promise of his daguerreotypes, understood their shortcomings; his critique is not only of the men he photographed, but also of the pictures themselves and what they fail to make visible. The gap between image and reality in Washington’s Liberian portraits serves to emphasize the performative nature of the daguerreotypes. That disconnect makes clear that Washington is not representing reality, but crafting positions, establishing relationships, imagining new propositions and new national forms. Just as his early daguerreotype of John Brown seemed to witness a future vision, so his Liberian portraits engage in imagining a nation not yet realized—a nation yet to come—and that is the civil contract of Washington’s photography.

192 — Chapter 6

In the Crowd 

They stand in the crowds that surround dark, mutilated

bodies. Some are formally dressed as if for a date. Others are in summer whites and wide-­brimmed hats. One leers. Another cowers. They hold the hands of lovers and small children. They hold themselves, arms wrapped tightly around their sides. These are the women in whose name the murders were committed. These are the women who are learning to be white.

Artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith

Chapter 7 

Afterimages Abu Ghraib

Photography’s dynamic of revelation and obfuscation is political, a fact made acutely visible in photographs of war. In recent years, explicit U.S. policies of censorship and propaganda that determine who will see and what will be seen have framed the national view of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This, of course, is neither surprising nor new.1 What was a revelation, however, was the unprecedented, global circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs on the World Wide Web, in the spring of 2004. Despite the U.S. government’s attempt to control images of the war in Iraq, unauthorized photographs of torture made by ordinary soldiers circulated widely and immediately, inciting an international scandal. For a moment at least, it seemed as though a national visual archive had spun out of official control.2 But even as the Abu Ghraib photographs marked a striking transformation in the global circulation of images, they also registered the persistent return of cultural afterimages. “New” images become legible against the ground of previous visual genealogies, both acknowledged and repressed. The photographs of Private First Class Lynndie England torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison conjured hidden visions of violence in the United States. Recalling specifically the photographs of lynching, the Abu Ghraib images “shocked” American viewers by revealing a suppressed history of sexualized racial violence at the core of U.S. nation-­building. Pfc. Lynndie England emerged as the most salient figure in the U.S. media coverage of torture at Abu Ghraib. No one can forget the

Figure 7.1 Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, October 25, 2003.

images of the woman holding the leash, or pointing to men’s genitalia and signaling “thumbs up” (see figure 7.1). As the Abu Ghraib photographs circulated without parallel on the World Wide Web, the infamous “hooded man” became the international icon of the anonymous Arab victim, and England, a white, female soldier, became the international icon of the American torturer. England became the poster girl for the war gone wrong, and as such, she figured as the negative image of that other gendered symbol of the war, the heavily scripted hero, Jessica Lynch. If the afterimage is literally that which remains visible on the retina when one closes one’s eyes, the residue left after one has looked, one might symbolically consider the afterimage the trace of a previous spectacle.3 It is in this sense that the Abu Ghraib photographs function as afterimages of American lynching photographs. Part of their disruptive power was due to their strange familiarity, to the way they evoked lynching images, encouraging one to remember, and to see as linked, a long legacy of American violence. But another part of the shock of the Abu Ghraib images was 196 — Chapter 7

due to the way they made manifest what was always repressed by the discourses surrounding lynching, namely the image of the sexually uncontrollable white woman with equivocal desires toward the dark male body. The photographs of England simultaneously recalled a disturbing history and revealed what was obscured within that history. They showed many viewers what they had refused to see, challenging a long legacy of willful blindness. As afterimages, the Abu Ghraib photographs “returned” saturated with gendered and racialized national logics that shaped and informed the United States’ international “war on terror.” While they disrupted visions of an American past, they also powerfully unsettled contemporary narratives that sought to justify the war. As the “liberation” of Iraq (and Afghanistan) was predicated, in part, on discourses of gender inequity in the Arab world, American women were made to serve as exemplars of women’s freedom, without, however, challenging a U.S. patriarchy. Jessica Lynch, figured as both a brave soldier and a damsel in distress, performed this function perfectly, but Lynndie England turned that spectacle inside out. As the international icon of the American torturer, England’s image ruptured U.S. narratives of liberation by showing how representations of gender and race have served American practices of torture and terror, past and present, at home and abroad. As afterimages, the photographs of England revealed a cultural blind spot long repressed and willfully unseen.

Gendered Heroes and Horrors Images of Lynndie England and Jessica Lynch were joined in inverted pairs in the U.S. media coverage of the war in Iraq. Those that celebrated Pfc. Jessica Lynch at war were carefully crafted and controlled to convey a specific message of gendered heroics. Lynch, an army supply clerk in the 507th Maintenance Company, was injured near the city of Nasiriyah, in Iraq, on March 23, 2003, when her convoy was ambushed after straying off course. On April 1, 2003, U.S. Special Operations Forces recovered Lynch from a Nasiriyah hospital, apparently planning the documentation of the rescue with forethought as a usable photo-­op for the Department of Defense. After her highly publicized rescue, Lynch became a complexly gendered national hero, both militarized and vulnerable, celebrated as a hometown, military, and media darling. Afterimages — 197

Initial reports of the ambush on Lynch’s convoy highlighted the soldier’s brave defensive maneuvers. However, Lynch herself undermined those stories when she revealed that her gun had jammed during the attack, and she was unable to fire her weapon. Faced with this narrative setback in its framing of an American hero, the Department of Defense quickly recuperated the story and renarrated it as the classic tale of a damsel in distress. In the military-­media production of Jessica Lynch at war, her experiences ultimately could be reinscribed in a long-­standing narrative tradition as those of the virtuous white woman who must be rescued from a dark enemy and avenged. Her inability to fire her weapon could readily be used to reinforce the historical logics of the white woman in distress. Even though a trained soldier, Lynch could be transformed into the time-­honored, vulnerable, victimized, blameless white woman, the gendered symbol of (white) national virtue. The story of her capture, injury, and rescue could become calculated propaganda for the war.4 In the Department of Defense’s made-­for-­the-­media video of the rescue of Jessica Lynch, available on the Internet, eerie green images depict soldiers in fatigues and helmets, carrying a stretcher. The details of faces and place are indiscernible, but the formal characteristics of the images are unmistakable: they are produced through a military night-­vision video camera. As such, the images advertise their secret status. They recall covert military actions, even as they are produced and reproduced for a public gaze. The images formally announce that they are making visible what usually remains invisible to the public eye. The media framing of the footage asserted that it depicted the dramatic rescue of a wounded war hero. The video epitomized the viewing politics of propaganda, for in order to see it, one literally had to look through military eyes, through the night-­vision viewfinder of a U.S. soldier. The words that Jessica Lynch used to describe the media extravaganza that spun stories of her heroism and then dramatic rescue from Iraq—“they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff ”—might also be used to describe the vilification of her counterpart, the woman who has been deemed the “anti-­Jessica,” namely Lynndie England.5 The infamous Abu Ghraib photographs that feature Pfc. Lynndie England were taken over seven days in October, November, and December of 2003. Many of them were made by Private Jeremy Sivits, the first U.S. soldier to be court-­martialed and imprisoned for mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.6 The images were 198 — Chapter 7

Figure 7.2 Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 8, 2003.

initially made public when aired by the cbs news program Sixty Minutes II on April 28, 2004. After their televised release, they were reproduced in the Washington Post, and then in countless other news media, and circulated globally via the World Wide Web.7 Whereas the spectacle of Jessica Lynch epitomized national propaganda, the unofficial photographs of Lynndie England and other U.S. soldiers inflicting torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib dramatically disrupted the official images of patriotic display. In one of the photographs, England poses in front of a group of naked male Iraqi “detainees” (see figure 7.2). The men, with stiff green bags covering their heads, are lined up against the wall of a drab institutional hall in Abu Ghraib prison. They cover their genitals with their hands. One has been singled out from the row. He stands slightly forward, his body outlined by the harsh light and shadows produced by a flash. England, dressed in army fatigues, lurches toward this naked man, her leering mouth clenching a cigarette. With one hand she signals thumbs up, and with the other cocked like a gun she points at his genitals. Through the blur of a censoring edit one can just barely discern that the man has been forced to masturbate. An unofficial military image Afterimages — 199

leaked to the U.S. press, this photograph, and others like it, became the most public of images from the war in Iraq, circulating globally to an international audience on the Internet. The impact of the Abu Ghraib images was widespread, and led to international protests in which much of the focus centered on the images of England torturing and degrading inmates. In an article for Time magazine, Claudia Wallis declared: “Perhaps the single most shocking thing about the images from Abu Ghraib prison is the woman in so many of the pictures . . . It’s the all-­American face of Private First Class Lynndie England. The girl next door, a Jessica Lynch gone wrong.”8 The Abu Ghraib torture photographs are disturbing for any number of reasons, most obviously, of course, for the torture they depict. But American audiences seemed to be particularly shocked by “the woman” in the pictures. Why was Lynndie England’s presence—as a woman—so uniquely offensive to an American audience (to say nothing of an Arab audience)?9 In expressing her own dismay, Wallis did not consider England’s presence from the point of view of her victims; she did not propose that the shame and humiliation of sexual exposure used to torture Iraqi male prisoners was heightened, for the Iraqi men, by the presence of a female viewer. Instead, she noted “our” shock, and suggested that for viewers in the United States the horror of the images was heightened by the fact of the soldier’s gender. Similarly, Katha Pollitt imagined Americans asking: “What, Americans commit atrocities? Our boys? Our girls?”10 In the widespread denunciations of Lynndie England that followed the circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs, commentators clearly responded to and rejected the torture in which she participated, but in so doing they also expressed unresolved anxieties about the role of women in the military. If “our girls” were capable of torturing, was military service perverting their proper femininity? Those anxieties were heightened by the sexual nature of the torture depicted, and by the stories of England’s own sexual escapades. The Abu Ghraib images that feature England are sexually explicit, and some, such as the infamous leash photograph, draw on sadomasochist themes in their choreography of humiliation. Unreleased photographs purportedly show England engaged in sexual acts with her superior, Charles A. Graner Jr., and England became pregnant while serving in Iraq.11 All told, England’s behavior could be used to reinforce an often-­rehearsed objection to women in the military, namely that their presence can only lead to one thing—sex. 200 — Chapter 7

Double Negatives Separated by more than a year, the stories of Lynch and England were nevertheless paired after the revelation of the Abu Ghraib images. The cover of RedEye for May 25, 2004, the Chicago Tribune’s newspaper for young adults, effectively encapsulated the ways in which Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England were conjoined as inverted images of women at war in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The cover features headshots of Lynch and England torn from formal portraits that show the women dressed in army fatigues and uniforms, posed in front of the American flag. The roughly “cropped” headshots are placed side by side, just overlapping, a proximity that highlights the contrasting expressions on their faces. Lynch looks directly at the camera, and thus out at viewers, a smile brightening her face and exposing her perfect teeth. In contrast, England’s emotionless eyes stare out to the side of the frame, seeming to avoid eye contact, and the lack of expression on her face makes her seem sullen or simply blank. The caption to this doubled image reads: “good girl, bad girl: Lynch and England have become symbols of the Iraq war and the role women are playing in it.” Visual pairings of the two young, female soldiers abounded in the summer of 2004. On May 28, Reuters circulated images of Lynch and England with the caption: “The vividly contrasting images of American soldiers Jessica Lynch (Top R) and Lynndie England (Bottom L), one portrayed as a heroic victim and the other as depraved villain, symbolize the souring of U.S. opinion of the Iraq war, experts say.” In the top image, Lynch, strapped into a car seat, reaches out of the open door to shake the hand of a young admirer. She beams at the girl, as an older woman looks on, smiling, from the back seat. Although Lynch is distinguished in the group by her military uniform, the image presents a triangle of white female gazes in which blond women openly express their mutual admiration for one another. In the bottom image, England stands in what is presumably a hallway at Abu Ghraib prison. With her left hand she holds a leash attached to the neck of a naked man lying on his side on the concrete floor. The leash runs at a diagonal line directly parallel to Lynch’s seatbelt in the image above, further encouraging a comparison of the two paired images. As Lynch becomes the icon of the hometown hero, England becomes the icon of the international torturer. The striking similarity in the personal histories of the two women seemed only to reinforce the symmetry whereby one became the inverse Afterimages — 201

of the other, the dark flipside of the same coin. They are both from tiny towns in West Virginia, both from white, working-­class families, and both entered the service in the hopes of paying for their education. Indeed, if we read the RedEye cover from left to right, and the Reuters pairing from top to bottom, in both cases we have a visual narrative in which the smiling Lynch serves as a “before” to the “after” of the sullen England. The good girl is closely entwined to her bad girl inverse, and one can readily become the other.

The Legacy of Lynching Lynch and England are heirs to a long-­standing American tradition in which “good” white women have been called upon to represent the virtues of their race and nation, and “bad” white women have been condemned as vicious villains. In the days of the early republic (the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth), white women were posed as the moral foundation of the nation, the first educators and molders of patriotic sons who would go on to shape the institutions of the country.12 First positioned as largely spiritual influences, white women were reconceived as the physical bearers of a racialized white Americanness over the course of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, under the pressures of increased immigration and the growing popularity of eugenics, white (“native” born, Anglo-­Saxon) women’s sexual reproduction was construed as essential to the stability of the nation. The regeneration of national character would be the literal gift of their bloodlines.13 Within these powerful discourses, white womanhood was figured as the pure and innocent fount of the white race and nation. Popular eugenicists, armed with a scientific discourse of white supremacy, deplored the tendency of elite white women to seek schooling instead of motherhood during their reproductive prime. They encouraged middle- and upper-­ class white women to reproduce prolifically to ensure the dominance of the white race. Thus, while eugenics “elevated” white women to a place of extreme importance in the reproduction of the race, it also provided a discourse whereby white women’s lives and sexual activities could be scrutinized and critiqued.14 As pure white womanhood was evoked as a symbol of racial and national virtue, her inverted shadow, the sexually promiscuous white woman, had to be held in check, her disruptive powers repressed. As white women 202 — Chapter 7

were figured as the literal and symbolic reproducers of a racialized nation, their sexuality had to be rigorously monitored and controlled. Such discourses were especially salient in the rhetoric of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth surrounding lynching, a white supremacist form of torture that sought to consolidate white nationalism in the context of an internal struggle over racialized national belonging in the post-­ Reconstruction United States. In the history of lynching, white womanhood served as the symbolic banner under which the murder of men and women of color was condoned. In this white nationalist form of terrorism, the fury of a white mob was most often raised with the call to protect white women from the advances of African American men, depicted as rapists. Indeed, as the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells demonstrated in the 1890s, the rhetoric of rape and revenge was so widespread, and so effective in converting murder into a form of “justified” retribution in the eyes of legal authorities and a wider (white) public, that the cry of rape eventually could simply be assumed as the explanation for lynching.15 Several complicated cultural legacies converged to make the discourse of rape and retribution surrounding lynching so powerful. In the antebellum South, access to the bodies of women, both white and black, had long been a privilege exercised by the white men of the planter class, and that privilege served as a sign of a southern white patriarchy’s economic, legal, and social ascendancy. In the post-­Reconstruction South, as African American men gained social, economic, and legal power, despite disfranchisement and segregation, the threat they posed to a white patriarchal power structure was symbolically figured through their newly imagined access to the bodies of white women.16 In other words, white anxieties about a shifting social and economic terrain were translated into sexual fears and apprehensions concerning reproduction. The bodies of white women could symbolically serve as the ground on which white men staked what they claimed to be exclusive privileges. Thus, the idea of African American men raping white women, the imagination of that rape, could tap broad cultural anxieties in white communities.17 Raising the cry of interracial rape, the lynch mob deemed white women in need of white male protection, while simultaneously schooling white women in the unspoken but visibly manifest dangers they might incur in loving black men. The mob’s fury over interracial sex also resonated with eugenicists’ warnings about the dangers of miscegenation, which they Afterimages — 203

Figure 7.3 Cpl. Charles Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 7, 2003.

claimed always corrupted the superior (Anglo-­Saxon) racial “stock.” By proclaiming to protect white womanhood, the lynch mob could imagine itself defending a white patriarchy, the white race, and a white nation. As several commentators have noted, the Abu Ghraib images recall the photographs of lynching.18 They shock because they show the perpetrators of crimes, of torture and murder, posing with their victims, taking pleasure in their brutality, and assuming an audience of sympathetic viewers. As in lynching photographs, the unabashed presence of the torturers in the Abu Ghraib images suggests their blatant disregard for the law, and also their assumption of immunity from the law. In both cases, the fact of the photographs attests to the self-­righteousness of the torturers. In one of the widely reproduced Abu Ghraib images, seven naked men with stiff green bags covering their heads are stacked in an awkward pyramid (see figure 7.3). Behind them Specialist Sabrina Harman crouches down, positioning her beaming face at the apex of the human pile; she signals “thumbs up” at the camera. Behind her, Corporal Charles A. Graner stands with his arms crossed, signaling thumbs up with one of his green-­ gloved hands, his face broken into a broad grin. A “reverse shot” photo204 — Chapter 7

graph of the pyramid reveals how exposed the victims are, and makes Graner’s gloved hands seem particularly menacing. Behind this sadistic grouping, a heap of clothes, presumably those of the naked men, stretches along the right side of a wide hallway divided by the bars of a prison gate. Placed in personal digital archives beside novelty images of camel rides and tourist attractions, the images of torture functioned as souvenirs for the soldiers.19 A pile of naked men became something “fun” to pose behind. The images might have been intended as digital postcards for friends and family back home. Just as lynching photographs were taken and circulated for pleasure and the perpetuation of power, reinforcing a white supremacist community of like-­minded individuals, the very fact of the Abu Ghraib photographs suggests that the perpetrators felt justified in their actions, and that they assumed an audience of others who would share their views.20 Like the lynchers who came before them, the smiling soldiers at Abu Ghraib are not performing a “grim duty,” and they are not afraid of being caught in the act. They do not feel that their performance needs to be obscured by intense secrecy. The men and women posing and performing for the camera did not perceive that the images could be used as evidence against them. Either they did not understand their activities to be criminal, or they believed themselves to be above the law. The grins and cocky performances for the camera make clear that the photographs were “authorized,” at least in the minds of the perpetrators they depict. The soldiers who participated in the torture of Iraqi prisoners and other commentators have suggested that one of the aims of taking the photographs was to further humiliate the Iraqis, threatening them explicitly and implicitly with blackmail, through the potential for further exposure to a broader audience. According to a government consultant interviewed by Seymour Hersh, “It was thought that some prisoners would do anything— including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends.”21 Taking cues once again from the archive of American lynching photographs, one can infer that the images were meant to be circulated to Iraqi viewers as a threat, to spread terror and fear to an ever wider audience of Iraqi men. Here, then, the visual archive was conceptualized and used as a weapon. As Mark Danner has argued, “the ubiquitous digital camera with its inescapable flash” became the “ultimate third party,” “there to let the detainee know that the humiliation would not stop when the act itself did but would be preserved into the future in a way that the detainee would not Afterimages — 205

Figure 7.4 The hooded man, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 4, 2003.

be able to control.”22 In other words, the photographs were an important part of the torture process. In several of the images, a soldier with a digital camera, making and reviewing images, is caught in the snapshot made by another soldier. In these images, the role of photography in the act of torture is documented and made manifest. Just as photography became integral to the ritual of lynching, photography was central to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In the context of this visual cultural history, the famous image of the hooded man takes on new resonance (see figure 7.4). Draped in black, the figure becomes the dark inverse of a white-­cloaked Ku Klux Klan member. Rendered in bold black strokes against a field of white in Richard Serra’s Stop Bush print, it is transformed into an ominous apparition that appears to be reaching toward the viewer, threatening attack, as if a repressed image of racialized violence has returned to haunt the national scene.23 The Abu Ghraib photographs also resonate with other visual archives. Several commentators have noted how the low-­ resolution, amateurish images of naked bodies posed in sexually explicit positions recall the imagery of “gonzo porn,” a genre of pornography “marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-­tech aesthetic meant to sug206 — Chapter 7

Figure 7.5 Abu Ghraib Prison, November 2003.

gest reality.”24 Indeed, it would seem that many of the Abu Ghraib images of torture were conceived and orchestrated as spectacles of pornography (see figure 7.5).25 But these particular pornographic images are also informed by the racialized sexual logics of lynching torture, in which the emasculation of men of color was central to the ritual.26 Lynching often included both stripping and castrating the victim, brutally displaying white supremacists’ desire to control and contain the symbolic locus of African American manhood. Indeed, if lynching displayed the power of a white mob over the black body, that spectacle was focused fetishistically on genitalia as the site of power.27 As rape was the accusation that incited the white supremacist mob, castration was the retribution the mob sought. Much of the torture depicted in the Abu Ghraib images also focuses on male genitalia as the site of masculine power, and soldiers exert control over Iraqi men by forcing them to simulate sexual acts and to masturbate. As Lynndie England points at a penis and signals thumbs up in a number of the photoAfterimages — 207

graphs, she seems to revel in her power and control over the Iraqi male body, taking pleasure in her symbolic emasculation of Iraqi men.

Afterimages In the twinned stories of Lynch and England, we see a cultural anxiety surfacing, a return of the repressed, an afterimage of the legacy of lynching. For in the historical rhetoric surrounding lynching, white women could only be used to symbolize racial and national purity when they could be controlled, when their actions, and most importantly their sexuality, could be effectively harnessed to such narratives. Indeed, in the discourses surrounding lynching, actual white women were best kept hidden. They might be displayed as eroticized victims to be avenged, and they might witness and participate in lynchings, but white women functioned foremost as symbolic subjects on whose behalf terror was perpetuated. In the context of lynching, the signifier of “pure white womanhood,” always exceeded its signifieds, remaining ultimately out of reach of those who would shelter themselves under its shadow. Rehearsed discourses of “pure white womanhood” served to mask white patriarchal anxiety, for could white nationalists ever really be certain of their control over white women’s bodies? At the height of lynching in the United States, Ida B. Wells tapped that anxiety, declaring, “Nobody in this section believes the old thread-­bare lie that Negroes assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-­reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”28 For this statement, Wells’s newspaper offices were burned to the ground, a lynch mob was sent for her, and she was not able to return safely to the South for decades. Through the hysterical reaction to Wells’s commentary one can measure how closely intertwined have been the images of the pure white woman as victim and the sexually adventurous white woman as villain. Precisely as white, patriarchal, national honor is draped on the shoulders of “pure white womanhood,” the specter of the sexually uncontrollable white woman looms large. As white womanhood was posed as an icon of national virtue, women of color were erased as victims and victors on the national scene. Such erasure continues today, for as Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England functioned as spectacles of national fascination, female soldiers of color remained relatively absent from the national spotlight. Take the example of Shoshana 208 — Chapter 7

Figure 7.6 The rescue of Spc. Shoshana Johnson, of the 507th Maintenance Company, April 2003.

Johnson as a case in point. Spc. Shoshana Johnson was a member of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, and along with Jessica Lynch, she was ambushed and captured near Nasiriyah in Iraq on March 23, 2003. Johnson became the first female African American prisoner of war, and she was held captive for twenty-­one days, until Marines rescued her and several of her comrades (figure 7.6). But Johnson failed to receive the same kind of media fanfare that greeted her blond colleague Jessica Lynch. As one commentator noted, “Only Lynch got the headlines, the tv movie, the prime-­time television interviews and a biography written by a Pulitzer Prize-­winning writer.”29 The relative lack of media coverage of Johnson’s heroics may be due in part to what one might variously call her shyness, her tact, or her dignity, for as Nadra Kareem reports, there was at least a momentary media frenzy when Johnson and her colleagues returned to El Paso, Texas.30 Or, in the end, the relative inattention Johnson finally received may have been a matter of racism. As a thirty-­year-­old African American single mother, she did not neatly fit the whitewashed iconography of womanhood; she did not register honorifically within the racialized national archive bequeathed by lynching.31 Despite the fact that her image quickly faded from the national spotAfterimages — 209

light, Johnson did receive a hero’s welcome and reception in Ebony magazine, one of the premier African American popular publications, as well as within some prominent African American organizations such as the naacp. In the issue of Ebony published in August 2003, photographs show Johnson being escorted by Marines to a transport plane at the time of her rescue (an alternate view of the scene depicted in figure 7.6), as she is being honored by Congressman Elijah Cummings at a tribute by the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., as photographed with U.S. representative Diane Watson, and at a “Free At Last” celebration in Los Angeles. According to Ebony magazine, Representative Watson organized a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles for Johnson in part because she was disturbed to see some of the other former pows “getting accolades but not Shoshana.”32 Except for the photograph showing her rescue, all of the other images presented in Ebony situate Johnson as a hero at African American-­sponsored events and celebrations. In other words, Johnson received a “hero’s welcome” within the African American media, and within African American communities, even as she was largely effaced within a predominantly white national media. Johnson’s simultaneous visibility and invisibility in different media contexts highlights the extent to which a national visual archive remains segregated in the United States.33 Other women of color also remain invisible in the war imagery from Iraq. In the Abu Ghraib photographs the spectacular presence of white, female torturers and sexually victimized Iraqi men obscures the place of Iraqi women in the U.S. administration’s justifications for the war. Although Iraqi women were absent from the spectacle of torture, their presence nevertheless haunted the images. In rhetoric that was particularly pronounced during the early U.S. bombings of Afghanistan, and which echoed throughout the war in Iraq, President Bush proclaimed that the U.S. military was “liberating” Muslim women from the oppression they suffered at the hands of religiously conservative Muslim men.34 Reconfiguring the gendered and racialized lynching discourse whereby white men are said to protect white women from black men, the president’s war rhetoric proclaims that American soldiers will save Iraqi women from Iraqi men. This new gendered and racialized rhetoric is further complicated, however, by the fact that many American soldiers are women. The military-­media spectacle of Jessica Lynch as heroic victim carefully balanced the two competing representational strategies at play surrounding white women in the war. She was “liberated” as a soldier in the 210 — Chapter 7

Figure 7.7 Pfc. Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Prison, November 4, 2003.

armed forces, but nevertheless vulnerable as a woman among men. The spectacle of her rescue worked to recode the U.S. military as the masculine rescuer of women, both American and Iraqi.35 In this context, the shocking images of Lynndie England as American torturer disrupted racialized patriarchal ambitions both at home and abroad. The photographs of Eng­ land showed that “liberators” were also torturers, that “liberated” white American women were “free” to torture like men, and that the actions of white women could not be contained through a national rhetoric of their purity and vulnerability. In the photographs of England, the repressed flip side of the national icon of the pure white woman raised its ugly head and signaled “thumbs up” (see figure 7.7). The sexually adventurous Lynndie England, who has sex at will and takes pleasure in the humiliation and torture of dark men, demonstrates how easily a good white girl can “go bad,” exposing the instability of discourses of national virtue founded on the “purity” of white womanhood. England illustrates what has always been the (unacknowledged) case, that the image of white womanhood cannot be fully controlled or contained. That racialized gender representation has long functioned as a political construct that disciplines white American women in service to a narrative Afterimages — 211

and program of racialized national violence. But Jessica Lynch can become Lynndie England. Indeed, she almost did. If it were not for the “gentlemanly,” “patriotic” restraint of Larry Flynt, photographs of Lynch’s own sexual escapades in the military might have graced the pages of Hustler magazine.36 The pinnacle of white American pride, the pure white woman can easily transmute into the sexually promiscuous white woman, and like Lynndie England, she may have her own sadistic desires toward the dark male body. Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England revive afterimages of a long-­standing national visual archive. Even though they are American soldiers, actors in a national military drama, they nevertheless continue to function as symbols of a racialized and gendered national mythology. Lynch represents the gendered epitome of national virtue, the white woman in distress, while England represents the repressed flipside of that iconic virtue made manifest. Appearing at her initial court hearings eight-­months pregnant and in military fatigues, Lynndie England embodied, quite literally, a long legacy of national anxiety.37 If historically, according to the logics of lynching, controlling the white woman’s reproductive capacity was imperative if she was to be heralded as the foundation of a white race and nation, the image of England pregnant, like the Abu Ghraib photographs that featured her so prominently, suggested that the reproduction of the nation, both literally and figuratively, was out of control. The Abu Ghraib photographs radically disrupted a national visual archive, bringing into view images denied and long repressed. They revealed willful blindnesses both in the present and the past, forcing American viewers to see torture committed by U.S. soldiers overseas, and encouraging them to recognize a suppressed history of torture at home.38 As the Abu Ghraib images recalled lynching photographs, they also made visible a blind spot in the imagery of lynching—the figure of the uncontrollable white woman. Responses to the photographs demonstrated how powerfully history and culture inform what is seen and not seen, what is sensed but not seen, and what is actively obscured. Like shadowy nightmares, the Abu Ghraib photographs unleashed repressed cultural images, making them visible in new forms.

212 — Chapter 7

Untitled (Abu Ghraib) She lurches forward, her hand cocked like a gun, pointing at the man who stands naked before her. She sneers at the camera, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She looks down at the man who lies at her feet, holding the end of a leash that loops around his neck. Captured in these lurid poses, she will bear the burden and become the symbol for all that has gone wrong with America’s war on terror.

Artwork by Shawn Michelle Smith

Epilogue 

A Parting Glance

A book that began with a single pewter plate has ended with digital images circulating on the World Wide Web. Durable material has transformed into pixels, and day-­long exposures have collapsed into the flashes of a fraction of a second. Niépce labored for years to make his first exposure, which lasted for hours, and produced a single, shadowy image. Today a proliferation of images overwhelms the senses. There is too much to see—we are increasingly aware of all that is visible that we don’t have the time or energy or interest to look at. In the 180-­odd years since its invention, photography has come to produce its own vast realm of the unseen. Despite radical transformations, photography remains a technology of revelation and obfuscation. It makes the invisible visible, showing us what we can’t otherwise see, and at the same time demonstrating how much we don’t ordinarily see. It also suggests further frontiers that never will be seen. In making so much visible, photography further obscures what is not visible, encouraging viewers to focus on what is in the frame, to the exclusion of what is not. Occasionally, however, the weight of what has been obscured, or culturally repressed, pierces the visible world, ushering forth the invisible into sight. Looking back, I am struck by the haunting presence of all that is not seen in this book about photography: Roland Barthes’s mother; the photographer; the foreground from the train; the body in motion; the nation; desire; loss; and hope for the future. Photographs grasp at these things, conjuring them through allusion and illusion,

but they remain present only in their absence, palpable yet invisible. The absent subjects that have animated these chapters reside at the edge of sight—in the vast realm of the unseen that photography compels us to acknowledge but refuses to reveal.

216 — Epilogue

Notes

Introduction 1. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1997), 125. 2. Information about the first photograph can be found on the Harry Ransom Center website. Accessed August 5, 2010. http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/per manent/wfp/. 3. According to Batchen, Gernsheim retouched the copy photograph with watercolor so that it finally resembled his own drawing based on the image. “The much touted first photograph turns out to be a representation of a representation.” “It seems that wherever we look for photography’s bottom line, we face this strange economy of deferral, an origin always preceded by another, more original, but never-­quite-­present photographic instance.” Batchen, Burning with Desire, 127. 4. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 123–25. 5. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” One-­Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979): 240–57, 240. 6. Niépce’s plate is my own “failed photographic window,” like James Elkins’s “trinity” of “selenite, ice, salt” (34), which he uses as “three models of photography . . . that evoke photography’s inadequacy at clearly representing the world” (212). He offers these three “failed looks into or through something” (34) in order to reject the presumption of photographic transparency and to refocus thoughts on the opaque materiality of the photograph itself. These are his images of “imperfect visibility” (28) and “stunted seeing” (20); they are reminders that “something cannot be seen” (34). James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York: Routledge, 2011). 7. Calotypes are paper negatives, sometimes soaked in wax to make them transparent, which are then printed on paper. 8. Talbot himself suggests that “the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina”

in his discussion of plate 3 in The Pencil of Nature. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844). 9. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 25. As Geoffrey Batchen has argued, “Talbot had no one subject in mind as the principal pictorial aspiration of photography.” Instead, he was “anxious to promote the infinite variety of possible uses to which photography could be put.” Batchen, Burning with Desire, 149. For an extensive and beautiful survey of Talbot’s photography see Geoffrey Batchen, William Henry Fox Talbot (London: Phaidon, 2008). 10. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 40. According to Jennifer Tucker, “This, for many, was the pleasure of photography and the source of its documentary power: things that the observer did not see at the time might be discovered later in a photograph. However, the presence of incidentals also revealed that the instrument was only partially under the operator’s control.” Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 19. As Christopher Pinney has argued, “However hard the photographer tries to exclude, the camera lens always includes.” “No matter how precautionary and punctilious the photographer is in arranging everything that is placed before the camera, the lens’s inability to discriminate will ensure a substrate or margin of excess.” Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), 4. See also Pinney, “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half . . . ,’ ” in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 1–14, 6–7. In his discussion of the accidental details recorded in photographs, Robin Kelsey argues that Talbot’s interest in the clock face is an effort both to highlight chance in photographic representation and “to salvage signification from the noise of the arbitrary” by emphasizing “decipherable” marks (“notations or measurements”). Kelsey, “Photography, Chance, and The Pencil of Nature,” The Meaning of Photography, eds. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 15–33, 24. For Elizabeth Abel, the disruptive potential of the photograph is precisely its ability to exceed and subvert other sign systems, especially language. As she argues, “The camera resists the power of the word to delineate the contours of the world.” Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 78. According to Jennifer Green-­Lewis, Talbot was particularly fond of “details of age and decay,” which drew “attention to the visibility of time itself ” in photographs. Green-­Lewis, “ ‘Already the Past’: The Backward Glance of Victorian Photography,” English Language Notes 44, no. 2 (fall/winter 2006): 25–43, 31. Batchen goes even further: “Talbot concluded that the primary subject of every photograph was . . . time itself.” Batchen, Burning with Desire, 93. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 218 — Notes

Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51, 236. 12. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 236. 13. A beautifully illustrated catalog produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with an exhibition examines nineteenth-­century scientific photography of the invisible. See especially Corey Keller’s essay “Sight Unseen: Picturing the Invisible,” in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840– 1900, ed. Corey Keller (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 19–35. As Keller argues, “Paired with the microscope and the telescope, photography contributed to a compelling body of visual evidence of worlds that existed beneath the threshold of human perception” (28). In his discussion of Talbot’s nineteenth-­century “natural magic,” Douglas Nickel quotes Sir David Brewster, Talbot’s friend and colleague, who enthused about photography’s revelatory powers: “The photographer presents to Nature an artificial eye, more powerful than his own. . . . He thus gives permanency to details which the eye itself is too dull to appreciate.” Sir David Brewster, quoted in Douglas R. Nickel, “Talbot’s Natural Magic,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (summer 2002): 132–40, 136. 14. Benjamin uses this exact term in “A Small History of Photography.” Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” 243. 15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 236. Christopher Pinney has argued: “Just as one might apply a microscope to images and reveal what the human eye itself could not see, so there was also a palpable sense that photographic scrutiny might be able to reach other domains as yet unexplored, creating what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconscious.’ ” Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India, 22. My discussion of spirit photography below pursues a similar line of inquiry, examining photographs that purported to show just such “other domains as yet unexplored.” 16. As James Elkins has said, “Blindness also happens alongside seeing—that is, it happens while we are seeing” (205), and such blindness is both physiological and psychological (219). Further, as neurobiology has revealed, “a large part of vision is not available to the conscious mind” (222). James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 17. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 179. 18. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 179–80. 19. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16. 20. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” 243, emphasis added. As James Elkins has argued, “In a literal reading, confined to just the one sentence, ‘optical unconscious’ isn’t about psychoanalysis. It’s a parallel: just as the ‘instincNotes — 219

tual unconscious’ was revealed by psychoanalysis, so this ‘optical unconscious’ of tiny and ephemeral forms was revealed by the camera.” James Elkins, What Photography Is, 217. 21. As Kaja Silverman has said of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, “The model of the psyche to which that work is committed is at every point a visual model.” Silverman, World Spectators (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 84. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 22. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), intro. Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 46. 23. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 46–59. 24. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 53. Kracauer’s expansion upon Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” is very much in accord with Benjamin’s larger critical project, which was to defamiliarize and denaturalize seeing and thinking. James Elkins has argued that “photography also always shows us things we would have preferred not to see, or don’t want to see, don’t know how to see, or don’t know how to acknowledge seeing.” What Photography Is, 98. See also p. 174. Elizabeth Abel has recently returned to the camera’s capacity to see beyond those things that “habit and prejudice prevent us from noticing” in her study of the visual culture of segregation in the United States. According to Abel, “Because the eye of the camera cannot overlook what the mind’s eye chooses not to see, it opens up a more democratic signifying field in which the repressed can have its say (or see).” Signs of the Times, 79. 25. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 53–57. 26. Miriam Bratu Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, vii–xlv, xxv. It is Kracauer’s “photographic approach” to film in Theory of Film (1960) that, according to Hansen, links it to the historical materialism of his earlier Weimar work, including his essay on photography, published in 1927, in which photography emerges as thoroughly imbricated in the historical processes it records and exposes. Hansen, xxiv–xxv, xii–xiii. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed., intro. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–63. 27. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 57–59. 28. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1990). Douglas Nickel identifies a relocation of visual truth to the subjectivity of the viewer in photographic discourse in Peter Henry Emerson’s treatise Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889). Douglas R. Nickel, “Photography and Invisibility,” in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. Dorothy Kosinski (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999), 34–41, 37. 29. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 124, 133, 135–36. 220 — Notes

30. Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), ix. Nicholas Mirzoeff has recently defined “visuality” as a distinctly imperial terrain in which the right to look is circumscribed by colonial power relations. He nevertheless proposes that “countervisualities” can and do challenge such restrictive looking relations. Mirzoeff is right to politicize the terrain of visuality, but visuality “as a social fact” already suggests a site of conflict, of both colonial gazes and tactics of resistance, of the look and the look back. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 31. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 336–56. 32. Louis Kaplan and Jennifer Tucker make similar points in their respective studies: Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 9; and Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 67–68. 33. Clément Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 45–55. 34. R. Laurence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly 24, no. 4 (October 1972): 474–500, 481. 35. R. Laurence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science,” 482. 36. Such corporeal boundary crossing, with its potential for gender and racial mixing, made some observers extremely nervous. See Daphne Brooks’s discussion of Hiram Mattison’s Spirit Rapping Unveiled (1853). Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16–22. 37. Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 101. See also Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71, 51. 38. For further information about Mumler, see Louis Kaplan’s edited collection of primary source documents, and his historical and theoretical discussion of those documents in The Strange Case of William Mumler. 39. McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 110. On “extras,” see also Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations,” 51. 40. Crista Cloutier, “Mumler’s Ghosts,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, and Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, Sophie Schmit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 21. Notes — 221

41. Cloutier, “Mumler’s Ghosts,” 22–23. 42. Cloutier, “Mumler’s Ghosts,” 22. 43. Cloutier, “Mumler’s Ghosts,” 22–23. 44. McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 110. 45. Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics,” 51. 46. Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics,” 51–52. 47. Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations,” 66. Jennifer Tucker also describes how spirit photographs were used in “social networks of consolation” (87). Tucker provides an extended analysis of spirit photography in England in chapter two of Nature Exposed, “Testing the Unity of Science and Fraternity,” 65–125. 48. As Geoffrey Batchen has argued, spirit photographs ultimately were not about the dead, but about the living, representing the labor and time of mourning. Like other memorial photographs in the nineteenth century, spirit photographs functioned as time machines through which the living could transport the dead symbolically into their own time and space. Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Louis Kaplan similarly suggests that spirit photographs functioned as transitional objects in the work of mourning. Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, 231–32. 49. Wallace, quoted in Glendinning, quoted in Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations,” 66. Andrew Glendinning, ed., The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography (London: Whitaker, 1894), 126. 50. McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 112. 51. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 14–26, 22. 52. Many scholars have made these points. Several salient examples include Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1998): 44–64; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and, of course, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 222 — Notes

53. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), especially chapter 3, “The Light of the World,” 82–144. 54. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 23. 55. I have made detailed arguments along these lines in American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) and in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1: Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 9. Subsequent citations in parentheses in the text. 2. I am thinking especially of the following works: Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political Personal and Photographic Autobiography (Seattle: Real Comet, 1988); Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2002); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Marianne Hirsch, ed., The Familial Gaze (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 43–53; Jane Gallop, Living with His Camera, photographs by Dick Blau (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Deborah Willis, Family, History, Memory (Irvington, NY: Hylas, 2005); Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler, Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000). 3. I agree with Fred Moten that “blackness and maternity play huge roles in the analytic of photography Roland Barthes lays down in Camera Lucida,” but I take a different critical path through Barthes’s text. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 202. 4. Margaret Olin first made this observation in her wonderful essay, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (fall 2002): 99–118, 104–7. 5. David C. Hart provides this biographical information in his master’s thesis, “Differing Views: Roland Barthes, Race and James VanDerZee’s Family Portrait,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1996, 1, 11. For further information about VanDerZee, see also Deborah Willis-­Braithwaite, VanDerZee, Photographer: 1886–1983 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993). 6. I agree, then, with Richard Powell’s assessment of the limitations of Barthes’s analysis of the VanDerZee photograph. Richard J. Powell, “Linguists, Poets, and ‘Others’ on African American Art,” American Art (spring 2003): 16–19, 17. Notes — 223

7. As Ruby Tapia suggests, for Barthes, “the punctum is thus that thing which transports him back to himself.” Tapia, American Pietás: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 36. 8. As Fred Moten has argued, in Camera Lucida “historical particularity . . . becomes egocentric particularity.” Fred Moten, In the Break, 208. 9. Jane Gallop, Living with His Camera, 19. 10. Maren Stange reminded me of the political nature of Barthes’s resistance to objectification in a lecture she gave in the 2003/2004 American Visual Culture Speaker Series, at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Stange, “Documenting the Private,” April 1, 2004. 11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 112. 12. I also agree with Diana Knight that the Winter Garden photograph may actually be the image reproduced later in Camera Lucida as The Stock, for in this image of the mother as child, “her pose, her expression, and the position of her hands exactly match Barthes’s description of the Winter Garden photograph.” Knight, “Roland Barthes, or the Woman without a Shadow,” in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-­Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 132–43, 138. 13. As Jane Gallop states, “The mother in that book [Camera Lucida] is defined precisely as never doing what the author does—observe and comment.” “He observes; she does not; she is observed.” Jane Gallop, Living with His Camera, 26. 14. As Diana Knight has argued, “The idea that Barthes himself has reproduced neither the family line nor the human species is omnipresent in the second half of the book,” and “this is obviously linked to the death of his mother and a new awareness of his own mortality.” Diana Knight, “Roland Barthes, or the Woman without a Shadow,” 133. 15. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 4, 3. 16. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 3, 4. 17. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 4. 18. Victor Burgin, “Re-­reading Camera Lucida,” The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 84–85. 19. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 21. 20. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 5. 21. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 32. 22. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes, 33. In Miller’s reading, Barthes is defined by his demand for his mother. In her own work with Barthes’s writing, Carol Mavor takes an interesting theoretical turn, choosing for herself the position of the mother whose “desire is to be demanded.” Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, 224 — Notes

NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 124. Jane Gallop also writes about Barthes’s Camera Lucida from the position of the mother, but while Mavor chooses the writing mother, Gallop chooses the photographed mother. See especially Jane Gallop’s chapter, “Observations of a Photographed Mother,” in Living with His Camera, 19–54. 23. See also David C. Hart’s reading of this image in “Differing Views,” 31–36, 45. 24. According to David C. Hart, none of the Osterhout sisters ever married. “Differing Views,” 15. 25. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs,” 112. 26. Barthes reproduces a photograph of his aunt in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, giving it the caption: “The father’s sister: she was alone all her life” (14). Carol Mavor also proposes that “Barthes identifies himself with both Aunt Alice and the Auntie of the Van Der Zee photograph,” and further notes that “Barthes was at times mockingly referred to by the students of the Collége de France as being a tante (not only ‘aunt’ but slang for ‘queer’).” Carol Mavor, “Black and Blue: The Shadows of Camera Lucida,” in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2009), 211–41, 227. 27. Diana Knight has similarly argued: “Of all Barthes’s delvings into the past generations of both sides of his family, I am struck by the sympathetic identification with his aunt. If Barthes perceives his lineage as ‘a disturbing entity’ of which he represents the end point (cl, 98), his aunt, too, has contributed to the collapse of the paternal line.” Diana Knight, “Roland Barthes, or the Woman without a Shadow,” 140. 28. This connection will be pursued further in the following chapter. See Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies; Or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism 46, no. 1 (winter 2004): 71–102, and Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 15–38. 29. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1892); Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907); Francis Galton, The Life History Album (London: Macmillan, 1884). 30. John Tagg also discusses “Barthes’s final ecstatic embrace of the evidential power of the photograph” (299). John Tagg, “The Pencil of History,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 285–303, especially 298–99. 31. Taking a different path through Barthes’s work, Victor Burgin similarly concludes that Camera Lucida’s “significance for theory is the emphasis thus placed on the active participation of the viewer in producing the meaning/affect of the photograph.” Victor Burgin, “Re-­reading Camera Lucida,” 88. 32. David Deitcher, “Looking for a Photograph, Looking for a History,” in The PasNotes — 225

sionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (London: Routledge, 1998), 22–36, 33. See also David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), especially 13–25. 33. The photograph is reproduced in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes on page 39. It is the final image in a short series of photographs of Barthes at his desk, on pages 37–39. John Tagg confirms that the photograph was taken as Barthes was actually writing the book in which the image appears, at art dealer Daniel Cordier’s house in Juan-­les-­Pins, in the summer of 1974. Correspondence with John Tagg, August 26, 2005.

Chapter 2: The Politics of Pictorialism 1. Kristin Schwain, “F. Holland Day’s Seven Last Words and the Religious Roots of American Modernism,” American Art 19, no. 1 (spring 2005): 32–59, 33, chapter three, “Art for Religion’s Sake: F. Holland Day and The Seven Last Words of Christ,” in Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 71–103; Verna Posever Curtis, “F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography,” History of Photography 18 (winter 1994): 299–321, 310–11; Pam Roberts, “Fred Holland Day (1864–1933),” in Pam Roberts et al. F. Holland Day (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2000), 11–28, 18; and Patricia J. Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 101–9. 2. Patricia J. Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens, 105–6. See also Estelle Jussim, Slave to Beauty: The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day, Photographer, Publisher, Aesthete (Boston: David R. Godine, 1981), 121–22. As Patricia Fanning and others have argued, Day’s “preparation was extensive, dating back to his Oberammergau visit in 1890,” where he attended the Passion Play. Through an Uncommon Lens, 105. Libby Bischof shared with me Day’s copy of the program for the Oberammergau Passion Play staged in 1890, which is held in the library at his home in Little Good Harbor, Maine. 3. Schwain, “F. Holland Day’s Seven Last Words and the Religious Roots of American Modernism,” 47. See also Jussim, Slave to Beauty, 130. 4. Schwain, “F. Holland Day’s Seven Last Words and the Religious Roots of American Modernism,” 49. 5. J. J. Vezey, a British commentator, expressing “a very strong feeling of personal regret” with regard to Day’s “sacred subjects,” argued that “photography is so realistic an art . . . it is very difficult to disconnect it from the individual who poses as the model.” J. J. Vezey, on F. Holland Day’s “Opening Address: A New School of American Photography” (originally published in Photographic Journal 25, no. 2 [October 31, 1900]: 77–80), in F. Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography, eds. Verna Posever Curtis and Jane Van Nimmen (Oxford: ABC-­Clio Press, 1995), 88. 226 — Notes

A more vituperative critic writing in the British Journal of Photography declared Day’s sacred photographs a “most flagrant offence against good taste,” “the crowning objection to which lies in the fact that he himself poses before the camera . . . as the divine founder of Christianity!” See “Plastic Psychological Syntheses at Russell Square” (originally published in British Journal of Photography 47, no. 2112 [October 26, 1900]: 677–78), in F. Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Curtis and Van Nimmen, 90–91. While discussion and debate erupted over Day’s sacred subjects in Great Britain, in France the images were greeted with approval. According to Robert Demachy, Day’s sacred photographs were “received [in Paris] with universal respect and admiration.” Robert Demachy, “Exhibition of the New American School of Artistic Photography at the Paris Photo-­Club,” first published in Amateur Photographer 33, no. 861 (April 5, 1901): 275–77, abridged version published in F. Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Curtis and Van Nimmen, 99–101, 100. 6. F. Holland Day, “Is Photography an Art?” excerpt from undated typescript manuscript, circa 1900, in F. Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Curtis and Van Nimmen, 79–80, 80. 7. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), 40. 8. Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 91. 9. Henry Peach Robinson, Picture-­Making by Photography (1884), quoted in Marien, Photography and Its Critics, 103. 10. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), quoted in Marien, Photography and Its Critics, 102–3. 11. Barbara L. Michaels, “Portraits of Friendship: Fred Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier and Their Circle,” in New Perspectives on F. Holland Day, ed. Patricia J. Fanning (Easton, MA: Stonehill College and the Norwood Historical Society, 1998), 25–38; Penelope Niven, “Camping in the Latin Quarter: Fred Holland Day as Edward Steichen’s First Teacher,” in New Perspectives on F. Holland Day, ed. Patricia J. Fanning (Easton, MA: Stonehill College and The Norwood Historical Society, 1998), 39–49. 12. More sympathetic and serious accounts of pictorialism include Phillip Prodger, Patrick Daum, and Francis Ribemont, Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888–1918 (London: Merrell, 2006), and Christian A. Peterson, After the Photo-­Secession: American Pictorial Photography 1910–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 13. Abigail Solomon-­Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 7–12. Margaret Walters similarly argues: “The male nude fades out in the nineteenth century. The male body is determinedly and nervously covered up; and as the male goes out of focus, the female nude becomes the central symbol of art. For the first time, nude is automatically taken to mean Notes — 227

a woman.” Walters, The Nude Male: A New Perspective (New York: Paddington, 1978), 228. The work of Thomas Eakins provides an important exception. 14. According to Margaret Walters, by the late nineteenth century, “Baron de Gloeden, who took photos of Sicilian peasant boys in vaguely classical poses—had an established homosexual clientele all over Europe” (The Nude Male, 289). Thomas Waugh states: “Of the dozen or so known pioneers of homoerotic imagery within the pictorialist current, by far the most famous is Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931)” (72). According to Waugh, von Gloeden sold his photographs to artists and others through catalogs (82), and also entered the postcard trade in 1905 (85). Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 15. In his study of the male nude in photography, Emmanuel Cooper takes a similarly wide-­ranging cultural approach, looking at artistic, scientific, medical, and colonial photography, as well as personal photographs. Cooper, Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 16. Curtis, “Actors and Adolescents—The Idealised Eye of F. H. Day,” 50–51. I am grateful to Libby Bischof for a lovely day trip to the F. Holland Day house, in Little Good Harbor, Maine. Edwin Becker is particularly helpful in decoding Day’s symbolism. Edwin Becker, “F. Holland Day and Symbolism,” in Pam Roberts, et. al., F. Holland Day (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2000), 53–64. 17. Roberts, “Fred Holland Day (1864–1933),” 22. 18. Verna Posever Curtis, “F. Holland Day and the Staging of Orpheus,” in New Perspectives on F. Holland Day, ed. Patricia J. Fanning (Easton, MA: Stonehill College and The Norwood Historical Society, 1998), 51–60, 51. 19. Day and Horace Copeland owned a publishing house, Copeland and Day, from 1893 to 1899. According to Emmanuel Cooper, after their business partnership ended, “Copeland wrote explicit letters to Day about his love affairs with young men,” and “there are also strong implications in his letters that he and Day shared the same interest in young men.” Cooper also suggests that Copeland became sexually involved with one of Day’s Italian immigrant models. Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82. 20. Patricia Berman is an important exception. See Berman, “F. Holland Day and His ‘Classical’ Models,” History of Photography 18, no. 4 (winter 1994): 348–67. 21. I agree with Verna Posever Curtis that Day’s photographs should not be read as “proof ” of his sexual relationship with Nicola Giancola or any other man. However, I cannot follow in her general disregard for the “erotic gaze or posture” in Day’s photographs, which she acknowledges one might “legitimate[ly]” find in the images. Verna Posever Curtis, “F. Holland Day and the Staging of Orpheus,” 51, 56.

228 — Notes

22. According to Ellenzweig, “It was through photography that Day’s personal flamboyance and repressed, or hidden, homosexuality was to find its most subtle, yet candid, expression.” Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 47. Thomas Waugh also assumes Day’s homosexuality in Hard to Imagine, as does Emmanuel Cooper in his books The Sexual Perspective and Fully Exposed. 23. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 80. 24. According to Waugh, Day’s “technical preoccupation with finely worked print surfaces and rich textures, developed chemically in the darkroom, now seem as obsessive as his fondness for the symptomatic Victorian indulgence, the soft focus, a device that his sun-­blessed Mediterranean contemporaries [such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and his nephew Wilhelm von Plüschow] mercifully eschewed” (Hard to Imagine, 77–78). According to Emmanuel Cooper, “The soft mists, the languid looks and suggestive poses could not compete with a more hard-­edged mood of modernism or a more knowing audience” that emerged around World War I (Fully Exposed, 163). 25. Giancola is not the androgynous “pictorialist ephebe icon” identified by Thomas Waugh as central to the homoerotic iconography of Victorian Classicism (Hard to Imagine, 91). 26. Maria Wyke, “Shared Sexualities: Roman Soldiers, Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, and British Homosexuality,” in Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture, eds. Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamud, and Donald T. McGuire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 229–48, 234–36. 27. Richard A. Kaye, “Losing His Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 91. Waugh also suggests that Saint Sebastian became a homosexual icon (Hard to Imagine, 96). Notably, Wyke, Kaye, and Waugh all note F. Holland Day’s St. Sebastian photographs in their discussions of the saint as a homosexual icon. 28. Day’s scrapbooks of life at Little Good Harbor also suggest an intimacy with men. A photograph of a man sleeping in bed is followed by a beautiful image of a man in the bath, standing with one leg hoisted up and draped with a towel, an erotic pose borrowed from Victorian pornography that accentuates the curve of the buttocks. The man is backlit by a large sunny window, and we see him through a screen door, his head and chest slightly obscured by the upper portion of the door, legs and buttocks standing out in sharper focus beneath the crossbar of the doorframe. These images are reproduced in James Crump, F. Holland Day: Suffering the Ideal (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1995), 128–31. 29. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 92; Patricia Berman, “F. Holland Day and His ‘Classical’ Models,” 348; Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25–26; David Deitcher, citing Peter

Notes — 229

Gay, in Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 60. 30. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10 (1 c.e.), translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden et al., in Geoffrey Miles, Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1999), 62; Verna Posever Curtis, “F. Holland Day and the Staging of Orpheus,” 58; Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph, 59. Heather Love reads Orpheus as “an apt emblem of the practice of queer history.” “Such is the relation of the queer historian to the past: we cannot help wanting to save figures from the past, but this mission is doomed to fail.” For Love, the attraction Eurydice holds for queer subjects “is an effect . . . of a historical experience of love as bound up with loss.” Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 50–51. 31. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11, in Miles, Classical Mythology in English Literature. 32. Saint Sebastian also came to a horrible end. After miraculously surviving his torture by arrows, he was later beaten to death in the Hippodrome. See Richard A. Kaye, “Losing His Religion,” 89. 33. Some art historians have read the Christ images as symbolic of the persecuted artist. 34. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), in Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998). 35. According to Kobena Mercer, such a transposition might disrupt Eurocentric ways of seeing, throwing the spectator into “uncertainty and unfixity.” Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 171–219, 199. 36. Cherise Smith provides an extended analysis of this image and its reception. She notes that “like many of Day’s images, the composition of Ebony and Ivory, as well as the pose of the sitter, are borrowed from an earlier art historical model, in this case French painter Hippolyte Flandrin’s Figure d’Etude” (35). She also compares the image “to another of Day’s photographs, Evening, from 1896 in which a European American model is posed in a similar fashion” (35). According to Smith, “The image was widely celebrated for its form and technique in the year it was produced, for it was published in the American Pictorialist publication Camera Notes, shown in London in the Fifth Photographic Salon exhibition of the Linked Ring group, and published again in the Linked Ring’s periodical” (36). Cherise Smith, “White on Black: Power Relations in F. Holland Day’s Ebony and Ivory,” Exposure 42, no. 1 (spring 2009): 33–42. Patricia Fanning has identified the model 230 — Notes

for Ebony and Ivory as J. R. Carter, a professional model and native of Danville, Virginia (Through an Uncommon Lens, 82–83). 37. Robert J. C. Young, “Egypt in America,” in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 126–33; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 59–60. According to Allen Ellenzweig, Day was also interested in and influenced by Egyptology, as were the bohemian “Boston-­based poets and artists who called themselves Visionists” (The Homoerotic Photograph, 47). 38. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, 127. 39. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, 126–33. 40. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 59–60; Scott Trafton, “ ‘A Veritable He-­Nigger after All’: Egypt, Ethnology, and the Crises of History,” Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-­Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 41–84. 41. According to Scott Trafton, “The scientific and social interest in ancient Egypt for Americans in the nineteenth century was directly related to the tensions, concerns, and anxieties over the institutionalized uses of Africans and their descendants as the foundation of an entire economic and social system in the United States. Within the history of American opinions concerning ancient Egypt is contained the history of American opinions concerning race and racial identity and vice versa. Throughout the nineteenth century, arguments about race—and in particular racial origin—were made on the basis of arguments about ancient Egypt. And, equally importantly, claims about ancient Egypt were made in the service of claims about the nature of race” (Egypt Land, 50). 42. According to Ethiopian legend, the Queen of Sheba traveled to Jerusalem sometime between 950 and 930 b.c.e, and with King Solomon had a son, whom she raised in Ethiopia. This son, Menelik, returned to Jerusalem and stole the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments, bringing them back to Ethiopia. According to Ethiopian tradition, Menelik was the first of a long line of Solomonic kings, extending to 1975, and ending with the murder of emperor Haile Selassie. Robert O. Collins and James McDonald Burns, A History of Sub-­Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 69–70; Saheed A. Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 11–12; Harold Courlander, ed., A Treasury of African Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Myths, Legends, Epics, Tales, Recollections, Wisdom, Sayings, and Humor of Africa (New York: Marlowe, 2002), 523–24. 43. As Barbara Michaels suggests: “In reviving the Menelik of old, Day alluded to recent events. In 1896, under its new leader, Menelik II, Ethiopia had won independence from Italy. . . . Menelik is no mere costumed pictorial photograph, but a picture with political reverberations.” Barbara L. Michaels, “New Light on F. Holland Day’s Photographs of African Americans,” History of Photography 18 (winter 1994): 334–47, 336. Notes — 231

According to Curtis, “the Abyssinian Emperor Menelek II defeated the Italians at Adowa in northern Ethiopia,” “the first defeat of a colonial power by Africans,” in 1896. Curtis, “Actors and Adolescents,” 46. 44. Day’s effort to represent a figure celebrated for his defeat of European colonialism contrasts strikingly with other pictorial photographers’ depiction of colonial subjects. Nearly three decades earlier, in 1868, the British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron made a series of photographs about the Abyssinian War of 1867– 68, a conflict that resulted in the death of the Abyssinian king Theowodrus II (“King Theodore”), the British occupation of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and the expatriation to England of the orphaned child-­prince Alamayou. Cameron made thirteen photographs, including portraits and tableaux vivants, of three Abyssinian subjects: Prince Alamayou, the British officer Captain Speedy (a translator who favored native attire), and Prince Alamayou’s Abyssian attendant, Casa. The photographs are by definition portraits of the conquered. According to Jeff Rosen, “Alamayou, the young Prince, might have been accepted by Queen Victoria, but only as a powerless, foreign-­born potentate who was dependent upon her largesse; his future lay in an English boarding school, there to be ‘civilized’ as he had been torn from his language of origins, his land and his history.” Cameron’s portrait of Prince Alamayou with Captain Speedy, both in Abyssinian attire, appears a kind of reinscribed family portrait, in which Speedy, representing the British armed forces, supplants Alamayou’s defeated father in the paternal role. In a more theatrically staged tableau, Cameron poses Captain Speedy and Casa to enact a popular vision of the conquest of King Theodore. The British soldier dressed in native attire looms over the supine and submissive African man, holding a spear to his throat. Ultimately, Cameron’s photographs represent British colonialism and conquest, presenting a portrait of African defeat. In contrast, Day’s Menelek photographs represent an African conqueror of European colonists. The comparison is even more striking in that Cameron and Day represent the triumph and subsequent defeat of European colonialism on the same territory (again—­ Abyssinia is the former name for Ethiopia). See Jeff Rosen, “Cameron’s Photographic Double Takes,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, eds. Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 158–86, 175. According to Rosen, Cameron “used her photography overtly to affirm both the justness and the justice of British imperialism. At the same time, however, she also articulated the internal inconsistencies, multiple anxieties, and double articulations inherent in the expression of colonialist discourses of power” (“Cameron’s Photographic Double Takes,” 158). 45. The exotic costuming of Day’s African series evokes the theatricality of his own elaborately staged Christ images (made one year later), modeled after the Passion Plays, as well as a slightly later tradition of political pageantry popular in the Progressive Era. As Susan Gillman has explained, the pageant was a form that blended popular history with political activism, and such serious intellectuals 232 — Notes

as W. E. B. Du Bois celebrated it. “ ‘The Pageant is the thing,’ ” Du Bois declared, “ ‘This is the gown and paraphernalia in which the message of education and reasonable race pride can deck itself.’ ” Du Bois’s own pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, first performed in New York in 1913, and subsequently in Washington, D.C. (1915), Philadelphia (1916), and Los Angeles (1925), presented a global, diasporic history of “the Negro,” from ancient Africa to the contemporary United States. Divided into six episodes, each covering a span of two hundred to two thousand years, the spectacular pageant included hundreds of performers and drew audiences of thousands. Resonant with a host of other forms of Egyptomania, The Star of Ethiopia culminated in a messianic triumph in which “ ‘Ethiopia, Mother of Men’ ” was revealed as “civilization’s originator and defender.” For Du Bois, as for Day, Ethiopia offered the gift of civilization to the Western world. See Susan Gillman, “Pageantry, Maternity, and World History,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 378–415, especially 381; Susan Gillman, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Occult History,” in Blood Talk, 148–99; and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Christmas Crisis, December 19, 1915, quoted in Susan Gillman, “Pageantry, Maternity, and World History,” 389. 46. Patricia Fanning has identified the model in this and several of Day’s other “African” images as J. Alexandre Skeete. “Born in British Guiana in 1874, Skeete came to Boston in 1888 and attended the Cowles Art School.” He eventually became a staff artist for the Colored American Magazine. Patricia Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens, 82. The studio in which Day photographed Carter and Skeete and others was located at 9 Pinckney Street, in Boston’s Beacon Hill, which by the 1890s was a bohemian district popular with artists and others who inhabited its “affordable roominghouses, bachelor apartments, and studios.” The neighborhood also bordered the so-­called Dark Side, an African American working-­class neighborhood that sloped toward the waterfront. Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens, 82–84. The location of Day’s studio on Beacon Hill, with its bachelor apartments and boarding houses, and its proximity to a working-­class African American neighborhood, may have corresponded to an emergent gay urban geography. In his history of gay culture in New York in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, George Chauncey has argued that “the existence of an urban bachelor subculture facilitated the development of a gay world. . . . Gay male residential and commercial enclaves developed in the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and Harlem in large part because they were the city’s major centers of furnished-­ room housing for single men” (136). The studio may also have been close to what Kevin Mumford has called an “interzone,” or “black/white sex district.” “Simultaneously marginal and central, interzones were located in African-­American neighborhoods, unique because their (often transient) inhabitants were black and white, heterosexual and homosexual, prostitute and customer” (Interzones, 20). Notes — 233

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 47. Edwin Becker, “F. Holland Day and Symbolism,” 58–60. 48. As Barbara Michaels has argued, “By seeming to put a black ‘Justice’ in the place of Christ (who traditionally sorts the sinners from the righteous in scenes of the Last Judgement), Day was arguably even more radical in composing Armageddon than he had been in photographing himself as Jesus in Crucifixion scenes.” Barbara L. Michaels, “New Light on F. Holland Day’s Photographs of African Americans,” 339. 49. Edwin Becker, “F. Holland Day and Symbolism,” 61. 50. See Jussim, Slave to Beauty, 145, for a photograph of Day’s display of sacred subjects at the Royal Photographic Society exhibition in London, 1900, reproduced here as figure 2.16. 51. According to Dana Seitler, discourses of sexual perversion and racial degeneracy not only intersected at the turn of the century, they were actually “mutually constitutive.” Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies; Or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism 46, no. 1 (winter 2004): 71–102, 75. Kevin Mumford has also shown how early twentieth-­century “medical experts relied on the more pervasive theory of racial difference, as well as the ideology of ‘miscegenation,’ to conceptualize sexual attraction and relations between people of the same gender.” Mumford, Interzones, 76. 52. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 15–38. 53. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 27. 54. Dana Seitler also describes “the racial matrix through which sexuality was largely understood” (84), but she nevertheless seeks to unsettle the stability of Somerville’s argument, according to which sexology borrows the template of race science, by arguing that emergent discourses of homosexuality were dispersed through multiple understandings of “perversion,” including atavism, degeneracy, and criminality, at the turn of the century. According to Seitler, “Medical photography at the turn of the century demonstrates the ways in which the perverse body was constituted as a hybrid entity that combines and condenses a number of coterminous discourses about sexuality, race, and gender, and not only those, in American modernity” (90). As Seitler shows, images of men and women deemed sexually perverse were more likely to show up in turn-­of-­the-­century texts devoted to criminology or degeneracy, rather than texts examining sexuality per se (93–94). Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies.” 55. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3. 56. Contemporary critics often commented on Day’s penchant for costume and 234 — Notes

exotic dress. See entries by Sadakichi Hartmann (72), Herbert White Taylor (74), and J. T. Keiley (104, 106), all in F. Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography, eds. Verna Posever Curtis and Jane Van Nimmen. 57. According to Thomas Waugh, “The articulation of racial difference in the choice of model and cultural setting is the most blatant application of the exotic scale of difference for this generation. All the pictorialists I have mentioned [including Day] expressed their aesthetics of desire in this way” (Hard to Imagine, 92). For Waugh, “the exotic,” like “the classical,” is a vehicle through which Victorian homosexuals registered “structures of difference” that “underpin the Western erotic imaginary” (Hard to Imagine, 92). While I agree that Day expressed homoerotic desire through the registers of race, he evoked race not to establish “structures of difference,” but instead to evoke associations of similarity. 58. Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 265. 59. Marr, describing Bayard Taylor’s correspondence from Egypt with his editor in Boston, James Ticknor Fields (The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, 269). John Lloyd Stephens, quoted in Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, 268. 60. In this context one might also reconsider Day’s Greek and Christian imagery, as well as his favorite model, the Italian immigrant Nicola Giancola, in racial terms. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has demonstrated, the claims of Greek, Italian, and Jewish immigrants to whiteness were contested in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. All of Day’s figures of male beauty would have been considered “not quite white.” Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15–38. 61. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 140. 62. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 59. 63. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52. 64. Pam Roberts, “Fred Holland Day (1864–1933),” 26. 65. Susan Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991). 66. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–64.

Chapter 3: The Space Between 1. Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9, 134. 2. For a biography of Muybridge and a cultural history of his milieu, see Rebecca Notes — 235

Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003). 3. Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still, 212. According to Jonathan Crary, “The breakthrough of Muybridge’s work in 1878 [with horses] was its deployment of machinic high speeds for the creation of perceptual units beyond the capacities of human vision.” Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1999), 140. 4. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One-­Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 240–57, 243. 5. After his work with Stanford, Muybridge spent several years giving illustrated lectures with his zoopraxiscope, and traveling in Europe, where he met prominent photographers such as Nadar and Étienne Jules Marey. His relationship with Stanford ended in bitter disappointment in 1882, after Stanford published his account of the California horse project and reproduced Muybridge’s photographs with only minimal credit in The Horse in Motion, effectively erasing Muybridge from his own project. After his break with Stanford, Muybridge continued to promote his work through lectures and desperately sought new funding sources. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (summer 1984): 2–21, 2–3. 6. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883–1887,” Gender and History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 627–56, 627, 640. 7. Elspeth Brown has identified a number of Muybridge’s models. Blanche Epler was an artist’s model, as was Catherine Aimer; Ben Bailey was a professional boxer; Randolph Faries was a member of the University of Pennsylvania baseball team and a champion runner; Percy C. Madeira was a track champion; Albert Cline was a pole-­vaulter; Thomas Grier was an athletic walker. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 628, 643. Muybridge also served as his own model in a couple of cases, as an “ex-­athlete” in his mid-­fifties, walking, throwing a disk, and ascending a step. Rebecca Solnit reproduces these images of Muybridge in River of Shadows, 224–25. 8. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 4. 9. Phillip Prodger describes most of this process in detail in Time Stands Still, 195. Information about the cyanotype proofs is included in Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion: The Director’s Cut,” History of Photography 24, no. 1 (spring 2000): 52–54, and in Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 202–7. I am grateful to Michelle Delaney for permitting me to see the various component parts of Muybridge’s work, including the lantern slides compiled on glass plates and the cyanotype proofs, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Photographic History archives. 236 — Notes

10. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 3–4. Rebecca Solnit notes that 562 of the final 781 plates in Animal Locomotion were of human subjects. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, 221. 11. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 5. 12. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 5. 13. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 9. 14. Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” 4. 15. This is what disturbed Muybridge’s colleague in chronophotography, Étienne Jules Marey, about Muybridge’s process. In his own attempts to record time and motion, Marey exposed the arc of movement in a blur on a single plate. Marey did not like Muybridge’s discreet stills, arranged in sequences, because, as Mary Ann Doane has argued, “the positions of the figures were too far apart—it was often impossible to determine how the figure moved from one position to the next. Too much time was lost.” Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 60. 16. Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 61. 17. Janine Mileaf has argued that the scientific sanction of Muybridge’s work saved him from the moral censorship he might have received if his nudes were judged in artistic terms. “By aligning his work with scientific research rather than the pursuit of artistic ideals, he gained endorsement from a society that otherwise condemned public exposure of nude figures.” Janine A. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the Human Figure,” American Art 16, no. 3 (fall 2002): 30–53, 32. 18. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 59–61. 19. Rony, The Third Eye, 48–58. 20. Rony, The Third Eye, 46, 48. 21. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9 (summer 1995): 39–61; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64. 22. For an extensive discussion of Agassiz and his shifting theories of natural history, as well as the cultural contexts in which the Zealy daguerreotypes were produced, see Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-­ Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 23. John Lamprey presented his system of anthropometric photography, using a standardized measuring grid, to the Ethnological Society of London in 1869, and according to Frank Spencer, “variations on Lamprey’s grid system were widely adopted.” Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 99–107, 102, 103. Notes — 237

24. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body.” 25. See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 10. 26. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 643–44. 27. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 639. 28. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 40. 29. Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 507–34, 515. 30. Laura Kipnis discusses women, bodily fluids, and hygiene in her chapter, “Dirt,” in The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 81–121. Rebecca Solnit suggests that Muybridge was “working out other concerns of his earlier life and work in the motion studies,” returning to water, the subject of his Yosemite waterfall photographs, but this time instead of rendering it in white blurs produced by long exposures, capturing “spilling water in elegant and startling shapes that had never been seen before.” Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, 226. 31. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 29. Here then the “social hierarchy based on gender” that Sarah Gordon finds in Muybridge’s project does not overshadow race, but is itself a sign of race. Sarah Anne Gordon, Sanctioning the Nude: Production and Reception of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, 1887, Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2006, 185. 32. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 15–38. 33. Tom Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge and Multiplicity,” in Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still, 222–56, 238. See also Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 38. 34. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 49. 35. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 45–48. 36. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 48–49. 37. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 48. 38. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 39. Elspeth Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 643. 40. Quoted in E. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 643. 41. Jayne Morgan reads the differences in the activities that Muybridge’s men and women perform in the context of Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure and the different courses of treatment he prescribed for men and women suffering from neurasthenia in the late nineteenth century. According to Morgan, “In looking at the images specifically from the perspective of Mitchell’s Rest Cure, with the woman

238 — Notes

confined to a restricted domestic space and the man subjected to rigorous physical activities, it is possible to read elements of a neurasthenic discourse encoded, or resonating, within the images.” Jayne Morgan, “Eadweard Muybridge and W. S. Playfair: An Aesthetics of Neurasthenia,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 225–31, 229. 42. These images are in the Prints and Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress. 43. See my chapter on Sister Carrie in American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 206–21. 44. As Sarah Gordon has argued, it is surprising that Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion volumes escaped censorship, given that they displayed “multitudinous signs of obscenity”—“the exposed female body, awkward and to the point of outlandish poses, frames that center around the female genitalia, indexical representation of nude models and provocative narratives” (Sanctioning the Nude, 104–5). Gordon proposes that Muybridge’s images ultimately avoided censorship because they were “cloaked in the robes of University authority, which during these very years gained the unquestioning faith of the middle class” (Sanctioning the Nude, 134). See also Sarah Gordon, “Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox of Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ Nudes,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 130, no. 1 (January 2006): 79–104. 45. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 50. 46. Muybridge, Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates, 12–13, reprinted in Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, 1588, quoted in Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera,” 37. 47. As Marta Braun notes, in the Prospectus and Catalogue, “a space was given to the subscriber to check off any number of plates for a dollar each; to choose a selection of 100 plates, to be bound in leather, for $100; or, for the serious collector, to purchase the entire eleven portfolios of 781 plates for $600.” Eadweard Muybridge, 218–19. 48. As Sarah Gordon has argued, “Muybridge’s wrestling scenes offer male physical interaction that surpasses homosocial images of other athletic activities and even goes beyond the erotic, offering a scene of male entanglement that encourages fantasizing.” Gordon, Sanctioning the Nude, 238. 49. Von Gloeden, Taormina: Wilhelm Von Gloeden, 3rd ed., intro. Roland Barthes, trans. Angus Whyte (Santa Fe, NM: Twelvetree Press, 1997).

Chapter 4: Preparing the Way for the Train 1. On the railroad’s transformation of space and time, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), especially chapter 3, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” 33–51; Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and

Notes — 239

Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 50–53; and John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker and Company, 1998), 39–58. 2. Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 19–20. 3. Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 44–45; and Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 64. Anne Friedberg makes a similar argument in regard to the diorama and the panorama, viewing technologies in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth that she suggests produced a viewer with a new kind of virtual spatial and temporal mobility that prefigured the cinema viewer. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 20. 4. Susan Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” in The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change, eds. Susan Danly and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1988), 93–112, 94. 5. William D. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” Geographical Review 52, no. 1 (January 1962): 25–36, 28 including note 8. 6. Barry B. Combs outlines this history in Westward to Promontory: Building the Union Pacific across the Plains and Mountains, a pictorial documentary, with text by Barry B. Combs (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Company, 1969), 13–14. 7. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 25. 8. Combs, Westward to Promontory, 17. 9. Samuel Bowles, Our New West (Hartford, CT: Hartford Publishing Company, 1869), quoted in Susan Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 98. 10. Combs, Westward to Promontory, 17. 11. Combs, Westward to Promontory, 16. 12. Combs, Westward to Promontory, 18. 13. “Parallel Portraits,” The Smithsonian Associates Civil War E-­mail Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 5. 14. Combs, Westward to Promontory, 43, for the photograph with Casement in the center; Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 28, for a detail focused on Russell’s traveling darkroom. 15. As Susan Danly has said of Russell, “Again and again he makes known the presence of his camera; shadows cast by the tripod, the darkroom tent, and the cumbersome box itself, intrude into the view of his lens” (“Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 109). Robin Kelsey makes a similar argument about Timothy O’Sullivan’s marked presence in the photographs he made for two surveys of the American West, the King survey of the fortieth parallel, in the late 1860s, and the Wheeler survey of lands west of the one hundredth meridian, in the early 1870s. According to Kelsey, O’Sullivan’s photographs are “rife with shadows, footprints, camera equipment, and other details that call attention to him and his practice” (136–37). The trace 240 — Notes

of the photographer’s presence in his images responds “to anxieties about the invisibility of his craft” (137–38), and addresses “the fundamental contradiction in O’Sullivan’s historical position as the skilled producer of records understood to be made primarily by nature” (138). Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 16. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 28, for photograph of Russell. 17. The Library of Congress’s online collection of prints and photographs includes a list of titles for Russell’s Uintah Series on the verso side of the scanned stereocard of Shadow Lake, Uintas. Russell also put himself in the picture in stereocard number 232 from the Uintah Series, Artists at Breakfast, Uintas. See the Union Pacific Railroad website for this image. 18. A. J. Russell, “On the Mountains with the Tripod and Camera,” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin (April 1870): 33–35, 33–34. 19. Once again see stereocard number 232 from the Uintah Series, Artists at Breakfast, Uintas, on the Union Pacific Railroad website. 20. Russell, “On the Mountains with the Tripod and Camera,” 34. 21. Russell, “On the Mountains with the Tripod and Camera,” 35. See Eastman House for Lewis M. Rutherford’s stereocard photographs of the moon. 22. A. J. Russell, “On the Mountains with the Tripod and Camera,” part two, Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin (August 1870): 128–30, 128. 23. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 27–28; Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 100. 24. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 26. 25. John Henderson, “Photography and the Stereoscope,” originally published in the London Photographic News, reprinted in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin (May 1871): 162–65, 164. 26. Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 55. 27. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 63. 28. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 56. 29. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1990), 116–36. 30. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping, 20. 31. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 29. 32. Susan Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 94. 33. Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 33, note 14. According to Susan Danly, the album was priced at $50 (“Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 94). 34. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 23. 35. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 23, 53. 36. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 62. 37. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 64. Notes — 241

38. Nye, American Technological Sublime, 59; and Pattison, “The Pacific Railroad Rediscovered,” 29. As John R. Stilgoe has argued, “Railroad companies built most of the marvels in the West . . . and the companies employed painters, engravers, and photographers to depict not only the natural scenery visible from the trains, but also the infrastructure created for the trains—the viaducts, tracks, roadbed, and signals.” John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, 139. 39. Russell’s alternate view of the bridge in plate 7 shows the cabin that the surveyor Charles Sharman lived in during the winter of 1867–68, at approximately 8,000 feet above sea level. Ernest Haycox Jr., “ ‘A Very Exclusive Party’: A Firsthand Account of Building the Union Pacific Railroad,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 51, no. 1 (spring 2001): 20–35, 32. 40. Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 3. 41. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 3–4. 42. Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 61. 43. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representations and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 154, 155. 44. A. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 157. 45. A. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 160. 46. Angela Miller, “The Fate of the Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation,’ ” in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–112, 102–3. 47. From Andrew J. Russell’s annotated table of contents, p. 3. 48. Alan Trachtenberg, “Naming the View,” in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 119– 63; and Robin Kelsey, “Timothy H. O’Sullivan: Surveys of the American West,” in Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 75–142. 49. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 128–32; Robin Kelsey, Archive Style, 75–142. Rosalind Krauss pays special attention to the translation of the photographic “view” into the art historical “landscape” in the museum in “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (winter 1982): 311–19. 50. Erwin Straus, quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 53. Robin Kelsey is particularly attentive to the graphic practices of survey O’Sullivan incorporated in his photographs, such as flattened spaces, geometric planes, and marked surfaces. See chapter 2 in Archive Style, as well as the earlier article version of that chapter, Robin E. Kelsey, “Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871–74,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 702–23.

242 — Notes

51. Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” 93. 52. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, 255. 53. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, 255. 54. Charles Sharman, an Irish immigrant employed to help set grade stakes along the railroad construction line, notes the military escort (28), and Ernest Haycox, who presents Sharman’s story, discusses the Indian raids, the cavalry guard, and the railroad workers’ ability to protect themselves as veterans of the recent Civil War (30–31). Ernest Haycox Jr., “ ‘A Very Exclusive Party.’ ” 55. Charles Sharman, in Haycox, “ ‘A Very Exclusive Party,’ ” 27; see also note 8. 56. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, revised edition (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), 181. See also Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian Americans, rev. ed. (New York: Back Bay Books, 1998), 85. 57. Nye, American Technological Sublime, 73. 58. Anthony W. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-­Century Factory Town (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 205–10. 59. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story, 3–5. 60. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story, 197–210. 61. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7. 62. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 37, 48. 63. Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 68–103; and Harper’s Weekly (1851), quoted in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 48. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 133. 64. Jacobson, “Becoming Caucasian,” in Whiteness of a Different Color, 91–138. 65. Berger, Sight Unseen, 49, 67. 66. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Introduction: Faith and the Contested Constitution,” The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–15. 67. S. B. Gordon, The Mormon Question, 55. 68. S. B. Gordon, The Mormon Question, 202–3. 69. S. B. Gordon, The Mormon Question, 189. Gordon actually uses two of Russell’s photographs from The Great West Illustrated to make this point. 70. Sarah Barringer Gordon outlines the history of the Edmunds-­Tucker Act, the debates leading toward its ratification, the seizure of state property in its wake, and the eventual return of church property, in “The Marital Economy,” in The Mormon Question, 183–220.

Notes — 243

Chapter 5: Chansonetta Stanley Emmons ’ s Nostalgic Views 1. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 16. 2. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 9. 3. Shaw and Chase, The Imagined Past, 3. 4. Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), xiii. 5. On April 24, 1897, Emmons wrote to her brother, describing her first experiments with the camera: “I think I have after many, many failures, begun to gauge the camera a little nearer right. I can’t let it alone and find it very fascinating, so much so that I have not painted a stroke since I got the camera.” Emmons to Freelan O. Stanley, Raymond W. Stanley Collection, Stanley Museum Archives, Kingfield, Maine. 6. She taught drawing and sketching in New Portland and Kingfield schools, and then in the mid-­1880s she moved to Boston to teach art in the school system there. 7. The best source for published biographical information about Emmons is Marius B. Péladeau, Chansonetta: The Life and Photographs of Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, 1858–1937 (Waldoboro, ME: Maine Antique Digest, 1977). Jim Merrick, at the Stanley Museum, is also extremely knowledgeable about the photographer’s life and family. In the last several decades, this understudied photographer has begun to receive some renewed recognition. Her work is included in Documenting a Myth: The South as Seen by Three Women Photographers, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Doris Ulmann, Bayard Wootten, 1910–1940, by Naomi Rosenblum and Susan Fillin-­Yeh (Portland, OR: Reed College and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, 1998); Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers by Naomi Rosenblum (New York: Abbeville Press, 2000); Jeffrey Simpson, The Way Life Was: A Photographic Treasury of the American Past (New York: Praeger, 1974); Oliver Jensen, Joan Patterson Karr, and Murral Belsky, American Album: How We Looked and How We Lived in a Vanished U.S.A. (New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1968); and the Franklin Library illustrated edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1979). The vast majority of Emmons’s photographs are currently housed in the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England in Portland, Maine, on loan from the Stanley Museum in Kingfield, Maine. The collection includes approximately 1,600 items, including one hundred five-­by-­seven glass plate negatives, three hundred hand-­colored glass lantern slides, and 1,200 photographic prints, including some small snapshot prints and hundreds of five-­by-­seven contact prints (with double and triple prints of some of the images), as well as matted, signed, and dated prints for exhibition. Some of the large five-­by-­seven contact

244 — Notes

prints are made on Velox, a silver gelatin paper that could be developed with gaslight, and others are on various papers, probably including albumen paper, silver gelatin printing-­out paper (Eastman Kodak’s Studio Proof Paper for contact printing, fixed and then toned with gold salts), and platinum paper. (Information about the photographic printing papers Emmons used can be found in a display at the Stanley Museum, in Kingfield, Maine.) Although Emmons’s practice of photography participated in the general association of photography with nostalgia that Kodak promoted in the early twentieth century, it is important to note that Emmons was not a “Kodak Girl.” Indeed, her brand of amateurism was actually closer to that of the “gentleman photographers” who invented the technology. Emmons favored a large format view camera, and she did her own developing and printing. She devoted significant time and energy to photography (largely because she could, with her brothers’ support), not as a professional, but as a “serious amateur.” (Emmons did not simply push a button on a small portable Kodak and allow a team of technicians to do the rest.) She did not participate in what Nancy Martha West has called the “mass amateurism (that is, amateurism that required no serious commitment)” that Kodak promoted to its consumers (Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, 44). For a discussion of the historical transformation of the amateur photographer, see Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, 40–53. 8. James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37. I would like to thank Samantha Johnston for bringing this work to my attention. 9. James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England, 40. 10. Her applications to the Daughters of the American Revolution are in the collection of the Stanley Museum, in Kingfield, Maine. 11. In 1896, Alice Austen, Emmons’s younger contemporary, offered for sale photographic portfolios of Street Types of New York. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 212. 12. James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England, 28. Unlike many who vacationed on the southern coast of Maine in this period, however, Emmons does not seem to have celebrated a particularly aristocratic version of colonial America. Although she did celebrate an Anglo-­Saxon identity based on bloodlines, her own crafting of a colonial past was decidedly more rural and agrarian. Dona Brown discusses the aristocratic ambitions of vacationers in southern Maine in “The Problem of the Summer: Race, Class, and the Colonial Vacation in Southern Maine, 1890–1910,” in Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 169–99. As Svetlana Boym defines it, nostalgia is a “longing for home” that was first

Notes — 245

suffered by soldiers and sailors displaced from their home and nation. It is not surprising then that Emmons’s nostalgia would be rooted in both the scenes of her rural childhood and an imagined national past. The Future of Nostalgia, 4–5. 13. Jeffrey Simpson offers these descriptions in The Way Life Was, caption number three, in the “Chansonetta Emmons: Way Down East” section. 14. Describing the striking glow of light at windows and doors in Emmons’s photographs, Marius Péladeau explains: Emmons “apparently preferred not to use anti-­ halation film since the halation (bouncing back of light through the emulsion after hitting the back of the glass plate) gave a halo-­like effect to the highlights of her photographs which she enjoyed.” Marius B. Péladeau, Chansonetta, 13. 15. According to Sarah Burns, “the pattern of mechanization in the East was sufficiently erratic and selective to allow for the coexistence of archaic and modern methods, even past the turn of the twentieth century.” Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-­Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 37–38. 16. Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions, 77–78. 17. Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2003). See especially pages 38–39 for a discussion of Nutting’s team of female colorists. 18. Wallace Nutting, The Wallace Nutting Expansible Catalog (Framingham, MA: Wallace Nutting, 1915), reprinted by Diamond Press, Maple Glen, Pennsylvania, 1987. Thomas Andrew Denenberg discusses Nutting’s “Expansible Catalog” in Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America, 23. 19. Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America, 123–24. 20. Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America, 34–35. 21. I have found only one photograph in which Emmons staged an image of women in colonial-­era dress in a historic house. It features Dorothy as an adult and a woman in a huge bonnet, seated before a large fireplace in the Old Fairbanks house in Dedham, Massachusetts. 22. Curtis, quoted in Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21; and Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 76. According to Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting also removed the signs of an encroaching industrial modernism from his nostalgic pastoral views, instructing colorists to “remove post and wire” from an image. Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America, 42. 23. Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated, 22. 24. Alan Trachtenberg discusses this paradox in Curtis’s representation of Native Americans at length in chapter four, “Ghostlier Demarcations,” of his Shades of 246 — Notes

Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 170–210. 25. For an extended discussion of race, blood, nation and the Daughters of the American Revolution, see S. M. Smith, “America Coursing through Her Veins,” in American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 136–56. 26. John Hensley, “Dreadful People: Dueling Representations in Ozarksland,” Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2008. According to the photography historian Naomi Rosenblum, “By the end of the nineteenth century Appalachia also was regarded as a bastion of traditional American values—a place where the virtues of individualism, self-­reliance, and religious feeling still reigned supreme.” Documenting a Myth, 5. 27. Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 61. Gregory Foster-­Rice argues that such nativist concerns fueled, or at least framed, Doris Ulmann’s photographs of Appalachian mountaineers made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He also suggests that Ulmann documented “vanishing types” in a manner similar to that of Edward Curtis. Gregory James Foster-­Rice, “Chapter Two: Doris Ulmann’s Search for the White Primitive,” The Visuality of Race: The Old Americans, The New Negro and American Art, c. 1925, Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2003, 104–57. 28. J. S. Becker, Selling Tradition, 60. 29. J. S. Becker, Selling Tradition, 46–48. 30. Assessing the earlier work of antebellum painters, Sarah Burns and Angela Miller have argued similarly that the pastoral ideals celebrated in New England farming scenes offered a critique of the southern slavery plantation system. Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions, 77–89, especially 84; Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representations and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 183–87. 31. In 1897, Chansonetta and Dorothy took a trip south to the Carolinas, financed by Chansonetta’s brother, Freelan (F. O.). It is unclear why she chose this destination, but it seems that her husband’s family had some connections there. They visited Charleston, boarded at a house in Summerville, South Carolina, visited the Highlands and Macon County as well as the town of Shortoff, in North Carolina, and stayed at the Oaks Hotel, in Asheville, North Carolina. This early trip to the Carolinas was the start of Emmons’s serious interest in photography. The album that she made as a gift for Freelan includes photographs of African Americans (1990-­PH01-­0448), landscapes taken in the Highlands, a photograph of a white “woods-­man,” and mountain cabins. Emmons inscribed the album to Freelan and noted that it shows “snapshots at what we saw going through the Carolinas, Dorothy and I, in the spring of 1897.” On the back of one of Chansonetta’s cyanotype prints in the Kingfield HisNotes — 247

torical Society is a note that identifies a cabin as the house that James Emmons inhabited in 1877 in the Highlands of North Carolina. The Stanley Museum also has a photograph of a group on a porch that identifies Grandfather and Grandmother Emmons in Shortoff, North Carolina. In a letter to Flora, F. O.’s wife, dated April 14, 1892, Chansonetta notes that she and James have both suffered from terrible colds, and “so he talks N. Carolina to me” (Stanley Museum fh-­1). On the back of another of Chansonetta’s cyanotype prints in the Kingfield Historical Society is a note that identifies the house in Summerville, South Carolina, where “Netta” boarded. One of the photographs in the Stanley Museum’s album documenting her trip, produced in 1897, notes that it shows the view from her hotel room window in Asheville, North Carolina. All of the other places are identified in captions to the album produced in 1897, which is held in the collection of the Stanley Museum, in Kingfield, Maine, 1990-­PH01–1029–1083. 32. For further discussion of Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs and the image campaigns of Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes launched early in the twentieth century, as well as those of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, see S. M. Smith, American Archives, 157–86; and S. M. Smith, Photography on the Color Line, W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence; Judith Fryer Davidov, Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Jeannene M. Pryzblyski, “American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs,” Art Journal 57, no. 3 (1998): 60–68; “Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris Exposition, 1900: A French Context for the American Negro Exhibit,” in National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America, ed. William L. Chew III (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 209–44; and Michael Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-­Representation (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 33. Some of these postcards are reproduced in Michael Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-­Representation, 193. 34. Another photograph of a woman seated in a doorway turning her back to the camera (1990-­PH01-­0690) was given the annotation “Aunt Dinah don’t want her picture taken.” 35. Classic American texts by these authors include Emerson, “Self-­Reliance” and “Nature” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson, intro. Mary Oliver, Modern Library Classics (New York: Random House, 2000); Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2007); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, ed. David S. Reynolds, 150th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading Frederick 248 — Notes

Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 36. The work of Steven Stoll and Angela Miller helped me to distinguish the “countryside” or “middle landscape” from the wilderness in American thought and art. Steven Stoll, “Farm against Forest,” in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 55–72. Angela Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation,’ ” in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–112. 37. Stanley Museum collection. 38. Several of the garden slides show wildly colored azaleas. As black and white images, they would have been unremarkable, but as painted slides they are striking. I imagine Chansonetta may have had the eventual hand-­colored lantern slides in mind when she made some of these photographs, projecting in her mind’s eye what the final, fabricated images would look like. 39. The plates for Emmons’s slides were made by “a. d. handy, Boston, Mass.,” and titles, locations, and attributions, such as “photo by C. S. Emmons” are written on the dark edges of the slides in white ink, or inscribed in black ink on paper labels. After a slide was painted, another thin piece of glass was adhered to it with black tape running along all sides, in order to protect the applied color and the emulsion. 40. For a discussion of touch and time in altered photographs, see Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). 41. On the communal aspects of the slide show, see Karen Voltz, Virtual Shoebox, mfa thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2010. 42. Susan Davis, a historian well acquainted with Emmons’s lantern slide collection, surmises that Chansonetta, who became deaf in her later life, loaded slides into the projector, while Dorothy gave the accompanying lecture and answered questions. 43. Elizabeth Siegel, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 32.

Chapter 6: Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography 1. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19. 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983), rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Reproduction is central to Anderson’s theory of the imagined nation, and therefore reproducible, negative-­positive print photography would seem to correspond more directly to his discussion of print media than Washington’s unique, nonreproducible daguerreotypes. But ultimately, repeated practices constitute Notes — 249

the nation for Anderson (such as reading the newspaper), practices giving one the sense of participating in a common ritual with one’s countrymen. Although the daguerreotype is not reproducible, the forms of portraiture are easily repeated, and Washington could replicate the signs of class and common endeavor among his subjects, visually enabling them to cohere as individual members of a group. Further, despite their status as unique, nonreproducible artifacts, Washington’s daguerreotypes circulated widely. Scholars have recently studied the role of photography in the production of transnational forms of affiliation and identification. Blake Stimson examines the role of serial photographic essays published in the 1950s in producing “supranational” forms of political identity, and Roberto Tejada examines the role of photography in producing a shared, transnational “image environment” across the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Roberto Tejada, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 3. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6. 4. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 5. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 26. 6. Once again, see Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. 7. David White provides further information about Washington’s multiple stints as a teacher, as well as his ambition to complete a college education. David O. White, “Augustus Washington, Black Daguerreotypist of Hartford,” The Connecticut Historical Society 39, no. 1 (January 1974): 14–19. 8. Ann M. Shumard provides the most detailed biography of Augustus Washington in “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” Exposure 35, no. 2 (2002): 5–16, and A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 2–18. See also David O. White, “Augustus Washington, Black Daguerreotypist of Hartford,” and Carol Johnson, “Faces of Freedom: Portraits from the American Colonization Society Collection,” The Daguerreian Annual 1996 (Pittsburgh: The Daguerreian Society, 1997): 265–78. Other art historians and scholars of photography, including Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Emily K. Shubert, Deborah Willis, Dalila Scruggs, and George Sullivan, have also marked Washington’s importance in the history of photography. Wilson Jeremiah Jones has collected Washington’s published letters. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, with contributions by Emily K. Shubert, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2006); Deborah Willis, Reflections 250 — Notes

in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2000); Dalila Scruggs, “‘The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here’: The American Colonization Society and the Imaging of African-­American Settlers in Liberia,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2010; George Sullivan, Black Artists in Photography, 1840–1940 (New York: Cobblehill Books, 1996); Liberian Dreams: Back-­to-­Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 9. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 7. 10. As Ann Shumard has argued, Washington must have made portraits of African Americans in Hartford, but “of the fewer than one hundred Washington daguerreotypes that have been documented to date, none representing an African American sitter from Hartford has been found.” Ann Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” Exposure 35, no. 2 (2002): 5–16, 11. 11. Shumard identifies Bulkeley in A Durable Memento, 5. 12. The small booklike object is identified as a daguerreotype case in the commentary provided for the daguerreotype portrait of an unidentified woman on the website of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. See “A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist,” http://www.npg.si.edu. 13. Sigourney’s dress, including her bonnet, long ribbons, patterned shawl, and lacy mitts, epitomizes the height of American fashion in the 1850s. Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 94–104, 141. Washington and Sigourney’s relationship extended beyond the confines of the studio, and she may have helped Washington and his family to emigrate to Liberia. He remembers her specifically in a letter to Reverend John Orcutt, Traveling Agent of the American Colonization Society, which was published in The African Repository, the official journal of the acs, in June 1854: “Remember us kindly to your lady, and in particular to that most noble lady, Mrs. Sigourney, and the several gentlemen, who you know were particularly interested in me.” Augustus Washington, “First Seven Weeks in Liberia, 1854,” in Liberian Dreams: Back-­to-­Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson J. Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 198–201, 201. Apparently Sigourney was affiliated with the acs; in its Forty-­Ninth Annual Report (Washington, DC, 1866) the American Colonization Society recognized Sigourney in an obituary: “Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney who devoted her purse as well as her pen to forwarding this and other enterprises that received her commendation” (6). Sigourney also wrote a poem for Elliott Cresson, a Quaker philanthropist, on the occasion of his departure for Liberia, which William Innes published in his appendix to Liberia; or the Early History and Signal Preservation of the American Colony of Free Negroes on the Coast of Africa, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1832), 234. Notes — 251

14. David White suggests that 136 Main Street was also the address of Washington’s home. “Augustus Washington, Black Daguerreotypist of Hartford,” 16. 15. See especially the introduction and essays by Laura Wexler and Ginger Hill in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, eds. Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Laura Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation”; and Ginger Hill, “ ‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures.” 16. Ann Shumard suggests that Washington’s female attendant was likely his wife, Cordelia. In a later advertisement published in the New Era newspaper in 1857, addressed to potential clients in Sierra Leone, Washington notes, “Mrs. Washington will be in attendance to receive ladies, and assist in arranging their toilet.” Ann Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” 13–14. 17. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31, 115. 18. Shawn Michelle Smith, “Second-­Sight: Du Bois and the Black Masculine Gaze,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 350–77, 350–51. As hooks suggests, “the ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally.” hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 116. 19. My reading here is inspired by David Lubin’s assessment of Robert S. Duncanson’s landscape paintings. David M. Lubin, “Reconstructing Duncanson,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-­Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 107–57. 20. It is unclear exactly how Brown found his way to Washington’s Hartford studio, but the photographer advertised his services in abolitionist newspapers such as the Connecticut Antislavery Society’s Charter Oak, and it is likely that Brown encountered him through abolitionist connections. David O. White, “Augustus Washington, Black Daguerreotypist of Hartford,” 18; and Shumard, A Durable Memento, 4. Shumard proposes that “Washington’s portrait depicts Brown during his brief tenure as a wool broker in Springfield, Massachusetts.” Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” 9. White suggests that other famous abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, had their portraits made in Washington’s studio. White, “Augustus Washington, Black Daguerreotypist of Hartford,” 18. 21. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 4. 22. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 23. Although I find Azoulay’s argument particularly useful in thinking about the encounter between John Brown and Augustus Washington, I am less convinced that the photographed subject’s address to a later viewer is always liberating in the way Azoulay suggests. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have proposed that “one can consider how any particular photo equips the viewer to act as a citizen, or expand 252 — Notes

one’s conception of citizenship, or otherwise redefine one’s relationship to the political community.” Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 18. 23. Ann Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” 16, note 9. See also Dalila Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 194. 24. According to Shumard, “Washington purposefully posed Brown with his left hand held aloft so that in the laterally reversed or ‘mirror image’ daguerreotype, Brown’s gesture ‘reads’ as his right hand raised in oath taking.” Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” 9. 25. As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have argued, “One source of a photograph’s power is that its lines of interpellation can be a direct imitation of face-­to-­ face interaction.” Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 142. 26. Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ ” New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 179–224, 208. 27. Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 208. 28. The acs modeled Liberia on the British colony of Sierra Leone. 29. According to Eric Burin, “The Society made its first land acquisition in 1821, when U.S. naval officer Robert Stockton leveled a pistol at King Peter’s head and thereby convinced the latter to sell some of his people’s territory.” Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 141. “On December 15, 1821, Cape Montserrado [Cape Mesurado, in Montserrado, Liberia] was allegedly bartered for the following items: ‘guns, gunpowder, beads, cloths, mirrors, food, and tobacco,’ the net value of which was less than $300” (Amos J. Beyan, quoting Richard West, 66). Amos J. Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991). According to Amos Beyan, King Peter’s resistance to the sale of his land “was mainly influenced by his desire to protect his involvement with the slave trade.” Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State, 63. Although most Liberians fought and deplored the slave trade, and the Liberian Constitution forbade the buying and selling of slaves, the slave trade nevertheless persisted throughout the territory. “The vicinity around Cape Mount [northwestern Liberia] alone exported fifteen thousand bondpersons each year between 1840 and 1850.” Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 153. 30. To be exact, 10,517. Allen Yarema discusses the purchase and early settlement of the colony, and the foundation of Liberia in The American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 35–51. Long quotation (46); discussion of the national seal (47); final statistics (47). Notes — 253

According to Eric Burin, in the early nineteenth century, “sixteen tribes occupied the region that would become Liberia.” Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 141. 31. Yarema, The American Colonization Society, 18. 32. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-­ American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 9–11. 33. Yarema outlines the early history of the acs in The American Colonization Society, 15–34. Statistics, 21. Yarema also discusses the British colony in Sierra Leone (6–7). See also Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 1–21. 34. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 27. 35. Augustus Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” in Liberian Dreams: Back-­to-­Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson J. Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 184–97, 186. 36. Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propaganda: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 22; Augustus Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 185. 37. Mitchell, Righteous Propaganda, 24, 22. 38. Mitchell, Righteous Propaganda, 22. According to Mitchell, “Emigrationist sentiment contained gendered and sexualized aspects,” and “some African Americans and Americo-­Liberians even viewed Africa as a haven where black men could at long last express, flaunt, and flex their manhood.” Righteous Propaganda, 19. As Stephanie McCurry has argued, in the antebellum United States, the status of white men as self-­possessed subjects was defined by their “independent” status in relation to their “dependents” (white women and children and all black slaves). One can surmise that the assertion of self-­possessed black manhood in Liberia was founded on similar gender assumptions. Stephanie McCurry, “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1245–64. However, despite the masculinist sentiments of the acs and some of the Americo-­Liberians, Liberia may also have enabled some women to “achieve a degree of independence” (Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 156). While some emigrant women may have aspired to an “elevated,” dependent model of middle-­class femininity, the Liberian constitution actually granted women property rights in marriage that were very progressive for the time. Further, Eric Burin argues that Liberian “freedwomen’s actions also suggest a different set of values, ones that stressed personal autonomy and financial security,” often outside of marriage (Slavery and the Peculiar Institution, 157). 39. Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). See especially chapter one, “Purity Control: Consolidating National Manhood in the Early Republic,” 29–60. 254 — Notes

40. Capitalist citizenship is Dana Nelson’s term. Nelson, National Manhood, 46. 41. Augustus Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 192. 42. Washington perceives the collusion of democracy and capitalism in maintaining a racial hierarchy. This is important because, as Nikhil Singh has argued about a later period, “Liberalism as a theory of market society and democratic-­ republicanism as a theory of political society collude in the perpetuation of racial inequalities by denying their own theoretical limitations and by locating the cause of racial division in the other theory.” Singh, Black Is a Country, 26. 43. Kenneth W. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 392–406, 395. Brent Hayes Edwards cautions scholars to recognize the gaps and discrepancies in twentieth-­century articulations of diaspora. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11–15. It is hard to say exactly how the African American colonization of Liberia fits within understandings of African diaspora. Most of the recent scholarly conversation about the African diaspora has focused on black writers, artists, and movements of the twentieth century. While clearly participating in the flow of ideas and bodies and goods between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas that Paul Gilroy describes with his conception of the Black Atlantic, the American Colonization Society’s project was, in its earliest incarnations, much more American than African, and as is evident in Washington’s letters, it did not pretend otherwise. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. 44. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 190. 45. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 193. 46. Many decades later, on January 1, 1924, acting as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Liberia on behalf of U.S. president Coolidge, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the president of Liberia, declaring: “Liberia is a child of the United States, and a sister Republic.” Further, he proposed that the American President understood “that in the great battle against color caste in America, the ability of Negroes to rule in Africa has been and ever will be a great and encouraging reenforcement.” Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940), in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 549–802, 644, 645. In Du Bois’s and President Coolidge’s estimations, Liberia did function as a measure of racial capability and success. As Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, “discourses about black national autonomy—especially as filtered through the passionate interest in the three independent black states, Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia—played a formative role in the formulation of black internationalist initiatives.” Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 10. Notes — 255

47. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 189. 48. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 189. 49. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 185. 50. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 186. 51. Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 188. 52. As Marcy Dinius has argued, Washington “ideally envision[ed] Liberia as America’s exact likeness but with slavery removed from the picture—as a perfect, if edited, copy rather than as its own original.” Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 171. 53. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 10. In a letter published in The African Repository in March 1864, Washington notes that he and his wife had a third child born in Liberia. Letter from Augustus Washington, published in The African Repository 40 (March 1864): 91. Once again, Allan Yarema discusses the purchase and early settlement of the colony, and the foundation of Liberia in The American Colonization Society, 35–51. 54. Washington, “Six Thousand Dollars Better, 1863,” first published in the African Repository, the official journal of the American Colonization Society, March 1864, reprinted in Liberian Dreams: Back-­to-­Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson J. Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 222–24, 223. 55. Given the long exposures necessitated by daguerreotypy, however, it is unlikely that Washington actually made this view from aboard a ship. Dalila Scruggs surmises that Washington may have set up his camera on a sandbar or on Providence Island, and Carol Johnson demonstrates that a view from “one of the little islands” was actually suggested to Washington by Dr. Lugenbeel, the recording secretary of the acs. Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 127; Johnson, “Faces of Freedom,” 270. 56. See Shumard, A Durable Memento, 10. Carol Johnson notes that the acs commissioned these views and others before Washington left for Liberia. Johnson, “Faces of Freedom,” 269–70. 57. As Dalila Scruggs has argued, “The illustration representing the anchorage became a favored representation of Monrovia for those who wanted to argue that Liberia was a ‘little America.’ ” Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 140. 58. Washington’s fellow traveler aboard the Isla de Cuba in 1853, Reverend Daniel H. Peterson, explicitly draws on biblical imagery in his praise of Monrovia: “This place looks more like the Garden of Eden, than any place that I have ever seen or read about.” D. H. Peterson, “The Looking Glass,” in Liberian Dreams: Back-­to-­ Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson J. Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 1–78, 47.

256 — Notes

59. Washington, “First Seven Weeks in Liberia, 1854,” 199. 60. My reading of View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, and Washington’s description of the (transplanted) foliage, is inspired and informed by Jill Casid’s Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), especially chapter 1, “The Hybrid Production of Empire,” 1–44. 61. He noted this in a letter published in The African Repository 31 (October 1855): 297. See also Moses, Liberian Dreams, 182. 62. Washington, “First Seven Weeks in Liberia, 1854,” 200. According to Carol Johnson, Washington “sold roughly $500 worth of portraits during his first five weeks of business in Liberia.” “News of Washington’s photo studio spread by word of mouth, with the studio hiring young boys to go out into the community and attract customers.” Johnson, “Faces of Freedom,” 270. Johnson also notes the difficulty of securing materials for daguerreotypy in Liberia. By July 1855, the supplies Washington had brought with him were exhausted, and he had to wait a year, until June 1856, to receive supplies from the United States (270–71). 63. Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer, 94–104, 141. Dalila Scruggs has suggested that Americo-­Liberians attended carefully to their clothing in efforts to denote their civilization and culture for a white American audience, and also to distinguish themselves from lower-­class Americo-­Liberians as well as African natives. Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 63–66. 64. The description of this daguerreotype on the website of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, states: “Augustus Washington posed this young woman much as he posed a number of his Hartford subjects. Like the women in his earlier portraits, she holds a daguerreotype case in her lap. It is interesting to note that in this instance, the case she displays is identical to that used to house both her portrait and that of Urias McGill.” Description of portrait of unidentified women, “A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist,” http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/mcgill.htm. See also Shumard, “Augustus Washington: African American Daguerreotypist,” 13. Ann Shumard clarifies that the two portraits of the McGills are “housed together in a double case,” in A Durable Memento, 12. 65. Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 73. 66. I am drawing on Carol Mavor’s understanding of “reduplicative” here, which she deems “(re)performative.” Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 41. 67. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 11–13. 68. Marcy Dinius reads these portraits as part of Washington’s larger efforts “to realize, rather than ‘memorialize,’ the government of the young republic.” The Camera and the Press, 177. 69. As Carol Johnson has noted, “these images differ from conventional portraits of

Notes — 257

the period” (266). Johnson surmises that the daguerreotypes, along with a watercolor by Robert K. Griffin, may have been sketches for a lithograph of the Liberian senate that was never realized. “Faces of Freedom,” 265–68. 70. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1987). 71. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 15. 72. Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” (manuscript facsimile of the lecture, American Memory, Library of Congress, 1861), http://memory.loc.gov. 73. A notice in The African Repository 44 (December 1868) states: “He has sold twenty-­five thousand pounds of sugar, in the New York market alone, during the past year” (376). In an earlier letter published in The African Repository in March 1864, Washington notes that on his farm he grows “sugarcane, coffee, rice, cassada, potatoes,” and in his garden (presumably for his household) he grows “cabbages, radishes, turnips, tomatoes, and many other vegetables.” He owns “four yokes of the largest African cattle, milk cows and other cattle, two horses, six jacks, turkeys, chickens, ducks, pigeons, &c.” He also states that he employs 50 laborers on his farm. Letter from Augustus Washington, published in The African Repository 40 (March 1864): 91. 74. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 16. 75. Shumard, A Durable Memento, 16. See also Wilson J. Moses, Liberian Dreams, 182. In reprinting a letter addressed to Washington and originally published in his newspaper, The African Repository notes that Augustus Washington is the editor and proprietor of The New Era. “Interesting Correspondence,” African Repository 50, no. 8 (August 1874): 225–27, 225. 76. Dalila Scruggs has studied the circulation of three of Washington’s daguerreotypes, of President Joseph Roberts, first lady Jane Roberts, and Vice President Stephen Benson, from Liberia to the acs in the United States, noting how they were transported by Reverend John McKay, who traveled on board the Harp from Liberia to New York in 1854, how the New York Colonization Society had copy daguerreotypes of the portraits made by Rufus Anson (which reversed the already reversed images), and then had wood engravings of President Roberts’s and Vice President Benson’s portraits made for reproduction in its Annual Report of 1856. In the meantime, Washington’s original daguerreotypes were taken to Philadelphia. Scruggs, “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here,” 44–46. 77. See Moses, Liberian Dreams, and Shumard, A Durable Memento. 78. African Repository 44 (December 1868): 376. 79. Washington, “Liberia as It Is, 1854,” 203, 204. 80. Farming, which Washington himself successfully pursued, proved a particularly complicated form of production in Liberia. The acs envisioned an agrarian econ258 — Notes

omy of self-­sufficient yeomen farmers in Liberia, and gave new emigrants up to ten acres of land (Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 150–51). But “emigrants who did work the land wanted to become planter-­merchants, not self-­ sufficient yeomen” (150). As Eric Burin has documented: “Between 1820 and 1843, almost 38 percent of the settlers who had been agricultural laborers in America abstained from such work in Liberia. A fair number became petty traders; even more ended up unskilled laborers. Some eschewed farming because it reminded them of slavery. Most left the land because it was unprofitable” (151). In general, the land in Liberia was swampy or thick with forests, and emigrants “had little knowledge of the climate, land, crops, and pests of West Africa” (151). 81. Washington, “Liberia as It Is, 1854,” 202. 82. Augustus Washington, “Thoughts on the American Colonization Society, 1851,” 186, 194; Washington, “Six Thousand Dollars Better, 1863,” 222. 83. Washington, “Liberia as It Is, 1854,” 202–3. As Eric Burin has argued, throughout the nineteenth century Liberia “remained a three-­tiered social order, with light-­ skinned, nepotistic free blacks dominating national affairs, a larger contingent of ex-­slaves clinging to the middle rungs of society, and masses of marginalized natives searching for ways to stem the forces of disempowerment” (Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 141–42). 84. Washington, “Liberia as It Is, 1854,” 205. Washington’s initial elation and subsequent disillusionment with Liberia displays what Eric Burin has described as a familiar pattern for emigrants: “Newly arrived emigrants breathed a sigh of relief upon landing in Liberia, for the country appeared to meet—and in some cases exceed—their expectations. But after this flush of enthusiasm came a chill of disappointment” (Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 144).

Chapter 7: Afterimages 1. As Susan Sontag has demonstrated, such censorship was endemic to the very beginning of war photography. Roger Fenton, “invariably called the first war photographer,” who documented the Crimean War for the British government, was “under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill.” Although censorship of war photography was ever-­present, “the first organized ban on press photography at the front came during the First World War.” Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 48–49, 64. As Sontag argues, today war is largely understood, by those who are not experiencing it directly, through images (Regarding the Pain of Others, 20–21). Media scholars of the first Persian Gulf War have amplified such arguments, proposing that the visual archive not only frames and shapes, but also makes the war for its noncombatant viewers. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz, eds., Seeing through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Similarly, Judith Butler has argued with respect to the war in Iraq, “By regulatNotes — 259

ing perspective in addition to content, the state authorities were clearly interested in regulating the visual modes of participation in the war.” Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 63–100, 65. 2. In that relative chaos of images and image sources, the potential for democratic participation in making the nation emerged, at least momentarily. Such contest over the national archive has important political consequences, for as Jacques Derrida has argued, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, note 1. 3. The afterimage was one of the phenomena discussed in the nineteenth century as an indicator of the embodied, subjective nature of vision because it was visible only after one closed one’s eyes. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: mit Press, 1990), 97–98. 4. Deepa Kumar, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch Story,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 297– 313; Stacy Takacs, “Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-­9/11,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–310. 5. Kumar, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women,” 308. 6. Toby Harnden, “Mechanic First to Face Trial over Prisoner Abuse,” Telegraph, May 10, 2004, telegraph.co.uk/news, and Toby Harnden, “U.S. Soldier Jailed over Prisoner Abuse,” Telegraph, May 19, 2004, telegraph.co.uk/news; Luc Sante, “Tourists and Torturers,” New York Times, May 11, 2004, a23. 7. The images were reportedly leaked to cbs by a relative of one of the military police officers accused of abusing prisoners after an investigation conducted by the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (cid). That investigation was instigated by Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who secured two cds of digital photographs from Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. and turned them over to the cid on January 13, 2004. Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 215–16; Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 22–28; Strasser, The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and the Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq, ed. Steven Strasser, intro. Craig R. Whitney (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 36–38. 8. Claudia Wallis, “Why Did They Do It?” Time, May 17, 2004, 38. 9. I would like to make clear that I think Lynndie England’s actions, as documented in the photographs, and those of her colleagues and the commanders who authorized or indirectly condoned those actions, or simply failed to stop them, are absolutely reprehensible. But while the fact of her womanhood may (or may not) 260 — Notes

have played a central role in her effectiveness as a torturer of Iraqi men, it is important that England’s actions be measured and condemned in the United States according to her status as a soldier and not according to her status as a woman. 10. Katha Pollitt, “Show and Tell in Abu Ghraib,” The Nation, May 24, 2004, 9. Sherene H. Razack discusses the dismay with which Western feminists responded to the participation of women in the torture at Abu Ghraib in Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 75–78. 11. “New Abu Ghraib Pictures Spark Fear, Outrage,” February 15, 2005, msnbc.com. 12. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 13. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 124, 139. 14. Albert Edward Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1924); Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11; S. M. Smith, American Archives. Francis Galton is the British inventor of eugenics, and his works include Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1892); Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907); and Natural Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1889). For more on the influence of eugenics in American culture, see Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-­American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). 15. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ed. Trudier Harris, 14–45, 19. 16. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 90; S. M. Smith, American Archives, 146–48. 17. For further examinations of white womanhood and lynching, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-­Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 18. Susan Sontag makes this link in “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, 25–29, 42, 27. See also Frank Rich, “It Was Porn That Made Them Do It,” New York Times, May 30, 2004; Luc Sante, “Tourists Notes — 261

and Torturers,” New York Times, May 11, 2004; Hazel Carby, “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture,” Open Democracy, November 10, 2004; Sherene H. Razack, “How Is White Supremacy Embodied?: Sexualized Racial Violence at Abu Ghraib,” University of Victoria Colloquium in Political, Social and Legal Theory, December 2, 2005, http://www.law.uvic.ca/demcon/victoria_colloquium/documents/Razack%20cjwl.rtf, and Razack, Casting Out, 59–80; Dora Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (summer 2005): 88–100; and Jonathan Markovitz, “Racial Spectacles under an Anti-­Racist Gaze: New Media and Abu Ghraib,” in Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2011), 124–58. For an analysis of the role photography played in the ritual of lynching, see Leigh Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 266–73; S. M. Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 19. Stephen Kiehl, “The X-­rated War: Prison Pictures Are a Type of Pornography,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 2004. 20. Ashraf Rushdy, “Exquisite Corpse,” Transition 83 (2000): 70–77. 21. Quoted in Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004, 42. 22. Mark Danner, “The Logic of Torture,” New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004, 72. 23. Serra’s print is reproduced in Artforum, September 2004. Susan Cahan, “Art in Today’s Urgent Times,” lecture delivered at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, October 12, 2004. According to Susan Sontag, this is what harrowing photographs do: “they haunt us” (Regarding the Pain of Others, 89). Although Serra’s print is not a photograph, it amplifies the ghostly, nightmarish characteristics of its source image, the infamous photograph of the hooded man. As W. J. T. Mitchell has said, “The images seem to keep coming back to haunt the nation in whose name they were produced, while eliciting screen memories of lynching photographs, martyrdoms, and scenes of torture. We seem to have already seen them when they first appeared, as if we were recognizing the return of a whole set of familiar images, but in a new context, and carried by a new technology.” W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 116. 24. Stephen Kiehl, “The X-­rated War.” See also Alessandro Camon, “American Torture, American Porn,” Salon.com, June 7, 2004, and Susan J. Brison, “Torture, or ‘Good Old American Pornography’?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4,

262 — Notes

2004. Susan Sontag also notes that “most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme” (“Regarding the Torture of Others,” 27). Zabet Patterson discusses the enhanced possibilities for viewer identification in digital pornography in “Going On-­line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era,” Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 104–123. 25. I would like to clarify that, as Judith Butler has argued, “we make an error if we insist that the ‘pornography’ of the photo is to blame.” Torture, not pornography, is the problem. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” 91. 26. I would like to thank Michele Mitchell for encouraging my thoughts along these lines. 27. Hazel V. Carby, “A Strange and Bitter Crop,” and Sherene H. Razack, “How Is White Supremacy Embodied?” 28. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 65–66. 29. William Douglas, “A Case of Race? One pow Acclaimed, Another Ignored,” Seattle Times, November 9, 2003. 30. Nadra Kareem, “Media Vying for Texas Woman’s pow Story,” El Paso Times, April 23, 2003. 31. The same might be said of Lori Piestewa, attacked in the same convoy as Johnson and Lynch. Piestewa became the first Native American woman to die in combat. Margaret Kimberley, “Freedom Rider: Shoshana Johnson and the Gangsters of War,” The Black Commentator 71, January 1, 2004, www.blackcommentator.com. 32. “Spc. Shoshana Johnson: Former pow Gets a Hero’s Welcome,” Ebony 58, no. 10 (August 2003): 49. 33. I would like to thank Jonathan Smith for his insights along these lines. 34. Stacy Takacs, “Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-­9/11,” 300. In several speeches, President Bush argued that U.S. military action has made life better for Afghani women and girls, as well as for women throughout the Middle East. He consistently cited Afghani girls attending school and their mothers living free from the fear of whippings in “the public square” and executions in “sports stadiums” at the hands of the “backward” Taliban as evidence of the liberating power of U.S. military might. In comments made to senior Floridians at Daytona Beach International Airport on January 30, 2002, President Bush proclaimed, “There’s nothing that makes me more joyous than to know our great military have been liberators; liberators of oppressed women and children, liberating people from the clutches of one of the most barbaric regimes in the history of mankind.” In his remarks at the Victory 2004 Rally in Holland, Michigan, on September 13, 2004, the President declared: “I believe women in the Middle East long for a day of their freedom.” George W. Bush, “President Asks Seniors to Get Involved in USA Freedom Corps,” Office of the Press Sec-

Notes — 263

retary, Daytona Beach, Florida, January 30, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov /news/releases/2002/01/20020131.html; George W. Bush, “President’s Remarks in Victory 2004 Rally in Holland, Michigan,” Office of the Press Secretary, Ottawa County Fairgrounds, September 13, 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/re leases/2004/09/20040913–5.html. 35. Deepa Kumar, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women.” 36. George Rush, “Jessica’s Hustled,” Daily News, November 11, 2003, www.ny dailynews.com. 37. Pfc. Lynndie England was sentenced to three years in prison and given a dishonorable discharge from the army. Josh White, “Reservist Sentenced to 3 Years for Abu Ghraib Abuse,” Washington Post, September 28, 2005, washingtonpost .com. 38. As Judith Butler might say, they helped to bring into view the “frame that blinds us to what we see.” “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” 100.

264 — Notes

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abel, Elizabeth, 218n10, 220n24 Abu Ghraib photographs, 18–19, 195–212, 213; critical commentary on, 200–202; lynching and, 195–97, 202–8, 212, 262n23; as pornography, 206–7, 262– 63nn24–25; publication of, 198–99, 260n7; U.S. court martials for, 198–99, 212, 264n37 Abyssinian War of 1867–68, 232n44 Afghanistan War, 195, 263n34 African Chief (Day), 57, 57–58 African diaspora, 180, 255n43 afterimages, 196, 260n3 Agassiz, Louis, 83 agrarian idealism, 131–33, 140–41, 164, 245n12, 246n21; Colonial Revival movement and, 134–35, 141–44; Dawes Act and, 147; Southern Appalachian culture and, 146–47, 247nn26–27; Southern tenant farming and, 132, 147–55. See also Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley Aimer, Catherine, 236n7 Alamayou, Prince of Abyssinia, 232n44 Alloula, Malek, 63 American Colonization Society (acs), 251n13; Liberian project of, 177–82, 184, 191–92, 253nn29–30, 256n56, 257n60, 258n80; records of, 184, 190–91, 258n76; Washington’s work for, 256n56

Anderson, Benedict, 167, 168, 249n2 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge), 79, 86; artistic themes in, 90–91; as artists’ atlas, 89–90; ascending stairs, looking round, waving hand’chief, 87; boxing, open hand, 85; cost of plates from, 238n47; dancing waltz, two models (detail), 17, 95, plate 4; getting into bed, 92, 93; on guard, walking, and turning around, 82; running, full speed, 78; striking a blow, 84, 84–85; toilet, sitting and putting on stockings, 92, 93; toilet, two models, one disrobing eight, 90, 90–91; turning, ascending stairs, bucket of water in r. hand, 87; two models, eight brings cup of tea, one takes cup and drinks, 95, 96; two models, one pouring bucket of water over eight, 88; two models, one standing, the other sitting, crossing legs, 95, 96; walking, 79, 79–80; wrestling, Graeco-­Roman, 97, 97. See also Muybridge, Eadweard J. Anson, Rufus, 258n76 Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, 104–5 anthropometric measurement, 83–85, 237n23 Appleton, William Sumner, Jr., 135, 144 Armageddon triptych (Day), 59, 60–62, 234n48

The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (Muybridge), 75, 76 Austen, Alice, 245n11 Avedon, Richard, 27–28 Azoulay, Ariella, 167–68, 175, 252n22 Bailey, Ben, 83–85, 236n7 Barnum, P. T., 11 Barthes, Roland, 17, 23–38; autobiography of, 32–34; on being photographed, 28, 30, 38, 190; personal and family life of, 35–36, 224n14, 225nn26–27; on personal impulses, 23, 38; on photographic meaning as mask, 27–28, 30; photographs of, 33, 38, 215, 226n33; on pity and embrace of the subject, 36–37, 225n31; on procreation through writing, 32–34; on the punctum, 16–17, 23–27, 34–38, 69, 224n7; on race, 31– 38; race-­based studium of, 24–25, 27, 36–37; on sharing skin, 29–31, 35; on that-­has-­been, 24, 27, 29–31, 34, 37–38. See also Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography Batchen, Geoffrey, 217n3, 218nn9–10, 222n48 Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty (Day), 59, 59–60, 61 Becker, Jane, 146 Benjamin, Walter: on the beginnings of photography, 2; critical project of, 220n24; on messianic moments, 71; on the optical unconscious, 4–7, 76– 77, 97–98, 176, 219n13, 219n15; on the progress of history, 69–71; theory of photographic representation of, 69 Benson, Stephen Allen, 186, 257n76 Berger, Martin, 117, 123–24 Berman, Patricia, 228n20 Bischof, Libby, 226n2 black internationalism, 255n46 blind spots, 6–7, 17–18. See also racial blind spots; trains; the West the body: in Day’s photographs, 45–53; in Neoclassical art, 45; in social and scientific hierarchies, 46–47 Boston Camera Club, 44

284 — Index

Boym, Svetlana, 131, 245n7 Braun, Marta, 80–81, 238n47 Brewster, David, 219n13 Brown, Dona, 245n7 Brown, Elspeth, 83, 86, 91, 236n7 Brown, John, 18, 165, 166, 168, 174–76, 189, 192, 252n20, 252n22, 253n24 Brown, William Wells, 55 Buguet, Édouard Isidore, 11–12 Bulkeley, Eliphalet Adams, 170, 171 Burgin, Victor, 33, 225n31 Burin, Eric, 253nn29–30, 259nn83–84 Burns, Sarah, 140, 246n15, 247n30 Bush, George W., 210, 263n34 Butler, Judith, 259n1, 263n25, 264n38 calotypes, 217n7 the camera, 16–19; first pictures of, 1–2, 217n3, plate 1; as paradoxical technology, 7–8; whiteness as normative for, 15–16 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Barthes), 23–38; on Avendon’s portrait of William Casby, 27–28, 30; on Galton and mental illness, 35–36; images omitted from, 31, 224n12; on the maternal procreative body, 33–36, 223n3; on the political right of subjecthood, 28; on the punctum and studium, 16–17, 23–27, 34–38, 224n7; on the slave market photograph, 29–30, 31; on that-­has-­been, 24, 27, 29–31, 34, 37–38; on VanDerZee’s photo, 24–27, 34–37, 223n6, 225n26; on the Winter Garden Photograph, 30–32, 224n12. See also Barthes, Roland Camera Work journal, 44–45 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 232n44 Carter, J. R., 230n36, 233n46 Carville, Lucy Butts, 136, 137 Casby, William, 27–28 Casement, John S., 102, 102–3, 120 Casid, Jill, 257n60 censorship, 195, 259–60nn1–2 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 120– 22 Chapman, Samuel, 148

Chase, Malcom, 131 Chauncey, George, 233n46 “Chorus Girls” series (Rau), 92–95 citizenship, 167–68; civil contract of photography and, 167–68, 175, 249–50n2; of free blacks, 174, 178, 179–80, 255n42; national manhood and, 179–80; of self-­governing African Americans in Liberia, 174, 186–92; of Washington’s white middle-­class clients, 170–72 civil contract of photography, 167–68, 175, 249–50n2. See also Azoulay, Ariella Clay, Henry, 178 Cline, Albert, 236n7 Coates, Edward, 78 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 44, 70 Coker, Philip, 186, 189, plate 9 Colonial Revival movement, 134–35, 141– 44, 245n12; racialized identities and, 144–46; Southern Appalachian culture and, 146–47, 247nn26–27. See also Nutting, Wallace The Coming of Mechanization (Emmons), 140 Cooper, Emmanuel, 228n15, 228n24 Copeland, Horace, 228n19 Copeland and Day publishing, 228n19 countervisualities, 221n30 Crary, Jonathan, 7, 236n3 Cresson, Elliott, 251n13 Crucifixion (Day), 40 Cummings, Elijah, 210 Curtis, Edward S., 144–45, 145, 247n27 Curtis, Verna Posever, 228n21 Danly, Susan, 120, 240n15 Danner, Mark, 205–6 Darby, Joseph M., 260n7 Darwinian theory, 88–89 Daughters of the American Revolution, 145–46 Davis, Susan, 249n42 Dawes Act of 1887, 147 Day, F. Holland, 16, 17, 39–71, plate 3; African works of, 53–65, 56–58, 66, 67, 230–31nn35–37, 232–33nn45–46, 234n48; Boston studio of, 233n46; on

Greek (classical) culture, 55–62, 67; male nudes of, 45–47, 67, 227–28nn13– 15; Orpheus series of, 47–53, 48, 49, 67; Passion of Christ images of, 39–41, 40, 42, 43, 44, 61, 67, 68, 71, 226n2, 226n5, 230n33; portraits of, 63–65, 64, 66, 70, 234n56; portrayal of homoerotic desire by, 44, 47–53, 62–69, 228–29nn20–22, 229n28, 235n57; Sacred Subjects installation of, 60–62, 61; soft-­focused pictorialist aesthetic of, 41–45, 47, 50, 67–69, 71, 228n24; St. Sebastian images of, 50–52, 67, plate 3; symbolism and idealism of, 58–62, 67–69, 235n60 Deitcher, David, 37 Delaney, Martin, 55 Demachy, Robert, 226n5 Derrida, Jacques, 260n2 Dinius, Marcy, 257n68 Doane, Mary Ann, 81, 237n15 Douglass, Frederick, 28, 55; on self-­ possession, 187; on self-­representation through photography, 172, 190 Dreiser, Theodore, 95 Du Bois, W. E. B., 55, 232n45; on double consciousness, 174; on Liberia, 255n46; on “uplift” programs, 148 Durand, Asher B., 117 Dyer, Richard, 14–15 Eakins, Thomas, 77–78, 89, 227n13 Ebony and Ivory (Day), 54, 54–55, 62, 230n36 Edmunds-­Tucker Act of 1887, 127, 243n70 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 255n43, 255n46 Egyptian culture, 55–56 Elkins, James, 219n20; on blindness and blind spots, 219n16, 220n24; three models of photography of, 217n6 Ellenzweig, Allen, 228n22, 230n37 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 156 Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley, 16, 18, 131–64, 244n7; Appalachian photog‑ raphy of, 146, 146–47, 247nn26–27; disinterest in urban photography of, 133–36, 244n6; family background of,

Index — 285

Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley (cont.) 133, 135, 146; landscapes of, 155–59, 156, 158, 249n36; New England rural photography of, 132, 132, 136–44, 137–39, 140, 141, 245–46nn12–15; nostalgic agrarian idealism of, 131–33, 162, 164, 245n12, 246n21; painted lantern slides of, 133, 149, 152, 159–64, 249nn38–39, 249n42, plates 7 and 8; on photographic technology, 132–33, 159, 162, 164, 244n5; racialized vision of, 144– 47; “salvage” photography of outmoded ways of, 143–47; snapshots of, 152, 152–55, 164; Southern tenant farm photos of, 132, 147–55, 149, 150, 154, 157, 247n31, 248n34 Emmons, Dorothy: painted lantern slides of, 162–64, 249n42; photographs of, 133, 138, 139, 153, 155–57, 159, 160, 247n31 Emmons, James, 247n31 England, Lynndie, 19, 195–202, 196, 199, 207–8, 211, 211–12, 213, 260n9, 264n37 Entombment (Day), 60 Epler, Blanche, 236n7 An Ethiopian Chief (Day), 58, 59–60 Ethiopian culture, 55–60, 231–32nn42–45 Ethiopian Monarch (Day), 60 eugenic movement, 35–36, 83, 237n23, 261n14; on African American poverty, 148; on miscegenation, 203–4; on white women and national stability, 202–3, 208 Evans, Frederick, 63, 64 Evening (Day), 230n36 Expansible Catalogue (Nutting), 142–43 family portrait (VanDerZee), 24–27, 34–35, 223n6, 225n24 Fanning, Patricia J., 226n2, 230n36, 233n46 Fanon, Frantz, 30 Faries, Randolph, 236n7 Faux, Egbert Guy, 101 Felder family (Emmons), 152–53, 154 Fenton, Roger, 259n1 “first photograph” (View from the Win-

286 — Index

dow at Le Gras—Niépce), 1–2, 217n3, 217n6, plate 1 Flynt, Larry, 212 40th Parallel Survey of 1867, 119 Foster, Hal, 7 Foster-­Rice, Gregory, 247n27 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 6, 219–20nn20–21 Friedberg, Anne, 240n3 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 174, 178 Gallop, Jane, 28, 224n13, 224n22 Galton, Francis, 35–36, 83, 261n14 Garrison, William Lloyd, 178 gendering: of citizenship, 179–80; Muybridge’s racially based encoding of, 83–92, 237n23; of national purity, 202– 3, 208; of pictorialist photography, 45; of symbols of the Iraq war, 196–202, 209–12, 214, 260n9 Gernsheim, Helmut, 2, 217n3 Gérôme, Jean-­Léon, 90 Giancola, Nicola, 47, 50–51, 52, 228n21, 228n25, 235n60 Gillman, Susan, 232n45 Gliddon, George, 55 Gloeden, Wilhelm von, 50, 97, 228n14 gonzo porn, 206–7, 262–63nn24–25 Gordon, Avery, 6 Gordon, Sarah Barringer, 125, 238n31, 239n44, 243n70 Gould, Charles, 117 Graner, Charles A., Jr., 200, 204, 204–5, 260n7 Granite Cañon, from the Water Tank (Russell), 111–12, 113 The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views . . . (Russell), 100, 110–14, plates 5 and 6; Carmichael’s Cut, Granite Cañon, 111, 112; Dale Creek Bridge, from Above, 113–14, 114; Granite Cañon, from the Water Tank, 111–12, 113; Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo Cañon, 118, plate 6; Laramie Hotel, Laramie City, 115, 115; Mormon Family, Great Salt Lake Valley, 125, plate 5; Mormon Tabernacle in, 125–26; On the Moun-

tains of Green River, 117–18, 119; promotion of travel by, 120; Residence of Brigham Young, 125–27, 126; Source of the Laramie River, 117, 118; visual formulation of the West in, 114–20; white West portrayed in, 100, 120–27; The Wind Mill at Laramie, 115–16, 116. See also Russell, Andrew J. Greek (classical) culture, 55–62, 230n35 Green-­Lewis, Jennifer, 218n10 Grier, Thomas, 236n7 Griffin, Robert K., 257n69 Gunning, Tom, 12 Hampton Institute, 147–48 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 7, 176, 220n26 Hanson, John, 186 the harem, 63 Hariman, Robert, 252n22, 253n25 Harman, Sabrina, 204–5 Harry Ransom Center (hrc), 1–3 Hartford Daily Courant advertisement, 176–77, 177 Haupt, Herman, 101, 123 Haycox, Ernest, 243n54 Henderson, John, 107 Hensley, John, 146 Hersh, Seymour, 205 The Home of Paul Revere (Emmons), 133–35, 134 homosexuality, 47–53; Day’s portrayal of, 44, 47–53, 62–69, 228–29nn20–22, 229n28, 235n57; as identity, 50; racialized views of, 62–65, 234n51, 234n54, 235n57; urban geography of, 233n46; visual erotic practices of, 49–51, 228nn14–15 hooks, bell, 174, 252n18 Hopkins, Pauline, 55 Hugo, Victor, 107 immigration, 120–23, 134–35, 144–46, 235n60 Innes, William, 251n13 Inspecting a Slave (White) (Muybridge), 90–91

Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit (Day), 42 Iraq War, 195–212; black women serving in, 208–12; Bush’s rhetoric on Iraqi women and, 210, 263n34; censorship and propaganda of, 195, 259–60nn1–2; female victims of, 208–10, 263n31; white female symbols of, 196–202, 209–12, 214, 260n9. See also Abu Ghraib photographs “Is Photography an Art?” (Day), 41 It Is Finished (Day), 42 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 122–23, 167–68, 235n60 Jay, Martin, 7 Jefferson, Thomas, 140, 149, 178 Johnson, Carol, 256nn55–56, 257n62, 257n69 Johnson, Shoshana, 208–10, 209 Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 147–48 Kaplan, Louis, 221n32, 222n48 Kareem, Nadra, 209 Käsebier, Gertrude, 44 Kaye, Richard, 50 Keats, John, 59–60 Keller, Corey, 219n13 Kelsey, Robin, 119, 218n10, 240n15, 242n50 Kipnis, Laura, 238n30 Kirby, Lynne, 99–100 Knight, Diana, 224n12, 224n14, 225n27 Kodak company, 131, 244–45n7 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6–7, 14, 220n24, 220n26 Krauss, Rosalind, 5–6, 119, 242n49 Kristeva, Julia, 33 Lacan, Jacques, 33 Lamprey, John, 46, 83, 237n23 landscape photography, 167; of Emmons, 155–59, 249n36; of Russell, 105, 114–20. See also the West lantern slides: of Emmons, 133, 149, 152, 159–64; of Russell, 105–6

Index — 287

Lee, Anthony, 122 Liberia: acs’s project in, 176–82, 184, 191–92, 253nn29–30, 256n56, 256n58, 257n60; farming in, 191, 258n80; in‑ dependence of, 179; as masculine endeavor, 179–80, 254n38; material exchange with the U.S., 190–91; native population of, 177, 180–81, 191–92, 259n83; self-­possession and subjectivity in, 174, 180, 186–92, 255n46, 257nn68–69; slave trade in, 183–84, 253n29; social hierarchies and discrimination in, 191–92, 259nn83–84; Washington’s experience in, 168, 181–92 Lincoln, Abraham, 178 Linked Ring salon, 44 Love, Heather, 230n30 Lubin, David, 252n19 Lucaites, John Louis, 252n22, 253n25 Lugenbeel, James W., 181 Lynch, Jessica, 196, 197–99, 201–2, 208–9, 212, 263n31 lynching, 18–19, 53–54, 63, 195–97, 202–8, 262n23; castration and, 207–8; postcards of, 205; white womanhood and, 193–94, 203, 208, 212. See also Abu Ghraib photographs Madeira, Percy C., 236n7 Madison, James, 178 marche en flexion (Regnault), 82–83 Marey, Étienne Jules, 81, 82, 236n5, 237n15 Marr, Timothy, 63 Mattison, Hiram, 221n36 Mavor, Carol, 224n22, 225n26, 257n66 McCurry, Stephanie, 254n38 McGarry, Molly, 10, 14 McGill, Urias Africanus, 184, 185, 257n64 McGill woman (unidentified), 184, 185, 257n64 McKay, John, 258n76 Menelek (Day), 55–58, 56 Menelik I, Emperor of Ethiopia, 55–56, 60, 231n42 Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, 56–57, 231–32nn43–44 Mercer, Kobena, 230n35

288 — Index

Michaels, Barbara, 231n43, 234n48 Mileaf, Janine, 89–90, 95, 237n17 Miller, Angela, 117, 247n30 Miller, D. A., 33, 224n22 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 221n30 Mitchell, Michele, 179, 254n38 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 238n41 Mitchell, W. J. T., 7, 262n23 Monroe, James, 177–78 Morgan, Jayne, 238n41 Mormons, 124–27, 126, 243n70, plate 5 Morris, Edward, 186–87, 188 Morton, S. G., 55 Moten, Fred, 223n3, 224n8 motion: cinematic forms of, 99–100; Muybridge’s studies of, 17, 75–83, 97–98, 236n3, 236n5, 237n15, plate 4; perception of train passengers of, 99–100, 110; racial taxonomies of, 82–83; space between frames in, 17, 81–82; stereoscopic forms of, 109–10; viewer imagination in, 77, 79–81, 97–98 Mumford, Kevin, 233n46, 234n51 Mumler, William H., 9, 11–14, 13, plate 2. See also spirit photography Muybridge, Eadweard J., 16, 75–98, plate 4; artistic themes of, 88–91, 238n30; artists’ models of, 236n7; class hierarchies of, 91–92, 238n31; erotic portrayals of, 90–97, 238n41, 239n44, 239n48; portrayals of whiteness by, 86–89; pugilist portrayals by, 84, 84–85, 85; racially based encoding of gender by, 83–92, 238nn30–31; running horse portrayals by, 75, 76; scientific intentions of, 82–83, 237n17, 237n23, 239n44; “space between” frames in motion studies of, 17, 75–83, 97–98, 236n3, 236n5, 237n15; viewer imagination and, 77, 79–81, 97–98. See also Animal Locomotion Nadar (Gaspard-­Félix Tournachon), 236n5 national imaginings, 18, 167–68, 249n2 Native Americans, 120–21; Curtis’s

photographs of, 144–45, 145; Dawes Act and, 147; disappearance of, 144 Naturalization Law of 1790, 122 Nelson, Dana, 179 New School of American Photography, 44 Nickel, Douglas, 219n13, 220n28 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 1–2, 215, 217n6, plate 1 Norton, Tristram G., 138, 139 nostalgia, 131–33, 136–41; agrarian idealism and, 131–33, 141–42, 245n12, 246n21; Colonial Revival movement and, 134–35, 141–44, 245n12; progressive-­era preservation movement and, 134–36; racialized view of, 144–47; staging of the past for, 136, 142–44, 162, 164, 246nn21–22. See also Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 140 Nott, Josiah, 55 Nutting, Wallace, 141–44, 143, 246n22 Nye, David, 113, 121 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 60 Old Pillsbury Homestead (Emmons), 132, 164, plate 8 the optical unconscious, 4–16, 218n10; in Muybridge’s motion studies, 75–83, 97–98; photography’s disruptive temporality and, 176; in spirit photography, 8–14, 222nn47–48; viewer imagination in, 77, 79–81, 97–98. See also racial blind spots Orientalism, 63, 235n59 Orpheus, 52–53, 230n30 Orpheus series (Day), 17, 47–53, 48, 49 Osterhout, David, 25, 27 Osterhout, Estelle, 25, 27, 34–37, 225n24 Osterhout, Mattie, 25, 27, 225n24 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 118–19, 240n15, 242n50 Ovid, 53 Panorama of the War for the Union (Russell), 101

panoramic perception, 100, 112–14, 120, 240n3 Paris Exposition of 1900, 147–48 Patterson, Zabet, 262n24 Pattison, William, 106 Paul Revere Memorial Association (prma), 135 Péladeau, Marius, 246n14 The Pencil of Nature (Talbot), 3–4, 217– 18nn7–10; Bust of Patroclus, 15–16; Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway, 4, 5, 218n10. See also Talbot, William Henry Fox Pepper, William, 86 Peterson, Daniel H., 256n58 physical anthropology, 83–85, 237n23 physical education, 86 pictorial photography, 44–45, 67, 69–71, 227n12; Day’s work in, 41–44, 50, 67–69, 71; gendering of, 45 “Pictures and Progress” lectures (Douglass), 172 Piestewa, Lori, 263n31 Pinney, Christopher, 218n10, 219n15 Pollitt, Katha, 200 polygamy, 125–27 portrait photography, 167–68; civil contract of subject and photographer in, 167–68, 175, 249–50n2; using daguerreotypes for, 18, 170–72, 175, 184–91, 249n2. See also Washington, Augustus Powell, Richard, 223n6 Prodger, Phillip, 75–76 Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (Durand), 117 the punctum, 38, 224n7; Barthes’s conception of, 16–17, 23–27, 34–37; in Day’s pictorialist images, 67–69 race: the agrarian ideal and, 132, 147–48, 247n30; anthropometric measurement of, 83–85, 237n23; binary divide in, 123; classical Greek and Egyptian culture and, 55–62, 67, 230n35, 231–32nn41–44; gender differentiation and, 88–92; lynchings and, 53–54, 63, 195–97, 202–

Index — 289

race (cont.) 8; Muybridge on bodily codification of, 82–92, 238nn30–31; in Oriental‑ ist fantasies, 63, 235n59; rights to gaze and, 174, 252n18; rural poverty and, 147–55; self-­possession and, 174, 186– 92; sexualized views of, 62–65, 90–91, 234n51, 234n54, 235n57; U.S. immigration policies and, 120–23, 235n60; in Washington’s national imaginings, 18, 168, 181–92, 259nn83–84; whiteness as category of, 14–15, 123, 222n52. See also whiteness race science, 62–63, 71, 89, 234n54 racial blind spots, 14–16; in Barthes’s Camera Lucida, 16–17, 23–38; in Day’s representation of sexuality, 17, 44, 53–66, 235n60; in Emmons’s nostalgic pastoral scenes, 18, 144–47; female virtue and victimhood and, 202–3, 208–12; in Russell’s portrayals of the West, 100, 120–27 railroads. See trains Rau, William H., 92–95, 94 Razack, Sherene H., 261n10 Regnault, Félix-­Louis, 82–83 The Return to Earth (Day), 47, 48 Revere (Paul) house, 133–35 Roberts, Jane, 257n76 Roberts, Joseph, 257n76 Roberts, Pam, 69 Robinson, Henry Peach, 41–43 Rogoff, Irit, 14 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Barthes), 32–33 Rosen, Jeff, 232n44 Rosenblum, Naomi, 247n26 Roye, Edward James, 189, 189 Russell, Andrew J., 16, 17–18, 99–127, 186, plates 5 and 6; Civil War photographs of, 123, 124; foreground focus of, 106–8; on labor of photography, 103–5, 240n15, 241n17; large-­format prints of, 110–14; on Mormon settlements, 124–27, 126, plate 5; photographic equipment of, 102, 102–3; types

290 — Index

of photographs of, 105–10; visual formulation of the West by, 114–20; white West portrayed by, 100, 120–27, 121. See also The Great West Illustrated; trains Sacred Subjects installation (Day), 60–62, 61 “salvage” ethnology, 144 Sampson, Calvin T., 122 Sandweiss, Martha, 116–17 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 107 Schwain, Krisitin, 41 scientific role of photography, 42–43, 46, 82–83, 237n17, 237n23 Scruggs, Dalila, 256n55, 256n57, 257n63, 258n76 Saint Sebastian, 50–52, 67, 229n27, 230n32, plate 3 Sedgwick, Stephen J., 105–6 Seitler, Dana, 234n51, 234n54 Sekula, Allan, 83, 85 Selassie, Haile, 231n42 Serra, Richard, 206, 262n23 The Seven Words (Day), 39–41, 40, 42, 43, 61 sexology, 62–63, 71, 89, 234n54, 238n31 sexuality: in Abu Ghraib photographs, 19, 198–212; in Day’s representation of desire, 17, 44, 47–53, 62–69, 228– 29nn20–22, 229n28, 235n57, 235n60, plate 3; of Muybridge’s erotic nudes, 87–89, 90–97, 238n41, 239n44, 239n48, plate 4; in Orientalist fantasies, 63; racialized stereotypes of, 62–65, 234n51, 234n54, 235n57; role in lynching of, 53–54, 63, 195–97, 202–8; white national stability and, 202–3, 208. See also homosexuality Sharman, Charles, 120, 242n39, 243n54 Shaw, Christopher, 131 Shumard, Ann M., 250n8, 251n10, 252n16 Siegel, Elizabeth, 164 Sigourney, Lydia Howard Huntley, 170, 171, 251n13

Silverman, Kaja, 220n21 Simpson, Jeffrey, 246n13 Singh, Nikhil, 165–67, 255n42 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 95 Sivits, Jeremy, 198–99 Skeete, J. Alexandre, 233n46 The Slave Market (Gérôme), 90 slavery, 167; abolition movement and, 178; the agrarian ideal and, 132, 147–48, 247n30; American capitalism and, 179– 80; Douglass’s campaign against, 172; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 174, 178; history of rape in, 90–91; Portuguese trade in, 183–84, 253n29; rights to gaze and, 174, 252n18; spread into the West of, 123; tenant farming as legacy of, 147–55. See also Liberia “A Small History of Photography” (Benjamin), 76–77 Smith, Cherise, 230n36 Smith, James Skivring, 186–87, 188 Solnit, Rebecca, 238n30 Solomon-­Godeau, Abigail, 45 Somerville, Siobhan, 62, 89, 234n54 Sontag, Susan, 259n1, 262n23 the South: Appalachian culture of, 146– 47, 247nn26–27; black tenant farming in, 132, 147–55, 247n31, 248n34. See also Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley Spencer, Frank, 237n23 spirit photography, 8–14, 222nn47–48; of Bronson Murray, plate 2; of John J. Glover, 9; of Mr. Chapin Oil Merchant—& His Spirit Wife & Babe Recognized, 12, 13, 14. See also Mumler, William H. spiritualism, 8–12, 221n36 Stanford, Leland, 75, 236n5 Stange, Maren, 224n10 Stanley, Francis E., 133 Stanley, Freelan O., 133, 247n31 The Star of Ethiopia (Du Bois), 232n45 Steichen, Edward, 44 stereoscopic images, 104, 105–10, 106, 108, 109. See also Russell, Andrew J. Stieglitz, Alfred, 44–45, 135

Stilgoe, John R., 242n38 Stimson, Blake, 249–50n2 Stockton, Robert, 253n29 Stop Bush (Serra), 206, 262n23 St. Sebastian (Day), 50–52, 67, plate 3 St. Sebastian (Day) [close-­up], 51 the studium, 17, 24–25, 27, 36–37 Sunny South souvenir postcards, 148–49 Tagg, John, 225n30 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 3–4, 5, 15, 15–16, 41, 217–18nn7–10. See also The Pencil of Nature Tapia, Ruby, 224n7 Taylor, Bayard, 235n59 Tejada, Robert, 249–50n2 temporal disruptions: of Emmons’s nostalgic pastoral scenes, 16, 18, 131– 33, 162, 164, 245n12, 246n21; in Muybridge’s “space between” photographic frames, 17, 75–83, 97–98, 236n3, 237n15; “salvage” ethnology and, 144 that-­has-­been, 24, 27, 29–31, 34, 37–38 Theory of Film (Kracauer), 220n26 Theowodrus II, King of Abyssinia, 232n44 Thoreau, Henry David, 156 To Live in Beauty (Emmons), 159, 161, 162, plate 7 Trachtenberg, Alan, 119 Trafton, Scott, 23n41 trains, 17–18, 99–127; as analogue of cinematic motion, 99–100; blurring of the foreground and, 100, 107–8, 110; documentation of building of, 100–102, 108, 110–14, 112–16, 121, 124; international circulation of commerce and, 121–22; panoramic perception in, 100, 112–14, 120, 240n3; promo‑ tion of travel by, 120; transformation of the West by, 119–20, 242n38. See also The Great West Illustrated; Rus‑ sell, Andrew J.; Union Pacific Railroad Tucker, Jennifer, 218n10, 221n32, 222n47 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 156

Index — 291

Uintah Series (Russell) (stereocard), 103– 4, 104, 108–9, 109, 241n17 Ulmann, Doris, 247n27 Union Pacific Railroad, 17–18, 100–102, 129–30; Casement’s track crew of, 102–3, 120; East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail (Russell), 121; The Great West Illustrated and, 100, 110–14, plates 5 and 6; immigrant labor of, 120–27, 243n54; Russell’s Uintah Series for, 104, 241n17; Sedgwick’s illuminated lectures for, 105–6. See also trains the unseen. See the optical unconscious VanDerZee, James, 24–27, 34–37, 223n6, 225n24 The Vanishing Race—Navaho (Curtis), 144–45, 145 Vermont Beautiful (Nutting), 142, 143 Vezey, J. J., 226n5 View from the Window at Le Gras (Niépce), 1–2, 217n3, 217n6, plate 1 View of Monrovia from the Anchorage (unidentified artist, after Washington), 181–82, 183, 256nn55–57, 257n60 vision: Muybridge’s extension of, 75–76; as physiological process, 7–8; as shifting capacity, 7. See also the optical unconscious The Vision (Day), 49 visuality, 7, 221n30 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 12 Wallis, Brian, 83 Wallis, Claudia, 200 Walters, Margaret, 227–28nn13–14 war on terror. See Iraq War war photography, 195, 259–60nn1–2. See also Iraq War Warren, Kenneth, 180 Washington, Alonzo Seward, 181 Washington, Augustus, 16, 18, 165–92, 250nn7–8, plate 9; case for emigration by, 176–81, 255n42; emigrant experiences of, 168, 181–84, 190–92,

292 — Index

256nn52–53, 257n73, 257n75, 258n80, 259n84; gallery broadsides and advertisements of, 168–69, 172–74, 173, 176–77, 177, 252n14; gendered and racialized social position of, 172–75, 251n13, 252n16; Hartford portraits by, 169–72, 251n10, 251nn12–13; letters from Liberia of, 191; Liberian portraits by, 184–91, 257nn62–64, 257n75; national imaginings of, 18, 167–68, 181–92, 259nn83–84, plate 9; portrait of John Brown by, 165, 166, 168, 174–76, 189, 192, 252n20, 252n22, 253n24; use of daguerreotypes by, 18, 170–72, 175, 256n55 Washington, Booker T., 148 Washington, Cordelia, 181, 252n16 Washington, Helena Augusta, 181 The Washington Daguerrean Gallery, 173 Waterman, Sarah Taintor Bulkeley, 169 Watson, Diane, 210 Waugh, Thomas, 49–50, 228n14, 228nn24–25, 229n27, 235n57 Wedding of the Rails (Russell), 100 Wells, Ida B., 53, 203, 208 West, Nancy, 131, 244–45n7 the West: Chinese immigration and, 120–23; federal surveys of, 119, 240n15; landscape painting of, 117–18, 242n49; Mormon settlement in, 124–27, 243n70, plate 5; racial landscape of, 100, 120–27; Russell’s visual formulation of, 114–20; scientific views of, 118–19, 242n50; spread of slavery into, 123; transformation by the railroad of, 119–20, 242n38. See also Russell, Andrew J.; trains White, Clarence H., 44, 65, 66 White, David, 250nn7–8 whiteness, 123, 179; Anglo-­Saxon values of, 134–35, 144–47, 245n7; as invisible racial category, 14–15, 123, 222n52; of Irish immigrants, 123; of Mormon settlers, 127, 243n70; as photographic norm, 15–16; racial death concerns and, 144–46; in Russell’s visual por-

trayal of the West, 120–27; symbols of national virtue and, 196–99, 202–3, 211 Whitman, Walt, 156 Williams, Linda, 86–87 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 69–71

Yarema, Allan, 177, 253n30, 256n52 Yates, Beverly Page, 186–87, 187 Yates, James B., 188 Young, Brigham, 125–27, 126 Young, Robert, 55 Zealy, Joseph, 83

Index — 293