Victorian Visual Culture

At the beginning of October, my friends and I made the hour-and-a-half drive from South Hadley to Concord, Massachusetts to tour “Orchard House,” where Louisa May Alcott wrote and set Little Women (1865). The area is also home to Walden Pond, the residence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne are buried. Concord’s rich literary history draws an abundance of tourists, and businesses in the area often use the associated names to their advantage. On Walden Street, in the town center, there are three antique stores on the same block (“Most Creative Name” goes to Thoreauly Antiques!). My friends and I found ourselves wandering around the porcelain figurines, buckets of brooches, and gaudy lamps after learning that parking at Walden Pond was $30 for out-of-state residents (and we had two cars!). Against the back wall of Walden Street Antiques, I came across a large wooden box with a rather haphazard arrangement of black-and-white photographs. They varied in size and style, and none had a traditional frame, if any. 

By this point, my friends were ready to move on to the next shop, but I knew that I wanted to spend some more time with this collection of photos. I grabbed one at random and took a picture with my phone, mildly aware of the bizarreness of taking a photo of a photo, of bridging a 200-year gap in image-capturing technology. 

Then, I noticed a small case that, when opened, revealed a small picture of a young boy. The showy presentation of the photo interested me, so I snapped another picture and went on my way.

Both photos happened to be of young boys, the first in a relatively simple paper frame, the other much fancier, encased in red velvet and set in a delicate gold frame. I’m typically unphased by these antique store displays of long-gone strangers, but with Charles Dickens in mind (the current assigned reading being the 1852 novel Bleak House), I couldn’t help thinking of the idea of photography as a means of possession.

Despite being “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family,” Dickens had a strong disdain for being photographed (Cook). In 1856, he declined an invitation to sit for a portrait at the studio of John Mayall, citing his having “so much to do and such a disinclination to multiply [his] counterfeit presentments” (“Lot Essay”). Dickens feared that his image would give viewers a “false sense of possessing” him (Cook), and that the reproduction of his body in a consumable form would only be furthering such a lie. As a private person forced to bask in the inescapable spotlight of celebrity, Dickens mourned this loss of control and found the commodification of his face to be an invasion of privacy.

Many of Dickens’ portraits are daguerreotypes, which, as of 1839, was the first commercially available photographic style (Daniel). Because of the fragile, mirror-like quality of daguerreotypes, it was popular to store and display them in “special housing” (“What is a…”). The velvet-lined folding case I came across led me to believe the photograph inside was a daguerreotype until I noticed a sticker identifying it as a tintype. (The tintype was a photographic method that peaked during the 1860s and 1870s and greatly expanded the market of mass portraiture.) However, when I searched Google for an A.J. Pierce of Rockland, ME– the small print at the bottom of the photo in the paper frame– an online archive of pioneer American photographers tagged Pierce under “daguerreotypists” (“A.J. Pierce”). Although this photo’s only protection is a paper frame, the surface does have a reflective quality as well as a level of detail that are characteristic of the daguerreotype, so for the purposes of this analysis, I’ll be categorizing it as such.

Portraiture “had for centuries been the privilege of the few” but suddenly, with the introduction of the daguerreotype, it “was pressed as a democratic right by the new middle classes of Britain, France and America” (Tagg 37). By today’s standards, photography is not so much a right as an expectation. It would be odd if the new iPhone had no camera for taking photos of your friends, or the sunset, or latte art. In fact the newest have three lenses(four, if you count the front camera). Moreover, most of us likely don’t question the need for our likeness on our driver’s license or seeing ourselves in the security footage in the self-checkout at Target. In September of this year, I witnessed my Twitter feed eagerly await the release of Donald Trump’s mugshot. The practice of photography has become utterly entrenched in and essential to the emotional lives of individuals as well as the practical functioning of the state.

However, I believe there is value in the advice of art historian John Tagg to “question the naturalness of portraiture” (35). I am especially interested in centering this questioning on the re-commodification of these centuries-old photographs. Both photos being of young boys evince not only a parental desire to capture the literal image of their youth, but the desire of the “rising social classes” to make “their ascent visible to themselves and others” (Tagg 37). 

Upon its introduction, photography was a “luxury:” not only a physical object– but a status– that could be bought, which it was by the parents of these boys, respectively (Tagg 37). At the time of their creation, the images were considered somewhat of a rarity because they required geographical access to a studio and the funds to pay a photographer. Additionally, such photos may be one of few– or the only– that were taken of these individuals as children. However, “the ‘cult’ value of the picture was effectively abolished when photographs became so common as to be unremarkable; when they were items of passing interest with no residual value, to be consumed and thrown away” (Tagg 56). Although this sentiment was pushed by pictorialists seeking to “distinguish their work aesthetically from that of commercial and amateur photographers” in the late-19th century, the “unremarkable” quality of photography as a practice and institution definitely permeates the feelings of the general public today (Tagg 56).

The portraits that I came across seem to have followed a circular path, orbiting back into the sphere of buying and selling. Notably, it is not the service of photography that is being purchased at Walden Street Antiques in Concord, but rather the physical photo alone. Furthermore, the 21st-century buyer (very likely) has no relation to either of these boys. I am left wondering what this buyer might gain from owning such an image. I assume the major audience is photography enthusiasts excited by the novelty of early image creation. But does that mean the subject of the photograph is unimportant to them? Is it possible to desire the photo for photography’s sake alone? While the subjects of any of these photos are (seemingly) not celebrities, does ownership of their image lead to a lie of false possession as Dickens feared? Moreover, does the act of possession matter? As in, if the photograph is only a “counterfeit [presentment],” is there any truth to be obtained from it (“Lot Essay”)? Paradoxically, Dickens believed the answer to be yes, since he considered the reproduction of his image to be an invasion of privacy. As for me– despite having so many debatable and ultimately unanswerable questions about the nature of possession and truth when it comes to photography, I still find myself wishing I had stayed a moment longer to buy the tintype in the plush case…

Works Cited

“A.J. Pierce.” Pioneer American Photographers, 1839-1860, 13 December 2022, https://pioneeramericanphotographers.com/tag/a-j-pierce/.

Cook, Susan. “Celebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs.” Journal of Victorian Culture, April 2016, https://jvc.oup.com/2013/04/16/celebrity-circulation-i-dickens-in-photographs/.

Daniel, Malcolm. “Daguerre (1787-1851) and the Invention of Photography.” The Met, October 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm.

“Lot Essay.” Christie’s, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-2045241.

“What is a daguerreotype?” Daguerreobase, http://www.daguerreobase.org/en/knowledge-base/what-is-a-daguerreotype.