Photography, History, (Dis)belief

Abstract

Challenging the common assumption that photography is entirely different from other visual media and possesses a historically unchangeable ontological “nature,” this article investigates media competition and changing media characteristics. During the Crimean War (1854–1856), for example, slow photographic emulsions were still unable to record unstaged scenes, permitting the eyewitness sketches of reporters for the illustrated weeklies to lay claim to greater authenticity. The same is true of academic painting. The professionalization of historiography and warfare itself transformed history painting into a project of factual, scientific correctness, one further strengthened by the organization of French painting as a state‐supported, professional pursuit governed by the imperative of maximum optical accuracy on canvas. In sum, historical narration, textual or pictorial, serves the transmission of social values; but values are a matter of mythology, rather than fact, explaining the constitution of modern history as a mythological grand reçu parading in objective disguise.

Keywords:

• Press Reportage
• Historical Events
• Academic Painting
• Authenticity
• Performance

Notes

1 Reinhart Koselleck, “Standortbildung und Zeitlichkeit. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Erschliessung der Welt,” in Objektivitat und Parteilichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Reinhart Koselleck, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch‐Verlag, 1977), 17.

2 For the Crimean War in British press reportage and photography generally, see Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001); and in the same source, more detailed discussions of Guys', Fenton's, and Barker's images, complete with reproductions of the latter (pp. 53, 147, 223).

3 For Yvon's Crimean subjects, see Annie Bardon, “Militärmalerei im Second Empire am Beispiel des Krimkriegs” (PhD diss., University of Marburg, 1980), 82; Stefan Germer, “Taken on the Spot. Zur Inszenierung des Zeitgenössischen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Bilder der Macht. Macht der Bilder. Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997), 29. For Durand‐Brager's Crimean sketches and paintings, see Bardon, “Militärmalerei,” 82. For Robertson's Crimean photo reportage, see Keller, Spectacle, 158.

4 Review of Yvon's salon painting by A. du Pays in L'Illustration, 4 July 1857, 4. The original text reads: “Il lui faut lutter de précision avec les bulletins militaires, consulter des rapports des officiers, étudier la configuration du terrain, indiquer les positions des diverses divisions, en un mot, faire œuvre de stratègie et pousser la rigoureuse exactitude jusqu'à donner les portraits ressemblents des principaux combattants.”

5 See Bardon, “Militärmalerei,” 26; Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century (London: Phaidon, 1971); Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth‐Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

6 For Fenton's war council and its repetition in other media, see Keller, Spectacle, 150.

7 Compare Ulrich Keller, “Bruderkuss der Maschinen. Promontory 1869. Eine frühe Medieninszenierung,” in Fotogeschichte 25, no. 98 (2005): 69 (with references to further literature).

8 For a good general account of the Dreyfus affair, see Jean Denis Bredin, L'Affaire (Paris: Julliard, 1983). The pictorial legacy of the affair is covered by Norman L. Kleeblatt, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); and Laurent Gervereau and Christophe Prochasson, L'Affaire Dreyfus et le tournant du siècle, 1894‐1910 (Paris: Diffusion, Editions La De'couverte, 1994).

9 See Keller, “Bruderkuss,” 71. A slight variant of the photograph shown here was published by the Illustrated London News on 1 July 1911.

10 For the traditional presidential speaking inhibition and the division of powers between government branches, compare Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 25, 117; Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: Norton, 2007), 15, 178, 250.

11 For the rise of the (pictorial) press and its cultural impact, see Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 260 Years: 1690 to 1950, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 215; Sydney Kobre, Development of American Journalism (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1969), 197; Michael and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 95; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 2, 1850‐1865 to Vol. 4, 1885‐1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–1957); John Tebbel, The American Magazine: A Compact History (New York: Hawthorn, 1969), 93.

12 The veto is discussed as a “seminal event in American history” by Jean E. Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 575. For the constitutional ramifications of the repeated clashes between president and Congress in the later nineteenth century, see Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1990), 159.

13 Much can be learned about this “golden age” of political cartoons in America, though not on their competitive relationship with reportage, in Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Thomas Blaisdell and Peter Selz, eds., The American Presidency in Political Caricature, 1776‐1976 (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley Art Museum, 1976); Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Richard Samuel West, Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

14 See Ulrich Keller, “Photojournalism Around 1900: The Institutionalization of a Mass Medium,” in Shadow and Substance: Essays in the History of Photography in Honor of Heinz K. Henisch, ed. Kathleen Collins (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Amorphous Institute Press, 1990), 283.