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Abstract
This article considers the fluctuation, in early commentary and historiography of photography (1843–1857), between the recurring expression of nationalities as criteria of photographic practice and an aspiration to regard the new medium as a promising universal language. Several key texts from the period are examined, including David Brewster's and Elizabeth Eastlake's landmark essays, as well as reports from the juries of the Expositions of 1851 and 1855. Discussions of photographic nationalities appear to have been prominent in the period, and those authors who staked universalist claims for photography may have been doing so in reaction to excesses of patriotism. This mostly Western European discussion needs, ultimately, to be read in the context of the larger globalising function of photography in the nineteenth century.
Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the Annual History of Photography Lecture at the University of St Andrews on 14 April 2010. I wish to thank the organisers, especially Natalie Adamson and Annette Carruthers, for their kind support, as well as Luke Gartlan, Tom Normand, and Marc Boulay, among others, for their feedback. I am also indebted, for the illustrations of this article, to Marc Boulay (University of St Andrews Library), Violet Hamilton (Wilson Centre for Photography), Garance Chabert and Carole Troufléau (Société Française de Photographie), as well as Serge Kakou. I am responsible for all translations, unless otherwise specified.
Notes
1 – Many web pages today still cite this statement, found in Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends, 1839–1960, New York: Dover 1991 [1962], 229; and included in Susan Sontag's anthology of quotes in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 1975, 192. Gernsheim's statement echoed Edward Steichen's historic 1955 show The Family of Man and possibly the veteran photographer's own formulation, in a 1960 article, of photography as the ‘most simple, direct, universal language’ of visual communication, comparable as such with the visual imagery of ‘cavemen’, as quoted by Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal, 41:1 (Spring 1981), 19 and n. 24. In the latter article, Sekula produced a trenchant critique of the universal language myth, which he expanded into a narrative attack on the global marketing of images by Corbis in his ‘Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)’, October, 102 (Autumn 2002), 3–34.
2 – See, in this connection, Tom Normand's foreword to his Scottish Photography: A History, Edinburgh: Luath Press 2007, 11. Here he voices a concern about the historiographic under-representation of ‘photography from Scotland’, while insisting that his survey intends to provide a survey of photography from and about Scotland, without assuming something like a national Scottish photographic character.
3 – Except perhaps when this subject is treated in the stylistic mode of national ‘schools’ and ‘traditions’, which I will discuss in the context of the 1850s (see especially nn. 28, 29). For a recent, suggestive assessment of national ‘trends’ in nineteenth-century photo-literature, see Paul Edwards, ‘Tendances nationales et tendances économiques dans la constitution de l'objet photolittéraire’, in Littérature et photographie, ed. Jean-Pierre Montier et al., Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2008, 37–45.
4 – See François Brunet, La Naissance de l'idée de photographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 2000, ch. 1–3.
5 – See François Arago, Œuvres complètes, ed. J.-A. Barral, Paris: Gide & Baudry 1858, t. 7, 516–17; Brunet, Naissance, 80.
6 – On Arago's politics, see Anne McCauley, ‘François Arago and the Politics of the French Invention of Photography’, in Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography 1983–1989, ed. Daniel Younger, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1991, 43–70; Brunet, Naissance, 82–99; and more broadly, and most recently, the collection Les Arago, acteurs de leur temps (actes du colloque de Perpignan), Perpignan: Archives départementales des Pyrénées-orientales 2010.
7 – See Sekula, ‘Traffic’, 17.
11 – Ibid., 343–4; and Goldberg, 68–9.
8 – Unsigned review, ‘Drawing by the Agency of Light’, The Edinburgh Review, CLIV (January 1843), 309–44; partial reprint in Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print, Writings from 1816 to the Present, New York: Simon & Schuster 1981. In this remarkable essay, the Scottish scientist outlined several future key themes in the cultural critique of photography, such as its affinity with embalming and ‘mortality’ (‘Drawing by the Agency of Light’, 330).
9 – Ibid., 320–2.
10 – Ibid., 323, 333.
13 – Quoted by Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography, London: Thames & Hudson 1983, 223.
12 – See François Brunet, ‘Le point de vue français dans l'affaire Hill’, Etudes photographiques, 16 (May 2005), 122–39.
14 – André Gunthert, ‘L'institution du photographique, Le roman de la Société héliographique’, Etudes photographiques, 12 (November 2002), 56–7.
16 – Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided …, London: Spicer 1852, vol. 1, 244; see the comments by Gernsheim, Origins, 120.
15 – On nineteenth-century expositions, see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988; and Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993; on the Crystal Palace Exhibition, see Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (eds), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London: Ashgate 2008; and on the cultural politics of Second Empire Exhibitions, see Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, New Haven: Yale University Press 1987.
17 – Reports by the Juries, 277; see Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 [1938], New York: Dover 1964, 68–72; Marcy J. Dinius, ‘“Best in Show,” American Daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition’, Common Place, 9:4 (July 2009), http://www.common-place.org/vol-09/no-04/dinius/, accessed 6 April 2010.
18 – See Gunthert, ‘L'institution du photographique’, 20 and n. 35, who notes that the 1851 Exhibition marked the first attempts at ‘geographical characterizations’ of photography, and cites an anonymous article ‘Photography in the Palace of Glass’, The Athenæum, 1233 (14 June 1851), 632. In this article one reads the following remarks: ‘Daguerreotypes are largely displayed by the French, – as might have been expected, that country being proud of the discovery: – but the examples exhibited by the Americans surpass in general beauty of effect any which we have examined from other countries. This has been attributed to a difference in the character of solar light as modified by atmospheric conditions; we are not, however, disposed to believe that to be the case. […] we know of no physical cause by which the superiority can be explained, – and we are quite disposed to be sufficiently honest to admit that the mode of manipulation has more to do with the result than any atmospheric influence’.
19 – For the quote from The Illustrated London News and a technical-professional explanation of the US success, see Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 69; for a longer discussion of this success, see Brunet, Naissance, 179; and for a general discussion of the US daguerreian ‘standard’, see ibid., ch. 4.
21 – Ernest Lacan, Esquisses photographiques [1856], reprint Paris: Jean-Michel Place 1979, 21–2.
20 – See André Rouillé (ed.), La Photographie en France: textes et controversies, une Anthologie 1816–1871, Paris: Macula 1989, 182–296, esp. 218.
22 – Exposition universelle de 1855: Rapports du jury mixte international, Paris: Imprimerie impériale 1856, Vol. 2, 569.
24 – Ibid., 573.
23 – Ibid., 572.
25 – Ibid., 574. In this passage the jury also expressed their regrets that Fenton's views of the Crimean war and especially the camp at Sebastopol were not displayed.
26 – The US contribution to the 1855 exhibition consisted of a few portraits and was considered poor. In France it was widely admitted that America had neither monuments nor a taste for landscape: see Francis Wey, ‘Comment le soleil est devenu peintre, Histoire du daguerréotype et de la photographie’, Le Musée des familles (20 July 1853), 290–1.
27 – In 1856 Roger Fenton, a member of the Société Française de Photographie since 1853, donated a series of thirteen prints to the French body, which were described in the following issue of the Société Française de Photographie's Bulletin as including ‘landscapes, monuments, and groups from nature’ (BSFP 1856, 301), and which were exhibited in 1857 along with some other Fenton prints (I thank Carole Troufléau for this information). The fact that the ‘monuments’ were mostly religious edifices or ruins may have contributed to the larger perception that Fenton and other English photographers did not excel in architecture.
28 – Yeshayahu Nir, ‘Cultural Predispositions in Early Photography: The Case of the Holy Land’, Journal of Communication, 35:3 (1985), 32–50. See also the recent exhibition presented in 2007–2008 at the Metropolitan Museum and then the Musée d'Orsay, L'image révélée: premières photographies sur papier en Grande-Bretagne (1840–1860) [Impressed by Light, British Photographs from Paper Negatives (1840–1860)], Paris: Musée d'Orsay 2008. According to the press release, ‘The fondness of the early British photographers for bucolic, undulating landscapes underlines the strong ties with the land at this time, of this essentially rural nation’.
31 – Gautier, in L'Artiste, 193.
29 – Théophile Gautier, review of ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, L'Artiste (December 1856–March 1857), 193–5, partially reprinted in Rouillé, La Photographie en France, 282–5. This same text is quoted in Dominique de Font-Réaulx's essay in the catalogue to L'image révélée [Impressed by Light], 13, with the comment that English calotypists ‘managed to imbue their photographic prints with a purely British character, nourished by painting and engraving’.
30 – On this episode and its contexts, and for references, see François Brunet, Photography and Literature, London: Reaktion Books 2009, 70.
32 – Ibid.
33 – Ibid.
34 – Ibid., 193–4.
35 – See Angelia Poon, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period, Colonialism and the Politics of Performance, London: Ashgate 2008, 28.
37 – Eastlake, in Newhall, Photography, 84.
36 – Unsigned review [Elizabeth Eastlake], Quarterly Review, 101 (1857), 442–68, reprinted in Beaumont Newhall (ed.), Photography: Essays and Images, New York: MoMA 1980, 81–96.
38 – Quoted in Rouillé, La Photographie en France, 204.
39 – Ibid.
40 – According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ appears to have entered the English language in the 1840s, first in the sense of ‘belonging to all parts of the world’, and then, especially in Emerson and Dickens, as 'having the characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments'. The noun ‘cosmopolite’, in the sense of ‘citizen of the world’, was common since the seventeenth century, but it enjoyed a strong revival in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in opposition to ‘patriot’.
41 – Elizabeth Eastlake, in Newhall, Photography, 87–9.
43 – Elizabeth Eastlake, in Newhall, Photography, 89. Roger Taylor, in L'image révélée, 21, notes that ‘climate conditions’ were an ‘essential’ point in the choice of processes (especially between collodion on glass and was paper) in the 1850s.
42 – Brunet, Photography and Literature, 73–5.