Photography and Failure

One Medium's Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs and Disappointments

Kris Belden-Adams, Kris Belden-Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

Throughout photography's history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures – individual and institutional, technological and historiographical – Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography. From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual 'failures', this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice. Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.

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INTRODUCTION

Noble Failure: Photography as Tragic Muse

KRIS BELDEN-ADAMS

Photography’s history is riddled with the appearance of celebrated figures who died penniless and largely forgotten by their contemporaries. Even the founders of the medium, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, each flirted with bankruptcy at some point in their careers. Civil War photographer Matthew Brady lost his successful studio practice altogether, and André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, the richest photographer in the world in 1861, created and fueled the carte-de-visite craze until it fell from favor and his fortune disappeared. Nevertheless, we tend to disregard the financial failures of photography’s pioneers in our written histories, and instead celebrate only their successes. The history of photography is a story written as if there have been only victors.

This book, on the other hand, is about photography’s failures. This makes it a no less challenging and fascinating story than the more standard approach, allowing for all sorts of interesting digressions and reflections. Indeed, to convey photography’s connections to failure only in terms of a practitioner’s financial success would provide a relatively limited view of its role. The medium itself is the result of incessant experimentation, which is a process rife with failures and setbacks, even if it simultaneously promises the sweet prospect of eventual success. The medium’s earliest innovators wrote detailed accounts of their struggles to find the perfect blend of photochemistry and/or light reactivity, lenses, and camera design to work together (ideally) to produce an enduring image. Along with Niépce and Daguerre, Thomas Wedgwood is acknowledged as an important precursor and influence over the emergence of the medium, even if none of Wedgwood’s photographs have survived.¹ This is to say, our histories of photography are malleable, and able to include prehistories of the medium, including those avenues pursued to a dead end. The story of the medium has been traditionally premised on the art-historical model of object-based analysis (and is therefore partial to surviving material artifacts), but it has also been sympathetic to photography’s experimental genesis. As Richard Chalfen has suggested, after photography’s twentieth-century vernacular turn, certain “failures” of picture-taking became commonplace: double exposures, blurred images, forgetting to remove the lens cap or load the camera with film, dead batteries, neglecting to turn on the flash or make sufficient “room” for the digital storage of photographs in the camera.² Photography’s historians must learn to forgive its practitioners’ occasional failures to produce, maintain, or preserve lasting material images of a prescribed quality. Errors are more than just an acknowledged part of this narrative; they are an essential and implicit foundation.

The task of revising our histories of photography must therefore be driven by the tacit acknowledgment of the medium’s imperfections and failures, as-is, if we are to accurately and compellingly speak for the medium, its multifarious practices, and its social and cultural engagements. Any history focused exclusively on success inherently omits, neglects, and/or overlooks certain practices, practitioners, or institutions that may (or may not) have made important contributions to the overall narrative. Some images even come and go from history. After its “disappearance” into storage around 1905, Niépce’s View from a Window at Le Gras (1827) was rediscovered and reacknowledged as the oldest-surviving camera-made photograph by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim in 1952. This propelled the image back into history.³ Consequently, Niépce’s role in the establishment of the medium rose from the shadows of near-obscurity to the early pages of our survey histories. Perhaps the very definition of “success,” then, is to embrace history as an imperfect, Western-centric document that is in a constant state of flux and revision, and which obligates us to examine and sometimes integrate overlooked contributions, to dig deeper, and to provide a more inclusive narrative (even though such a story ultimately is destined for revision itself). Failure, in this sense, is a precondition to the writing of history, just as it provides the subject and inspiration for it.

This anthology brings together a global collection of writings by scholars who examine various facets of failure’s essential and persistent role in the history of photography. Their work insists on the ongoing task of recording, revising, and re-presenting the medium’s history. These authors look beyond familiar stories about familiar figures to feature previously unpublished tales of failure and causal missteps from throughout photography’s history. They include the trials and errors of several of the medium’s earliest innovators and practitioners in both fine-art and commercial practices. Many of these stories examine ways in which the medium was supposed to change or preserve culture, but didn’t. They take a closer look at how photography failed to reach its intended audience, and how its theorization has failed to speak for contemporary practice. The authors in this book also take a look at the failures of institutions, historians, curators, philosophers, and theoreticians to highlight and preserve the medium’s various practices for posterity.

Perhaps even more significantly, several of the essays in this volume point to the failure of photographic images themselves to exemplify a perceived “essence” of the medium—whether as a purveyor of a prescribed degree of “truth,” as an expression of time/space, as an expression of documentary realism, or as an agent for societal preservation or change. As such, this volume implicitly argues that photography’s rhetorical voices are as varied and diverse as its multifarious practices. Its definition is equally elusive and variously understood. Thus, from a study of “failure” also comes a keener appreciation of the nature of the medium’s success as a means of expression. It embodies modern culture in all its aspects, good and bad, successes and failures. An antidote to our usual winner-takes-all attitude, this book forces us to ask which of these we are more likely to learn from.

Notes

1 Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings Upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver” (1802), in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 15–16.

2 Richard Chalfen, Photo-Gaffes: Family Snapshots as Social Dilemmas (Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2012), 2. I thank Annebella Pollen for bringing this book to my attention.

3 Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, “Re-Discovery of the World’s First Photograph,” The Photographic Journal, Section A (May 1952): 118–120, 129.

Selected Bibliography

• Chalfen, Richard. Photo-Gaffes: Family Snapshots as Social Dilemmas, Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2012.
• Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim. “Re-Discovery of the World’s First Photograph,” The Photographic Journal, Section A (May 1952): 118–120, 129.
• Wedgwood, Thomas and Humphry Davy. “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings Upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver” (1802), in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays and Images, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980: 15, 16.

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“NOTHING WORTHY OF NOTICE”? THE DAGUERREIAN GALLERY OF T. P. AND D. C. COLLINS IN PHILADELPHIA

ANNE VERPLANCK

In 1856, The Photographic and Fine Art Journal described the Philadelphia gallery of T. P. and D. C. Collins gallery as producing “Daguerreotypes, nothing worthy of notice. The specimens are mostly muddy and dim, and show great want of care and taste.”¹ Yet the Collinses recorded that they produced over 21,000 images between 1845 and 1854. How does one explain remarks such as “I have taken three pictures this week for which I have received but seven dollars” and “every dollar that can be obtained must be saved to pay on debts”² in the context of the studio’s output? What accounts for the discrepancy between quantity and (seemingly marginally acceptable) quality?

Philadelphia quickly became a major center for the production and consumption of photographic images in the early 1840s. Members of the city’s amateur and scientific communities refined techniques for taking daguerreotypes, drawing on their knowledge of fields such as chemistry and optics.³ Others capitalized on the widespread interest in the medium. In 1846, there were approximately sixteen businesses that produced daguerreotypes in the city. A decade later, about 113 galleries sold daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and, in some cases, paper photographs.⁴

Yet when the small, family-owned firm of T. P. and D. C. Collins opened their gallery in Philadelphia in 1845, they embarked upon an endeavor for which there were no direct business models. Instead, the Collinses incorporated knowledge from past pursuits, modeled some of their practices on those of other studios, and employed novel strategies to attract customers and distinguish themselves from other daguerreotypists. The trajectory of the Collins firm provides an alternative narrative to those of large, urban daguerreotype firms and rural, often itinerant, practitioners in the United States, Britain, and Europe.⁵ Although some elements of the studio’s evolution may be specific to the family, their extraordinary written records articulate some of the challenges small, urban firms faced during the height of the medium’s popularity. Analyzing how T. P. and D. C. Collins created, sustained, and lost their business allows us to comprehend many of the forces that affected daguerreotype studios in the 1840s and 1850s. Studying the firm also elucidates the extensive interconnections among various capitalist enterprises associated with artistic production, such as printing, book publishing, and chemical manufacturing.

The earliest practitioners in New York and Philadelphia and the initial reception of daguerreotypes are well-documented.⁶ Research on individual daguerreotype firms in Philadelphia after the early years shows that they varied in scale and trajectory. Some were short-lived, others more enduring. Some daguerreotypists left to work in other cities, then returned to Philadelphia. Partnerships were created, then broken. Knowledge of how these firms operated over time remains elusive, however, as the surviving data, other than for the Collinses, are limited.⁷ Far more is known about the high-end firms in Paris, London, New York City, and Boston than the small studios that were the mainstays of the business in the United States. The majority of work on European daguerreotypes has focused on the timing and circumstances of discovery, with limited attention to work outside Paris.⁸ Much of the scholarship on early British photography centers on William Henry Fox Talbot’s development of paper-based images roughly concurrently with the advancement of daguerreotypes in France. His Talbotypes (calotypes) were paper photographic images that could be produced in multiples from paper negatives. Whether a result of Richard Beard’s control of the patent for daguerreotypes in Britain, or citizens’ interest in the paper images developed by their countryman, Talbot, there were relatively few daguerreotypists in Britain compared with the number in the United States.⁹ Several cultural studies that have examined the ongoing reception and use of the medium in the United States, such as the substantial...