Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle

The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J.W. Newland

Elisa deCourcy, Martyn Jolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000209938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

James William Newland's (1810–1857) career as a showman daguerreotypist began in the United States but expanded into Central and South America, across the Pacific to New Zealand and colonial Australia and onto India.

Newland used the latest developments in photography, theatre and spectacle to create powerful new visual experiences for audiences in each of these volatile colonial societies. This book assesses his surviving, vivid portraits against other visual ephemera and archival records of his time. Newland's magic lantern and theatre shows are imaginatively reconstructed from textual sources and analysed, with his short, rich career casting a new light on the complex worlds of the mid-nineteenth century. It provides a revealing case study of someone brokering new experiences with optical technologies for varied audiences at the forefront of the age of modern vision.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, the history of photography and Victorian history.

1The Americas

Competing photographic practices across shifting political borders

In mid May 1845 the editor of the New Orleans Daily Tropic announced the placement of an ‘advertising box’ at the United States Exchange on the corner of Poydras and Tchoupitoulas Streets, just up from the Mississippi docks (Figure 1.1). He called for notices of the arrivals and departures of ships and steamboats, manifests of cargo and sundry advertisements to be deposited. Submissions received before seven in the evening were promised to appear in the paper the next day.¹ The steamy and sticky onset of the summer heat had heralded the transient population’s seasonal retreat from the city and the editor was struggling to fill the columns of his four-page daily news-sheet.² In the following weeks, this ‘advertising box’ became the receptacle of a debate, a contest among New Orleans’ four daguerreotypists, each vying to produce a superior portrait likeness. The ‘theatre’ of their egos and pledges was printed on the paper’s pages among notices of circus acts, touring giantesses and one-night-only symphonies. This is where J.W. Newland’s professional career began, as a late arrival to the daguerreotypists’ contest. The press squabble between the four men featured alongside lists of imports, from hair tonic and horse saddles to medical textbooks and bell glasses, nestled among notices of in- and outbound vessels travelling to Norfolk, Baltimore and Philadelphia, as well as ports as far away as Havana, Liverpool and Antwerp.³ The advertising box was a productive space, contained, but capturing movement and facilitating transmission. Its very nature resembled the daguerreotypes being argued over. The subjects that gleamed off their reflective surfaces were similarly boxed – cased or framed – yet inherently mobile. Their images tell stories of migration; their contained likenesses would be propelled by the same networks of commerce and trade that webbed in and out from New Orleans.

Figure 1.1B.M. Norman, ‘Norman’s Plan of New Orleans & Environs’, New Orleans, 1845. Courtesy: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Cartographic Associates.

Early photography in New Orleans as part of a history of looking in transit

Before the daguerreotype process entered New Orleans as an apparatus, or even as a cased image transported by the postal system, it arrived as an idea. An initial report on the technology was published in the ‘Late from Europe’ column during June 1839, two months before the daguerreotype’s official unveiling in Paris but months after unofficial lectures held to reveal its properties.⁴ New Orleans’ Daily Picayune reported that: ‘Animal magnetism and the Daguerreotype are exciting great sensation in the scientific world – Men of acknowledged talent are delivering lectures on them to crowded and respectable audiences’.⁵

This coupling, in a column otherwise routinely concerned with summarising news of English political intrigue and European trade treaties, grafted together the daguerreotype and ‘animal magnetism’, or mesmerism, to imply a shared sense of novel spectacle. The ‘great sensation’ alluded to the watershed embodied by the new technologies, but did not deride the ‘crowded and respectable’ European audiences in the same way that Maurisset’s Parisian caricature of the same year had cast them as hysterical hordes. In many ways, this simple sentence foretold the reception and evolution of photography in the American South. Rather than being anticipated as a threat to established art, or a technology to police, the daguerreotype entered as a subject of playful banter with elusive properties.

During the year that followed, the unprecedented verisimilitude of the invention was a point of focus for media reports, not just about the daguerreotype itself, but beyond it as well. The perfect facsimile of the daguerreotype’s technology provided a language through which to convey repetition and doubling in other aspects of public life. For example, in January 1840 the editor of New Orleans’ Daily Picayune was accused of plagiarising editorials from a small North Carolina paper. He appealed to his readers, asking rhetorically whether the charge could be reversed and had, ‘Master Lemay [from North Carolina] been propping daguerreotype reflectors at us while we were writing’.⁶ The curious compilation of ‘reflectors’ and ‘daguerreotype’ betrays only a partial knowledge of the technology. Daguerreotype operators were, in fact, beginning to employ reflectors to focus additional light onto their sitters, and mirrors to reverse the inverted image that entered their cameras. These accessories were not generally used to surreptitiously take a picture, with any level of candidness impossible to achieve due to lengthy exposure times. The editor’s retort highlights how, even before the daguerreotype’s widespread commercial use, knowledge of the camera’s technical processes of inverting, capturing and imprinting reality were being metaphorically evoked as a literary device, in this case to deflect vexing allegations.

The daguerreotype was understood in New Orleans, as it was in Europe, by calling on a vocabulary already established in a diverse spectrum of traditional picture formats.⁷ The daguerreotype was discussed through the language of drawing and engraving; its physical palm-sized portrait presentation was conceptualised in terms of the modalities of miniature painting and, perhaps more particular to New Orleans, its ability to ‘capture’ a scene was theatricalised. Alexander Wolcott’s 1840s experiments with the media in New York were described alternately in the New Orleans press as ‘Daguerreotype likenesses’ and ‘Daguerreotype miniatures’.⁸ Daguerreotypes made by the Philadelphia-based chemist Dr Goddard, in the same year, were similarly described as ‘likenesses’; this term had already been widely employed for realist painted portraiture for half a century and had become inextricably tied to photography.⁹ These brief and early despatches about East Coast American studios, succinct and straightforward, were followed by journalistic flourishes in the form of a series of New Orleans columns entitled ‘Daguerreotype Drawings’. The unattributed author(s) of these textual, rather than pictorial, vignettes regaled readers with exhaustively detailed accounts of the city’s (presumably already familiar) landmarks. They described front and side views of structures such as the Old Cathedral and Carrollton House, detailing qualities of the light and including fleeting quirks such as: ‘you may catch a glimpse of half a dozen young fellows in round jackets flirting decanters’.¹⁰ Such prose aimed for the same style of unselective scrutiny the contributor imagined the yet-to-be experienced daguerreotype process might provide. Yet, the carnival city was also a place where innovation was the topic of playful repartee. The daguerreotype’s famous verisimilitude was gently mocked in reports such as that relaying news that Herr Driesbach in Boston had exposed a portrait of a circus tiger: ‘The likeness is so perfect that those who look at it seem to hear the animal growl’.¹¹ Bourgeois East Coast experiments with the daguerreotype were the subject of mockery in a topsy-turvy column on new inventions: ‘a Yankee has thrown the Daguerreotype in the shade by an artificial sun, which he carries about with him and takes likenesses at night’.¹²

This speculative discussion of photography in New Orleans represents the technology’s first – often overlooked – reproduction and dissemination: its forward travel as an idea that preceded its circulation and arrival as a physical apparatus.¹³ This context is significant because it fed a growing curiosity, manifest in concerted efforts to comprehend photography through second-hand knowledge. In New Orleans during 1839 and early 1840, the daguerreotype was anticipated for its almost unbelievable capacity to replicate sight. Its playful handling and derision in the press points to a mounting appetite for the process to be seen and experienced.

It is hard to say who took the first photograph in New Orleans or from which direction the first camera arrived, whether overland or by sea. Certainly, the Frenchman J.B. Pointel du Portail advertised daguerreotype demonstrations and an exhibition in L’abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans as early as February 1840. He notified the public that he would ‘expose several beautiful specimens of local scenery’, but it is unverifiable whether these plates were ever made or the exhibition hung.¹⁴ A very early, if not the first, advertisement for a daguerreotype camera was posted, not by an optician or fancy goods store, which would have usually carried such technologies, but by a hairdresser. Mr Theodore, for reasons undisclosed, was selling a daguerreotype apparatus from his 150 Chartres Street salon in July 1840. He invited the public to come and ‘view’ the camera, but notice of its sale was brief suggesting his ignorance of its operation or an absence of the component plates and chemistry.¹⁵ In early August, Theodore seems to have found a way around earlier obstacles and his listing was revised to announce that he was opening his premises to the public to see an ‘experiment […] made by Mr Lion […] the drawing remitted therefr...