The Mass Production of Memory

Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak

Tammy S. Gordon

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781625345325, 9781625345318
• eBook ISBN: 9781613767818
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company offered the first portable camera that allowed users to conveniently take photos, using leisure travel as a primary marketing feature to promote it. The combination of portability, ease of use, and mass advertising fed into a national trend of popular photography that drew on Americans' increasing mobility and leisure time. The Kodak Company and the first generation of tourist photographers established new standards for personal archiving that amplified the individual's role in authoring the national narrative. But not everyone had equal access to travel and tourism, and many members of the African American, Native American, and gay and lesbian communities used the camera to counter the racism, homophobia, and classism that shaped public spaces.

In this groundbreaking history, Tammy S. Gordon tells the story of the camera's emerging centrality in leisure travel across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its role in "the mass production of memory," a process in which users crafted a visual archive attesting to their experiences, values, and circumstances, setting the stage for the customizable visual culture of the digital age.

Chapter One

“One did not ‘take’ a camera”

The Roots of Tourist Photography

Americans used travel and cameras to represent their identities on the basis of visual culture carried over from an earlier period. Heritage had been a motivation for travel in the modern era since the popularization of the Grand Tour, a phenomenon that started in the sixteenth century and peaked in the eighteenth century, and visual culture had been associated with it from the beginning. Grand Tourists, usually young men of means primarily from England, took extensive tours of Europe, with a particular focus on Italy. The purpose of the tour was to provide classical learning in art and architecture as well as lessons in the aristocratic manners of the Continent. Self-presentation with relics of the past was also a part of the Grand Tour tradition. Grand Tourists hired painters to create portraits that included the visual evidence of history—ruins, artworks, books—to present themselves as heirs to the power of Roman and Greek antiquity.1 Artifacts and authority aligned in the visual culture of the Grand Tour. For instance, Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), the most popular Italian painter of tourist portraits, painted over two hundred portraits of British travelers from around 1740 to the end of his life. While only about a quarter of them evoked antiquity, these attracted a great deal of attention from patrons and collectors.2 In the 1750s, the young James Caulfield, who would become the first Earl of Charlemont, paused in his seven-year-long journey through Europe and the Middle East to pose for a Batoni portrait. While his lavish clothing attested to his wealth, the view of the Roman Colosseum through a window over his shoulder attested to the cultural capital accrued through heritage tourism.3 The subject of another Batoni portrait, Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, points observers toward his own view of a historical landscape (figure 1). In 1764, Edward Augustus posed for Batoni, who repeated the composition of the stately man gesturing past a powerfully large column toward the Colosseum.4 William Gordon, military man and aristocratic tourist, raised the political stakes of the relationship between past and present power in 1766 by posing in exquisite Scottish military regalia while surrounded by Roman artifacts, including the Colosseum and a monument to a Roman deity.5 As the British middle class grew in the nineteenth century, its members gained increased exposure to Grand Tour paintings through the tradition of house tours, a ritual described by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice when she narrates Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Mr. Darcy’s estate with her upper-middle-class aunt and uncle.6 Batoni’s portraits of English travelers speak to the established tradition of self-documentation and evocation of the past while on tour, a tradition continued by these travelers’ camera-holding descendants. The Grand Tour roots of tourist photography fed into the idea that travel and the visual evidence of it were the responsibility of the privileged—defined especially in terms of race and class—whose experiences could then be used as justification for their social position. Visual evidence of travel was cultural capital.

As mass travel increased in the nineteenth century and a specialized tourist industry developed in tandem, American travelers continued some of the traditions of the earlier Grand Tour. They visited ruins, museums, and galleries, and took pride in relating these experiences to their social set when they returned home. Starting around 1870, photos of them, usually produced by professional photographers hired on-site or brought with the touring parties, featured not just the ruins of the world but the tourists posing among them, just as Batoni’s sitters had emphasized their status as heirs to power. Professional photos of tourists among ruins implied control over space, and the presence of relics also implied control over time in the form of historical memory. The people-in-historic-places photos showed that the tourist had not only the means and leisure to travel to Europe but also the refinement to appreciate antiquities.

Figure 1. A souvenir of the Grand Tour. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, 1758–1759. Original oil on canvas, housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Modern travel clothes, casual poses, and sometimes the very modern presence of another camera created a visual distinction between the tourists and the evidence of the past civilizations that surrounded them. Such a distinction betrayed the ambivalence many Americans felt toward antiquities; as citizens of a relatively new nation focused on invention and economic development, American travelers of the upper middle class tended to identify with powerful past civilizations that embodied their ambitions, but at the same time they wanted to see themselves as a people focused on progress. An example from literature—Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain—demonstrated Americans’ anxiety over their own interest in the past. In 1867 Twain set out upon a steamer cruise of the Mediterranean to experience the history and culture of the region. Innocents Abroad, a parody of the sentimental travel narrative so popular in his time, resulted from this trip, and it included a passage on touring the art and ruins of Rome. Fatigued from “wander[ing] among the crumbling wonders” and being “fed upon the dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries,” its narrator worries that he might turn into a ruin himself and be “liable at any moment to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and ‘restored’ with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names on forever and forevermore.”7 Twain’s narrator satirizes the project of preservation and the creation of a material archive, particularly its social pretensions and the graffiti those pretensions invited. Even though the narrator never takes a photo or commissions a painting of his image on tour, he worries about becoming a pathetic remnant of history in the future.8

The tension between what Twain saw as the detritus of the past and the needs of the tourist to appear modern was symbolically resolved with photography. By posing with the ruins of the past and conveying the resulting images through photographic technologies such as lantern slides, the stereoscope, and the album, American tourists echoed their relatively new nation’s tentative claims to the power of empire. Re-creating a visual narrative similar to that advanced by Pompeo Batoni and his eighteenth-century sitters, they established their own connection to empires past. With the camera, though, tourists could lay claim to the past and at the same time assert their distinction from it as modern people with contemporary recording technology.

While the more elite international American tourists in Europe used visual culture to engage issues of national power, a wider variety of tourists traveled domestically. As travel narratives and other cultural products made normative the white upper-middle-class leisure tourist, Americans of different social and economic positions found ways to travel that departed from the model of the two-week to two-month leisure tour. Middle- and working-class American travelers differed from their more elite counterparts in that they were in the process of overcoming their suspicion of leisure. Cindy Aron’s work on public dialogue about vacations for the American middle and working classes reveals much angst about free time; Americans worried that idleness among the middle classes could erode the work ethic that served as part of the foundation of republicanism.9 This angst led to the development of “productive” vacationing, trips devoted to increasing one’s knowledge (as in the case of Chautauquas), promoting health through agricultural labor, working vacations, revivals and religious retreats, and sightseeing.10 Among these, sightseeing was the most popular way to vacation and at the same time feel productive. Nineteenth-century vacationers could set an agenda of sights to see and experiences to have and then busy themselves visiting natural wonders like Niagara Falls, wild landscapes, and even institutions like asylums and prisons. Cemeteries and battlefields were special venues to visit and in which to talk about the past.11 Travelers exploring the new places to which their work led them could visit sites in short day trips in between periods of work. Artists, salesmen, entertainers, and teachers were among the travelers who combined work and tourism. By the late nineteenth century, as shown by the historian Marguerite S. Shaffer, domestic tourism offered Americans a way to shape their national identity as a people possessing both landscapes comparable in magnitude to the most magnificent cathedrals of Europe and the sense to appreciate these American scenes of grandeur.12

Photography fit neatly into the American style of productive tourism, but it was bulky and technical in the 1870s. The photos that tourists brought home before the advent of the Kodak in 1888 were likely the product of a professional hired for the occasion.13 The experience of being photographed was part of the excitement of the vacation, as depicted in James Wells Champney’s illustration “The Season at Niagara Falls,” which appeared in Harper’s in 1877. It depicts a serene couple being photographed in front of the grandeur of Niagara Falls, but the scene outside the frame of the camera is chaotic: onlookers, unruly dogs, busy children (figure 2). Photography was not so much a hobby, as it would become later, as it was itself an event. Tourists in this era could also buy prepared albums created by professional photographers showing popular views of the architecture, features, and people of the places they visited. Unlike the later amateur photo albums, these minimized the presence of the tourist in the photos themselves.14

When Champney drew “The Season at Niagara Falls” in 1877, tourist photography needed some modernizing, and George Eastman was working on the problem. In 1872, the young Eastman was one of the few intrepid tourists trying with difficulty to take his own photos; unlike others, he successfully improved the cumbersome technology. Carl Ackerman, who wrote the only full-length biography of Eastman published during his lifetime, recounted Eastman’s photographic experiments while traveling and noted that Eastman took his first trip to Niagara Falls as part of a tour of the East Coast. Upon his return to Rochester, he “spent more time at his workbench” perfecting his photographic ideas.15 On another trip, Eastman noted that his “photographic outfit” was hard to carry: “I bought an outfit and learned that it took not only a strong but a dauntless man to be an outdoor photographer. My layout, which included only the essentials, had in it a camera about the size of a soap box, a tripod, which was strong and heavy enough to support a bungalow, a big plate-holder, a dark-tent, a nitrate bath, and a container for water.” Additionally, developing materials were difficult to transport, which he reported to Ackerman, saying: “The nitrate of silver was something that always had to go along and it was perhaps the most awkward companion imaginable on a journey. . . . The first time I took a silver bath away with me, I wrapped it with exceeding great care and put it in my trunk. The cover leaked, the nitrate got out, and stained most of my clothing.” Eastman summarized his early travels with a camera by saying that “in those days, one did not ‘take’ a camera, one accompanied the outfit of which the camera was only a part. . . . It seemed that one ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load.”16

In addition to learning firsthand about the unwieldiness of cameras, Eastman had another early experience that taught him an important feature of tourist photography: the presence of a camera shaped the experience of tourism itself and led people to behave differently than if the camera were not present. In his early travels, Eastman had “become wholly absorbed in photography—in spite of all the trouble involved and in spite of the fact that, whenever I set up my apparatus, a crowd drew around as though I were going to open a patent-medicine show.” In the 1870s, he tried to take a photograph of a natural wonder but ended up causing a commotion with the presence of his camera:

Figure 2. James Wells Champney, “The Season at Niagara Falls,” Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1877 (Harpweek).

One burning hot day I set up my encampment to go about photographing the natural bridge at Mackinac. . . . [A] party of tourists . . . draped themselves about the bridge engaging attitudes that were then thought necessary when one was photographed close to nature. I paid no attention to them, took several exposures, and when I had finished, one of the men came forward and inquired the price. I told him that I was an amateur making pictures for my own amusement and not for sale. He exploded “Then why did you let us stand in the hot sun for a full half-hour while you fooled around with your contraptions!”17

Eastman learned that tourists—even in the early stages of the development of tourist photography—knew, from experience with professional photographers, the albums of their peers, and the visual traditions associated with genteel travel, the “appropriate” poses for demonstrating their place in a picturesque landscape. While he did not turn these tourists into customers that day, he had found a significant customer base for his later work and a foundation for building a marketing strategy that centralized leisure travel.

By the 1890s, George Eastman’s company had tapped into touristic interest in photography and successfully addressed the portability and processing problems faced by traveling amateur photographers. The Kodak, a name Eastman gave his new portable camera because he thought it sounded “euphonious and snappy,” became available in 1888.18 It used a film roll system enclosed in a small box, and it came with an innovative business model as well: instead of having to maintain a darkroom, Kodak users simply sent the camera to a dealer for film de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index