The Camera and the Press

American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype

Marcy J. Dinius

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812206340
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Before most Americans ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this visual form through written descriptions, published and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the land. In The Camera and the Press, Marcy J. Dinius examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization of portraiture that photography enabled.Dinius's archival research ranges from essays in popular nineteenth-century periodicals to daguerreotypes of Americans, Liberians, slaves, and even fictional characters. Examples of these portraits are among the dozens of illustrations featured in the book. The Camera and the Press presents new dimensions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville's Pierre, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave. Dinius shows how these authors strategically incorporated aspects of daguerreian representation to advance their aesthetic, political, and social agendas. By recognizing print and visual culture as one, Dinius redefines such terms as art, objectivity, sympathy, representation, race, and nationalism and their interrelations in nineteenth-century America.

Chapter 1

The Daguerreotype in Antebellum
American Popular Print

On the front page of the February 23, 1839, Boston Daily Advertiser, a brief article reprinted from Paris’s Journal des Débats appeared under what had become a common headline in an age of concentrated scientific experimentation and innovation: “Remarkable Invention.”¹ The article begins,

At a session of the Academy of Sciences, held the 8th of January, M. Arago gave an account of a curious invention lately made by M. Daguerre; for making drawings.

The manner in which the camera obscura produces images of objects, by means of a lens, is well known. The new invention is a method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone; ten or fifteen minutes being amply sufficient for taking any view, though the time varies with the intensity of the light. By this machine M. Daguerre has made accurate drawings of the gallery of the Louvre and of Notre Dame; any object indeed, or any natural appearance may be copied by it—it reproduces the freshness of morning—the brilliancy of noon—the dim twilight and the dullness of a rainy day. The colours are marked by a gradation of shades similar to aqualuita [aquatint—ed.].

By first establishing the invention’s commonality with the old (the camera obscura), the article prepares readers for what is new and different—what is inventive and remarkable—about it: the “method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone.” The article assumes that readers are familiar with the camera obscura, which projects an optically precise image onto a medium that is incapable of retaining it without the intervention of an artist’s hand; it also implies that an artist must replicate by tracing the otherwise ephemeral image as it is projected onto paper or canvas. In the case of Daguerre’s “machine,” the article emphasizes, “light alone” is the copyist, making “accurate drawings” of “any object” or “any natural appearance.” What is most remarkable about Daguerre’s invention, then, is its unprecedented achievement of a simultaneously “natural” and mechanical—thus, an unmediated, objective, and scientific—means of representation. With Daguerre’s method, man is replaced by a machine that allows nature to record itself without human interference as art becomes a science.

What is most remarkable about America’s, and much of the world’s, first encounter with this supposedly unmediated form of representation is just how mediated it was. Before anyone in the United States saw any actual daguerreotypes, they read about them in newspaper and magazine articles, such as the one published in the Boston Daily Advertiser. These articles were translated or reprinted from French and British periodicals by metropolitan editors keeping a keen eye out for the first word of exciting news from abroad to compete with rival papers. Their British sources were translating from the French, and the original French articles described the process by summarizing François Arago’s January 7, 1839, announcement of Daguerre’s invention at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. And significantly, at this first public announcement of the invention of what we now call photography, Arago only described the process and the appearance of the images without exhibiting any examples as Daguerre was in continuing negotiations with the French government for payment in return for the full details of his discovery.² Though it has become easy for us to overlook from the perspective of the image-saturated present, photography thus came into public view verbally, not visually.

Despite sustained scholarly attention to the invention of photography and to its incorporation into American culture, we have yet to register fully either the extent or the effects of its linguistic and textual mediation.³ This chapter closely reads a series of early responses to the daguerreotype—specifically, articles, essays, and stories that appeared in a range of popular antebellum U.S. print publications—to attend to the different phases of daguerreotypy’s incorporation into popular culture. In doing so, it reveals how the idea of photographic objectivity was necessarily a linguistic construction, emerging over time in a diverse array of print publications. By “photographic objectivity,” I mean our still strong cultural tendency to see the photographic image as capturing its subject “as it is” or was and, thus, to naturalize—even in the age of digital imaging, and after much theorization—what we know is an artificial means of representing the world.⁴ I contend that these tendencies have their origins in the linguistic and textual mediation of the first photographic images.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison make an extensive and compelling case that the idea of “blind sight,” or objectively “seeing without interference, interpretation, or intelligence,” first emerged in mid-nineteenth-century discussions about scientific image making (17). “Over the course of the nineteenth century,” they explain, “scientists, from astronomers probing the very large to bacteriologists peering at the very small . . . began questioning their own traditions of idealizing representation. . . . What had been a supremely admirable aspiration for so long, the stripping away of the accidental to find the essential, became a scientific vice” as the “new epistemic virtue” of scientific objectivity was created (16). Yet Daston and Galison surprisingly dismiss the coincidence of the invention of photography and the rise of scientific objectivity as insignificant to their study, describing the former as one of several “remotely relevant” factors in the latter (35–36). In this chapter, I am not interested in establishing a cause- and-effect relationship between early photography and the emergence of scientific objectivity but rather in attending to the invention of photography and its mediation in print as integral components within a broader history of objectivity and of media change. As the Journal des Débats/Boston Daily Advertiser article begins to suggest, and as the readings that follow will illustrate more fully, writers represented the daguerreotype as straddling the categories of art and science that scientists increasingly were working to separate. Whereas Daston and Galison limit their history to the idea of scientific objectivity and argue that scientific and artistic images were “diametrically opposed” in the mid-nineteenth century (37), this chapter examines how the extended conversations about daguerreotypy that were conducted in print brought the issue of objectivity into conversations about artistic principles and into mid-nineteenth-century public culture more broadly. I establish how one strain of scientific and popular writing about daguerreotypy insisted on mechanical objectivity as the standard for evaluating both scientific and artistic image making and began to associate mechanically objective representation with morality, democracy, and progress. In using popular representations of daguerreotypy circulating in antebellum U.S. print publications to historicize the idea of photographic objectivity more specifically, this chapter also broadens and complicates our understanding of the history of objectivity itself.

The subject of this chapter, then, is not so much daguerreotypy itself as it is writings about daguerreotypy—articles, essays, poems, and stories that attempt to describe the new medium’s material attributes and representational work and that aim to predict or represent its cultural effects. The first section of the chapter takes us to the beginning of the daguerreian age with the first known newspaper articles announcing the daguerreotype published in early 1839, recognizing how the reprint culture of mid-nineteenth-century periodicals mediated America’s introduction to daguerreotypy. I argue that this practice of reprinting resulted in the consolidation of a set of rhetorical strategies for representing the daguerreotype as both an image and an object in the more widely reproducible and available medium of print. The resulting message about the medium’s distinguishing representational and material characteristics set the terms for how people subsequently saw and wrote about daguerreotypy.

From here, I move to the first descriptions of daguerreotypy by Americans for other Americans. I look at one example of the several letters written by visitors to Daguerre’s Paris studio that were published in U.S. newspapers and magazines both to satisfy readers’ curiosity about the invention and to verify that it was not a publicity hoax invented to generate newspaper sales. I also examine passages from representative articles reporting on the first exhibitions of images made by Daguerre in New York and Boston. As we will see, both kinds of eyewitness accounts deploy many of the same strategies for describing images that the earliest responses developed; surprisingly, firsthand observation allows these writers to say almost nothing new.⁵ This repetition, I contend, further substantiates how the written word contributed to the production of photographic meaning, preparing future viewers so that they saw, understood, and valued the daguerreotype as an unmediated form of representation.

Print was also the medium through which America’s first daguerreotypists learned the process; newspaper articles and instructional manuals taught them the basics with which they quickly began experimenting so that daguerreotypy could be used for portraiture. With newspaper announcements of Americans’ first successes in producing likenesses, the daguerreotype again captured national attention. Articles and essays about daguerreian portraiture also trained subjects-to-be in what to expect of sitting for the camera, suggesting how to pose and explaining what the picture would capture. In blending the scientific ideals of mechanical objectivity and truth-to-nature to theorize the representational work of daguerreian portraiture, these texts inspired public faith in the photographic portrait’s capacity to image one’s inner character as faithfully as one’s appearance.⁶ By including such texts in the chapter’s archive, this section recognizes and examines how print simultaneously fostered supply and demand and served as the space for negotiating the cultural effects of a flood of daguerreian images.

Having familiarized readers with daguerreotypes as images and objects and with the process by which they were made, popular periodical writers began to use the word daguerreotype more figuratively, as both a noun and a verb; what had been “sketches” of people and places became “daguerreotypes,” with the suggestion of representational reliability and authority that the word had come to carry. At the same time, daguerreotypes and daguerreotypists began serving as the occasion for and subjects of poems and short stories about life in the daguerreian age, as conversations about early photography took an explicitly literary turn. This body of literature, I contend, extended popular ideas about daguerreotypy that had been established in print to explorations of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, science and art, and democracy and the masses, often coming to conservative conclusions about the implications of technological and social progress. The chapter concludes by considering how such treatments of daguerreotypy in popular newspapers and magazines made their way into the works of the authors and daguerreotypists featured in the chapters that follow.

First Word

Immediately noticeable in the Daily Advertiser article with which this chapter and the history of photography in America begin is the absence of a specific name for the “remarkable invention.” Because the word daguerreotype had not yet been widely adopted as a name for Daguerre’s “drawings,” the article is unable to use a name to tell readers something about them; instead, it must outline the process and attempt to describe at some length what the resulting images look like. In doing so, the article establishes what will become a familiar pattern: the oscillation between assimilating and differentiating the known and unknown, old and new, that introduces readers to this new technology before the images themselves can be seen. Such strategies of mediation exemplify the “accretive, gradual process” of media change that David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins set against “the idea that new technologies displace older systems with decisive suddenness.”⁷ In this case, we see how established art forms make sense of new science and thus recognize this process as one of collaboration rather than collision.

After comparing Daguerre’s method to the operations of the camera obscura, the article draws an analogy to another established form of imaging in its effort to represent the appearance of the resulting images, likening them to aquatint, the printmaking technique characterized by its ability to produce a wide range of tones between light and dark. The similarity of these new “drawings” to monochrome prints suggests another difference between Daguerre’s invention and the camera obscura: the latter projects images in color, whereas Daguerre’s method strips images of their original colors. As the article explains, nature’s different colors “are marked by,” or translated into, “a gradation of shades” in Daguerre’s process, allowing for a degree of detail in the image that compensates for its lack of color. In introducing what could be seen as a shortcoming in the daguerreotype’s representational capacities, this second attempt at analogy also points up the limitations of attempting to understand the new through the old by indicating that the images are “similar to” and, thus, not exactly like aquatint. In gaining a sense of their resemblance, the reader recognizes that this comparison, too, necessarily falls short of capturing what Daguerre’s images actually look like and is compelled to pick up imaginatively where description leaves off.

The article closes by noting that after Arago’s account, Jean-Baptiste Biot—the physicist noted for his significant contributions to scientific knowledge of optics and light—“expressed his admiration of the invention, which he could only justly praise by comparing it to a kind of physical retina as sensible as the retina of the eye.” Beyond certifying Daguerre’s work as an important scientific accomplishment, Biot’s declaration represents one last attempt to understand the still vaguely defined “invention” by comparing it to something that is known and understood: the retina, or the light-sensitive tissue in the eye thought to register images projected by the optic lens. Biot’s own research had shed important new light on the mysteries of the human eye and vision; yet even with this knowledge and authority, his comparison works more to praise Daguerre’s invention than to offer insight into its workings. And we see once again that the language of this analogy registers its own inadequacy: because neither scientists nor the public can be sure how the process works, the light-sensitive medium of his images can only be “justly praise[d],” but still not fully understood, as a “kind of physical retina.” This approximate language also suggests the limitations to knowledge that are a consequence of Daguerre’s proprietary secrecy about the details of his invention. Thus, the rough transactions of science and profit and the limitations of knowledge and description leave room for the reader to imagine just what is so remarkable about this latest invention.

An article titled “Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery” that appeared three days later in the Boston Mercantile Journal describes the process as effecting “an exact representation of light and shade of whatever object may be wished to be viewed” that “is obtained with the precise accuracy of nature herself.”⁸ As a result, the writer decides that the images “are not paintings, they are drawings; but drawings pushed to a degree of perfection which art can never reach.” In attributing this perfection to “nature . . . delineat[ing] herself,” the article’s writer reveals his indebtedness to what Daston and Galison describe as “the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the artist-author, and to put in its stead a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol, if not automatically” (121). As this article makes clear, the growing influence of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making makes its way into thinking about artistic images via discussions of daguerreotypy.

Although these articles all call attention to their difficulty in describing Daguerre’s invention, we should not understand them as early expressions of a writerly anxiety about the threat posed to either the visual arts or the written word by the first photographic images, as some scholars have.⁹ Rather we should see these explicit acknowledgments of the limitations of man-made images and linguistic description as part of the rhetoric that is responsible for the idea of photography’s mechanical objectivity. At this point in word and photographic image relations, writers have the advantage of being in the position to tell how visually different Daguerre’s images are from any form of image making before anyone can show a curious public. They ...