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By Dr. Shrout

In many ways, photography feels like a radical change from what came before. Thinking back to our visit to the college art gallery, taking a photo with your phone, a digital camera or even a film camera seems like much less work than carving a wood block for a print, engraving a copperplate or setting up a lithograph.

In some ways, the Frank article reinforces this sense of radical paradigm shift, by highlighting the ways in which photography was a cultural touchstone for Emily Dickinson. Carolyn rightfully notes that the emphasis on photography might be a way into 19th century ideas about living life in public or private. She also noted that there might have been a gendered aspect to Dickinson’s aversion to photography:

It was perhaps accepted, if not encouraged, for men like Whitman to actively praise themselves; were a woman to have so enthusiastically thrust herself into the limelight, she might have been received to be unladylike.

Alec also brings up an aspect of Frank’s article that wasn’t fully developed – the physical significance of the daguerreotype. Alec asks us to consider whether the reflectiveness of daguerreotypes was (to borrow modern parlance) “a feature or a bug” – that is, he

would guess that the mirror-like quality of the daguerrotype was more a product of technical limitation than a conscious attempt at creating a print that reflected its user.

Wilson also riffed on this theme, noting that, despite Dickinson’s poetic riffing on the idea of representing her image, photographs were qualitatively distinct from text. He also raised the question of whether photographs are more “true” than other kinds of artistic rendering, suggesting on the one hand that the formality of early photographs robs the subjects of their individuality, but noting on the other that it was easier for Dickinson to shape her correspondent’s image of her textually than it would have been had she sent a photograph.

All three writers this week explored how the ascent of photography changed 19th century American culture – a theme we’ll continue to explore in class.