This American Life: Early Photography (TA3)

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By Avery

I looked at three sources to understand how early photography has been written about. The first is an essay written for a museum exhibit. This essay represents a hyperlocal historical approach that is important for understanding how history is created. The second is a peer-reviewed journal article that relates the public’s initial trust in photography’s ability to reveal truth with the spiritualist’s quest to reveal the ghostly world. Finally, the third is a peer-reviewed journal article that that mixes history and literary criticism to explore the tension individuals felt in the face of photography as a new technology.

Flynt curates the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her essay accompanied an exhibit of early photographs of Deerfield locals. She offers little commentary on individual photographs, instead framing the images with major themes of the period. The themes Flynt identifies are informed by her local focus; she comments extensively on the subjects’ social habits rather than a grand political arc. For example, Flynt explains the stale expressions on the subjects’ faces in the following way: “Early photographs offer a window on how people presented themselves. Social convention frowned on excessive familiarity, and a smile, particularly a teeth-revealing smile, could be perceived as unbecoming or inappropriate.”[1] This social approach to history makes sense in the context of a local museum where residents are not necessarily looking for a grand narrative. The hyperlocal approach to history is important to acknowledge because it’s where history starts: with some preserving their grandmother’s letters and retelling the stories of her individual life. Flynt gives us a flavor of the everyday, social history of early photography.

West explores the influence of photography on spiritualism (belief in ghosts) in the 19^th century. Photography emerged at a time when few people had even a basic understanding of science. Thus, West claims that the discourse surrounding photography focused on its “magical” properties rather than technical mechanisms.[2] Photography paired well with spiritualist arguments especially because of the technology’s reliance on light. Photographs manipulated light to reveal truth; as West writes, “With light as its modus operandi, photography could potentially render everything visible and thus transform all the world into a lucid text—a possibility that also resided at the heart of the spiritualist movement.”[3] Photographers began to exploit the public’s lack of scientific knowledge and belief in the spirit world; they layered daguerreotypes to create the appearance of ghostly figures in domestic portraits.[4]

By relating early photography and spiritualism, West paints the emergence of photography as a strange and revolutionary phenomena. For the most part, West focuses on ways the average person did not understand the photographic process and yet beheld the technology as the path to truth. West’s historical actors are willing to trust photography. West complicates the trusting nature near the end of her article when she describes the public’s eventual skepticism of ghostly photographs,[5] but her picture of the earliest viewers’ awe remains intact.

Contrastingly, Frank’s presentation of Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward photographs offers a much warier relationship to the new technology. Frank uses Dickinson’s poems to illustrate her mistrust of photographs. Exactly opposite to the spiritualists, Dickinson seems to have a relatively deep knowledge of the physical mechanisms of photography and also deeply doubts its merits. Frank argues that Dickinson was caught between competing trends in American life, the revivalist impulse to keep one’s truth inside[6] and the general “‘explosion of the private into the public’” catalyzed by the increasing commonality of photography[7]. Dickinson found herself between competing notions of sincerity.

Ultimately, Frank seems more concerned with forwarding a new perspective in Dickinson literary criticism than with making a historical argument. His piece does, however, represent the importance of interdisciplinary work—in this case English and History—to understanding the complexity of human experience. Though Dickinson may at first seem tangentially related to the emergence of photography, Frank uses her work to explicate the tension felt by one (remarkable) individual in order to identify the cultural clash felt after the introduction of a new technology.

All three narratives by Flynt, Frank, and West explain the emergence of early photography within contemporary social dialogues. For Flynt, Deerfield photographs are a new representative form, but do not alter existing social conventions. For West, early photography greatly burgeons the spiritualist movement. Finally, for Frank photography represents a disturbance in and contrast to existing notions of privacy and truth. Together, these pieces argue that from its invention photographic technology was integrated into and shaped American culture.

Bibliography

Flynt, Suzanne L. 2009. “Don’t Smile for the Camera: Expression in Early Photography.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 37 (1): 3–11.

Frank, Adam. 2001. “Emily Dickinson and Photography.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10 (2): 1–21.

West, Nancy M. 1996. “Camera Fiends: Early Photography, Death, and the Supernatural.” The Centennial Review 40 (1): 170–206.

[1] Flynt, Suzanne L. 2009. “Don’t Smile for the Camera: Expression in Early Photography.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 37 (1): 3–11, 5

[2] West, Nancy M. 1996. “Camera Fiends: Early Photography, Death, and the Supernatural.” The Centennial Review 40 (1): 170–206, 172-3.

[3] Ibid, 178.

[4] Ibid, 186.

[5] Ibid, 190.

[6] Frank, Adam. 2001. “Emily Dickinson and Photography.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10 (2): 1–21, 9

[7] Ibid, 14.