There are different ways of studying photography: through the history of its technological development, through art history and art criticism, through ontological theories or critiques of representation. Photography has multiple faces: it is an art, a means of registration and documentation, a research tool, a way of communication, an industry, and science. In order to preserve the medium’s diversity, new approaches of studying are applied. One of the possible approaches is cultural studies or, as it is understood here, the history of the idea of photography. It is necessary to mention that we do not talk now about the history of ideas as an intellectual history. The latter deals with the way ideas were born, expressed, developed, preserved, and changed over time and first of all in philosophy and literature. The history of the idea of photography (or the cultural studies history of photography) includes these problems but is not limited by them: it goes further to the analysis of social understanding and usage of photography in certain historical periods. It includes the description of social, historical, economic, and cultural contexts in which photography functioned, it introduces the explanations of how photography was produced, displayed, consumed, influenced by other social practices, and how it influenced itself on other practices and on the ways of seeing. Such an approach makes it possible to include not only technological history and biographies of artists, but to explore everyday experience of photography, such medium’s types as amateur and commercial photography, photography in mass media, in science, medicine, architecture, in a word, photography as it is involved in different aspects of social life.
One of the positive features of this approach is an attempt to embrace diversity and incorporate marginal but nevertheless important aspects, as for example, the issues of materiality of photography. This topic was brightly expressed in the article “Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs” by Elizabeth Edwards (Edwards 2002). Edwards argues that material being or physical dimension of photography is always neglected by researchers as they prefer to concentrate on the analysis of images’ contents (semiotic or iconographical analysis). She writes about ethnographic photography which materiality is expressed in two ways: in “the plasticity of the image itself, the paper it is printed on, the toning, the resulting surface effects” and in “the presentational forms – carte de visite, cabinet cards, albums, mounts and frames” (Edwards 2002: 68). It is important to understand that photographs are not only images but also physical objects which exist in time and space, in social and cultural experience. Their materiality is closely connected with their ‘social biography’ as a ‘continuing process of meaning, production, exchange and usage’ (Edwards 2002: 68). That is why the arrival of new techniques, new formats and material forms changes the contents of images, their spatial arrangements, the act of looking at them, reading them, and the very experience of dealing with them.
As about this essay, it was inspired by the article “Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the-Century Midwestern Women” by Marilyn F. Motz. The subject of the author’s concern is the phenomenon of the New Woman who appeared at the turn of the century and how this New Woman used the advantages of progressive technology for portraying her identity in photographic albums. Motz gives a clear distinction between family and individual photoalbums as only the latter ones allowed women to “examine their past, their environments, their personal growth, and even their life choices” (Motz 1989: 63). We agree that this distinction (‘private’ or ‘personal’ pictures / ‘family’ picture) is very crucial as it allows examining photographic albums from completely different perspectives, and as Liz Wells underlines: “The equation between ‘the family’ and private experience is too easy made and excludes too much. The evolution of private photography has indeed been family based but that link is historically contingent, not, as is often assumed, the consequence of ‘natural’ necessity”. (Wells 2004: 117) However, for the topic of our paper (materially of albums) this distinction does not play the main role. The autobiographical albums, described by Motz, were focused on the lives of their compilers, however these lives were not separated from the lives of other people. So these albums constantly included the images of family members and friends, and thus we can say that to some extend we still deal with a kind of family albums. The more fruitful part of the article concerns the materiality of the albums: the author gives a detailed description of the arrangements of images in the albums, their contents, and captions. This description is presented as an illustration of a new stile of photographic albums, the one that emerged in 1890s as a result of the popularity of the hand-held camera. This allows us to concentrate on the topic of the difference between two types of photographic albums, ‘Kodak albums’ (1890s-1920s) and ‘Disdery albums’ (1860s-1870s), as two types of visual diaries and memory arrangements.
First Wave of Family Albums: ‘Disdйri Albums’
Talking about family photographic albums, we are dealing with a special kind of images: these are not pictures of landscapes, still lifes, war events, architecture, art, plants, or astronomical objects. These are pictures of people that they have taken for themselves. The aim of these pictures is to show people’s identities and their relationships with places and other people. These pictures are not printed in newspapers or collected by public institutions. They are kept at private homes and are shown only to relatives and friends.
We connect the first bloom of family albums with the invention of the wet plate process and the format of cartes-de-visite in the 1850s. The first family albums consisted of portrait pictures taken in studios exclusively. And it is necessary to mention here that people had the possibility to have their photographic portraits long before these years, due to the existence of daguerreotype and calotype. But their expensiveness and necessity of long exposures did not let them receive mass popularity.
The wet plate, or collodion, process was introduced by Scott Archer in 1851. In comparison with previous photographic processes, the collodion had several advantages: being more sensitive to light, it reduced the exposure times drastically (to two or three seconds); because a glass base was used, the images were sharper; the price of a picture became much cheaper (about a tenth of that of a daguerreotype). In addition to this, collodion process allowed making multiple prints. The invention of this process turned out to be a watershed in the history of photography. It gave birth to two popular forms of the low-priced photography: stereoscopic photography and the carte-de-visite.
Stereoscopic photography was rarely used for portraiture, because its main peculiarity – the illusion of death and three-dimensionality – would be distracted in this case. The stereo format was rather used for the so-called “views” (Krauss 1982): urban vistas, architecture, romance and courtship scenes, pornography. As about the carte-de-visite, they were patented by French photographer Andre Disdйri in 1854. The carte-de-visite were small visiting card portraits, usually measuring 2 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches, attached to a 2 1/2 x 4-inch paper card. Many carte-de-visite were full-length portraits, or bust-length shots, rather than close-ups of face. A number of exposures were made with a multilens camera on a single collodion wet-plate and were contact-printed on albumen paper. The multilens allowed the model to vary the poses. In small prints many defects were not noticeable, and that is why retouching was not needed. All these features of the carte-de-visite made them extremely cheap (the average price for a card was a shilling) and thus affordable for the majority of people.
According to historian Robert Hirsch, “the carte became a hit in May 1859 when Napoleon III, leading his army out of Paris on a military campaign against Austria, stopped to have a publicity portrait made at Disdйri’s studio.” (Hirsch 2000: 79). Disdйri became a celebrity, and by 1861 he was reported to be the richest photographer in the world (he was said to be earning nearly Ј50,000 a year from one studio alone). It gave birth to the extreme interest to celebrity photography. Hundreds of thousands of cartes of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were sold. Cartes of politicians, actors were widely circulated.
As carte-de-visite were fast, small and easy to collect, many people began to place them in ornamented, manufactured photographic albums. Walter Benjamin, a famous German critic, wrote in his “Short History of Photography” that after the first decade of existence of photography (when, according to Benjamin, photography had the aura), there was the beginning of its decline: it started to be quickly taken and mass produced. “Then was the time when photograph albums began to appear. In the coldest places in the house, on consoles or gueridons in the drawing room, they were most likely to be found: leather covered with metal latches and giltedged pages as thick as a finger on which the foolishly draped or embellished figures were distributed — Uncle Alex and Aunt Riekehe, Trudy when she was little, Papa in his first semester. And finally to make the same complete, we ourselves: as salon Tiroleans, yodeling, hats swinging against painted firs, or as sailors, one leg straight and the other bent, as is appropriate, leaning against an upholstered post. The accessories in such portraits, with the columns, balustrades and little oval tables, recall the time when one had to give the models points of support so they could remain steady during the long exposure. “ (Benjamin 1980: 206). Thus, these albums had two characteristics: they were composed of photographic portraits made in studios and they included photographs of celebrities.
As about the first feature, it is necessary to underline that photography as a practice did not reach the domestic sphere at that time. The photographic equipment was so big, complicated and expensive (it usually involved tripods, black cloths, glass plate negatives, special backdrops, darkrooms and a number of chemicals) , that only professionals and/or reach people could afford to have it at their homes. As for example Queen Victoria or Julia Margaret Cameron. For the majority of people to have a photo taken meat to go out to the public space, i.e. to visit the studio of a professional photographer, and to follow the preestablished roles. The poses were controlled by photographers. The sitter could look either directly at the camera or turn to the one side. The background could be neutral or painted (imitating an exotic landscape, an interior of a rich family, etc.). Most scenes included props, such as fancy chairs, balustrades, columns, drapery, and furniture. The subjects usually posed unsmiling, dressed in their best clothes. While many studio portraits were of solitary individuals, certain family configurations were also common: parents with their young children, three generations of women in a family, mothers with their children, married couples, brothers and sisters.
As it can be easily understood, a photographic studio is an element of urban culture. But the need for photography was common both for urban dwellers and for inhabitants of the countryside. For the latter a visit to a studio signified something more: not only a physical journey from the village to the city but also a movement between cultures. The role imposed by a studio can be absolutely strange and inadequate for a person. And we talk here not only about Disdйri times. The situation when people could have their photos take only in studios remained quite normal for the whole first half of the 20th century. The above photos are visual examples (dated by the year 1905) of peasants in the studio settings.
As about the second feature, that of celebrity photography, it is interesting to quote here Liz Wells who argues that “some of the earliest photographic albums were not ‘family albums’ at all, but handsomely bound volumes filled with pictures of royalty, celebrities and politicians” (Wells 2004: 128). We can make two comments concerning this issue. The great number of celebrity portraits that people could not only see but also buy and keep at their homes and looked at them whenever they liked, and show them whoever they liked, and exchange them to whatever they liked – is an example of what the researchers call the democratization of images as an integral part of modernity. First photographic albums were democratic albums. They represent a new demand for visual mass media. The second comment is about the specificity of creation of photographic albums: they were rather collected from manufactured pictures than filled with self-made snapshots.
The early albums consisted of pages with pre-cut slots (a single slot per page or four evenly spaced slots) where photographs were put. These pre-cut slots referred to conventional formats of pictures and their content and compositional perfection (it was presupposes that as they were made by professionals, there was no need to change anything in the picture).
One of the key features of these albums was that people were isolated from their domestic settings. For poor people it was an advantage. They continued to choose studio portraits at that time and later in the 20th century as dignified or exotic backdrops removed them from their indigent homes. But for the middle-class consumers it was a big loss or disadvantage as they could show and boast their respectable houses. A certain level of desirable informality can be reached only due to traveling photographers.
‘Kodak Albums’
By 1880s photography had become an integral part of the Western people’s everyday life to a much greater extent than ever before. More than 60 photographic journals and more than 160 photographic societies existed at that time. Underwood & Underwood, manufacturer of stereographs, produced about 25 thousand pictures daily.
In 1880s several important technical developments in the field of photography were made. Experiments in photomechanical processes led to the invention of the half-tone process, a method of polygraphic reproduction of photography. Before this invention photographs were not printed directly in newspapers, but were turned into engravings. By 1890s it became cheaper and faster to use half-tone images rather than to hire painters to translate photographs into engravings. Half-tones started to be produced by millions and millions of copies. To a great extent the dissemination of half-tones was stimulated by advertising (which demanded illustrations) and growing number of illustrated periodicals. It led to the fact that by the end of the century photography existed in three most popular forms: stereography, postcards, and half-tone images.
In 1878 Charles Bennett invented the dry-plate process. It was a revolutionary event as, in contrast to the wet-plate collodion process widely used at that time, dry-plates gave much more possibilities and freedom to a photographer. Dry-plates did not need to be prepared and processed close to the time of exposure. So the exposure and development became separate processes. Portable darkrooms were no longer necessary. Then, dry-plates were much more sensitive to light, and that is why the exposure time was shortened. Dry-plates were sensitive to the full range of colors and thus could create monochromatic images with tiny variations of tones. And finally, due to the invention of dry-plates new type of cameras appeared: smaller, more portable, without a tripod, called hand-held cameras.
In 1888 the Eastman Dry Plate Company, Rochester, New York, started manufacturing the Kodak cameras. These first cameras were intended not for professionals but for casual use by middle-class consumers. It was a small wooden box with a hole at one end (for the lens). It had a fixed focus, so that a photographer did not need to focus the lens and look through a viewfinder. But the most important feature was that this camera was sold being loaded with a roll of light-sensitive paper. The film contained 100 exposures (the negatives were circular). When all the pictures had been taken, the photographer returned the whole camera to the company’s office where prints were developed and the camera was reloaded. The company launched an intensive advertising. Its best-known slogan was “You Press the Button, We do the Rest!”. It meant that the Kodak company did not only sell cameras but also offered additional services, such as development and printing of photographs. This separation of the taking of an image from the subsequent stages of making a photograph was a crucial move. It made it possible for photographers to be not aware about details of the mechanics of the camera and the chemical steps of the process. It remains actual till today when it is rather rare when ordinary photographers develop and print their snapshots by themselves.
Some years later after the invention of the first Kodak camera, the camera was improved (for example, the paper film was changed to transparent celluloid one), became easier to use, and cheaper. Kodak made photography a mass product, introduced it to the market and stimulated development of home amateur photography.
As a product of mass consumption, photography became a simple medium. Its users, as Don Slater argued, “have no sense of photography as manipulation, as a form of action, as a making sense through the manipulation of tools of representation and meaning” (Wells 2004: 139). People could easily make their own photographs of what they liked. Amateurs followed their interest and imagination and as a rule they did not take into account art tradition and fashion that limited so much the work of professional photographers. A specific term started to be used for images made with a hand-held camera – a ‘snapshot’. It referred to practices of hunting and meant direct, instinctive, spontaneous and casual images. Snapshots did not presuppose the knowledge of classical aesthetic criteria of content, form and technique, did not presuppose either the trained sensitivity to the Western European art, as ordinary owners of hand-held camera did not graduated from art schools where they could study art history, composition, and other skills. That is why the mass production of Kodak cameras is closely connected with the so-called democratization of images or visual democracy.
Thus, in contrast to professional photographers who were concentrated on the subject and tried to follow the norms, hand-held camera users could act in a completely different way. They incorporated photographic practices in the texture of their everyday lives and pleasures. They used snapshots as a “democratic collection of memories” (Hirsch 2000: 173).
One of the images widely used in the Kodak’s advertising campaigns was a girl with a camera. It was a so-called ‘Kodak girl’, an independent, stylish, and youthful amateur. Her role was not only to make an advertisement picture more attractive. The Kodak girl was intended to become a new hero for all middle-class women, to become a new type of woman. So it is necessary to underline that the Kodak company regarded women as an integral part of its target group. In relation to this, the company’s slogans carried two main ideas: 1) the camera is so easy that even women can use without problems, 2) the camera gives women a possibility to create a family album with the collection of snapshots of all important events of the family life, and every woman who wants to be a good wife can’t miss this opportunity.
Therefore, the Kodak cameras exercised profound influence on such a phenomenon as family albums. Of course, keeping of photographic albums as a form of activity existed long before the invention of Kodak. But Kodak gave a new life to these albums and caused their new specificity. This specificity was composed of two main features: family albums started to be kept by women predominantly; pictures were made not by professional photographers but by amateurs. It made it possibly to register very banal, ordinary evens of everyday life: meetings, parties, as well as birth and growth of children, marriages, death. In other words to create a visual diary of the ordinary and familiar.
Now we will turn to Marilyn Motz’s article “Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the-Century Midwestern Women” which we mentioned in the introductory part of the paper, and we will try to read it in a selective manner, focusing only on the description of materiality of the albums. This methodological step is bound by the fact that this article is one of few we have on the topic and that in general investigations of family albums from the point of view of their location, content and meaning (i.e. material culture) are very rare in photographic studies.
What Kodak cameras gave to photographers was freedom to choose an object of an image. It is not surprising that people got first of all interested in photographing natural settings of their daily lives. This desire to catch the ordinary by camera is an indispensable part of photographic experience. As Susan Sontag mentions: “…the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store” (Susan 1979). This freedom that let everyday informality appear in photographic images demanded additional freedom of the mode of collecting and storing the images. Motz sums it up in the following way: “The new albums consisted of sheets of heavy paper, usually black or white, bound together in the form of the book. Photographs could be glued to the page in any arrangement desired by the album’s creator. No longer limited to a single slot per page or four evenly spaced slots per page, the creator of this new type of album could arrange photographs symmetrically or asymmetrically, could overlap photographs, could place photographs at any angle, could cut the photographs into any shape desired, and could combine the photographs with anything flat enough to fit into an album” (Motz 1989: 64). In addition these albums varied in size and shape.
One the main outcomes of this type of albums is a possibility for people to create their own narrative with the help of pictures. So the freedom of arrangements was important not because it allowed creating artistic collages from photographs, but because it allowed people to express their world perception (or, to say it in a narrow sense, their understanding of social relations) in photography. To say more, they were forced to create this narrative, because the only way to fix the images in the albums was to glue them. They can’t be rearranged later. The choice and decision had to be made at once. It caused a new attitude towards albums: more creative and more serious, responsible, and reflective at the same time.
One of the problems that Motz raised in her article is the relation of Kodak imagery to studio photography. The fact that studio photography blossomed in the 19th century and for majority of people it was the only means to have their portraits photos taken led to the situation that conventions of studio photography became a matter of common knowledge. The owners of Kodak cameras faced the problem: to use the freedom that the new technology gave them and forget completely all the restraint of studios, or to return to studio conventions in order to copy them or parody. So in new albums we can see images referring to studio photography. Studio environment is recreated to some extent at homes. As we know, it is still common today, as for some people, as far as they understand it, it is the only way to make their pictures look ‘respectable’. Very often Motz explains the specificity of photo arrangements through class, education and marital status of the compiler, as they influence the sense of identity expressed in the album.
Another interesting subject matter of new albums is houses. The photographs of people are placed near the photographs of houses where they live. The latter were separate images (without people) that could be complimented also by the images of pets and interiors. So, before the Kodak people who wanted to have their photos taken had to move from their natural surroundings to the artificial ones created by the studio. Of course, they could bring with them some objects that helped to express their identity in a clearer way, as for example a favorite book. However, the number of such objects that could by brought to the studio was drastically limited. It was impossible to recreate the atmosphere of private home, to show the decoration, for example, which proclaimed the owner’s taste and personality. The situation changed with the ‘Kodak albums’ which made it possible to place a personal picture into the context –– a visual context of people and places.
Conclusion
The problems that were discussed in the paper concern the second half of the 19th century predominantly; however, only from the formal point of view. There are two reasons that persuaded us to attach this paper to the framework of the 20th century culture. The first is a possibility to draw analogy between social changes caused by Kodak innovations and by digital technologies. The second is the awareness that the essay is based on the works written by the Western researchers, and that is why the development line they outline corresponds mainly to the progressive part of the world, while other parts could lag behind considerably, and thus the specificity of the 19th century culture may rest common for the 20th century realities.
Two types of albums that were described in the paper lead us to broader issues, such as social usage of photography and photography as an element of mass culture. Kodak innovations are understood as a decisive attempt to make photography to be a mass product through its industrialization and domestification. “You press the button, we do the rest” meant that all difficult and expensive parts of photographic process were given in charge to the companies. People were freed from this problems. This domestification reached its end with the invention of digital technology. Photography became a home-based media. As Liz Wells comments, “ ‘Doing the rest’ is now as easy as ‘pressing the button’…There is an infinity of playful ways of organizing and rearranging personal pictures using simple computer programs, and of distributing them instantaneously via e-mail, the Internet and mobile phones” (Wells 2004: 116).
As about the problem of lagging behind of some countries, I can give an example of Belarus where, in Minsk, first studios appeared only in 1960s there were quite few of them till the 20th century (there were 11 in 1898, in comparison to New York where there were about 300). The reason was because the authorities regarded photography as printed media. And taking into account revolutionary situation in Belarus at that time, photographers had to prove their loyalties to the authorities before they could start their photographic business. A huge number of appropriate documents and recommendations were need (Савченко 2000: 34-41). Of course, it slowed down the development. That is why studio photos received popularity only at the first half of the 20th century. And when we open photoalbums of people born in 1920s-1930s, some classic studio photographs can be easily found there.
Bibliography
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