"Records of simple truth and precision": Photography, archives, and the illusion of control

Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 61-83

  Schwartz, Joan M ^a  

^a TRENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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References (151)

1. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, 2d rev. ed. (New York, 1968) 106.
2. For an analysis of this caricature, see Gary W. Ewer, "Théodore Maurisset's "Fantaisies': La Daguerré otypomanie," The Daguerreian Annual 1995 (Official Yearbook of the Daguerreian Society) 135-45.
3. Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque, NM, 1988) 124-25.
4. Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre 104.
5. Nancy Bartlett, "Respect des Fonds: The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance," in Lawrence J. Mc-Crank, ed., Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies (New York, 1991) 107-15.
6. Lara Moore, "Putting French History in Order: Archivists and Archival Classification in the 1840s," paper presented for discussion at the Sawyer Seminar of the Advanced Study Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, September, 20, 2000 18.
7. The paper was based on "Restoring Order: Archives, Libraries, and the Legacy of the Old Regime in Nineteenth-Century France" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University 2001).
8. Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology, rev. ed. (Toronto 1999);
9. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA 1992);
10. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898 and the Future Paradigm Shift," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997) 17-63.
11. [Comte Tanneguay Duchâtel], "The particulars and motives of a bill tending to grant: 1st, to Mr. Daguerre, an annuity for life of 6,000 francs; 2d, to Mr. Niépce junior, an annuity for life of 4,000 fr., in return for the cession made by them of the process to fix the objects reflected in a camera obscura, Presented by the Minister of the Interior," Chamber of Deputies, France, June 15, 1839, reproduced in An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama, by Daguerre (London 1839).
12. Souvenir reprint by the American Photographic Historical Society on the 150th Anniversary of Photography, 1989 2.
13. [Joseph Louis] Gay-Lussac, "The Report of Mr. Gay-Lussac, in the name of a special committee charged to examine the Bill relative to the acquisition of the process invented by Mr. Daguerre to fix the images of the camera obscura," Chamber of Peers, July 30, 1839
14. reproduced in An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama, by Daguerre 35.
15. An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama, by Daguerre 34.
16. reproduced in An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama, by Daguerre 27.
17. Mayer et [Louis] Pierson, La Photographie considérée comme art et comme industrie: Histoire de sa Découverte, ses Progrès, ses Applications-son Avenir (Paris, 1862); repr. ed. (New York, 1979) 223.
18. For an examination of the link between photography and travel as ways of seeing and knowing the world, see Joan M. Schwartz, "The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies," Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996) 16-45.
19. Humboldt's connections to Daguerre and to Talbot are noted in passing in English-language histories of photography and are all but ignored in histories of science. The most extensive treatment of Humboldt's involvement in photography is Hanno Beck, "Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859): Förderer der frühen Photographie," in Bodo von Dewitz and Reinhard Matz, Silber und Salz: Kataloghandbuch zur Jubiläumsausstellung 150 Jahre Photographie (Cologne, 1989), 40-59. I am grateful to Elizabeth Edwards for bringing this work to my attention, and to Geneviève Samson for the gift of the copy of Silber und Salz that belonged to her husband, my friend and colleague, the late Dr. Klaus B. Hendriks to whom this essay is dedicated.
20. During the 1860s, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron's home on the Isle of Wight was a gathering place for prominent poets, writers, artists, scientists, scholars, and explorers. Among the Victorian visitors who sat for her camera were Robert Browning, Anthony Trollope, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Holman Hunt, Gustave Doré, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir John Herschel, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Edward John Eyre, and Richard Burton. See Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (Millerton, NY, 1975), esp. 15, 174 190.
21. See Grace Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago, 1986) 9.
22. Quoted in Michel F. Braive, The Photograph: A Social History, David Britt, trans. (London, 1966) 212.
23. Elizabeth Edwards, "Photographic "Types': The Pursuit of Method," in Joanna Cohan Scherer, ed., Picturing Cultures: Historical Photographs in Anthropological Inquiry, special issue of Visual Anthropology 3, no. 2-3 (1990) 235-58.
24. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals: With Photographic and Other Illustrations (London 1872).
25. Larry Schaaf, "Piazzi Smyth at Teneriffe: Part 1, The Expedition and the Resulting Book," History of Photography 4, no. 4 (October 1980) 289-307.
26. Seiberling notes the diversity of Diamond's photographic pursuits: "He photographed antiquarian monuments for the Society of Antiquaries, mental patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, which he headed, and still lifes of game and other objects arranged like paintings for the Photographic Exchange Club." See Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination, 21; biographical appendix, 128-29; 149, notes 12 13.
27. Larry Schaaf, "Charles Piazzi Smyth's 1865 Conquest of the Great Pyramid," History of Photography 3, no. 4 (October 1979) 331-54;
28. also his "Charles Piazzi Smyth's 1865 Photographs of the Great Pyramid," Image 27 (1984) 24-32.
29. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885 (Philadelphia 1887).
30. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey, 1830-1904 (Chicago 1992).
31. Here, I put a photographic spin on the term "virtual witnessing" used by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their discussion of Robert Boyle's seventeenth-century scientific method for producing empirically based knowledge. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985) 55-65.
32. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York, 1989) 116.
33. H. Gaucheraud, Gazette de France (January 6, 1839), quoted in Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre 85.
34. Arago to Académie des Sciences, Paris (January 7, 1839)
35. quoted in Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 84. The text of Arago's address is reproduced at length 82-84.
36. [Duchâtel], "The particulars and motives of a bill" 2.
37. Arago, "The Report" 21-22.
38. Louis de Cormenin, "Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, dessins photographiques par Maxime Du Camp," La Lumière 25 (June 12, 1852)
39. quoted in Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé, eds., A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Cambridge, 1987) 54.
40. "America in the Stereoscope," The Art-Journal (July 1, 1860) 221.
41. George Thomas Fisher, Jr., Photogenic Manipulation, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, 1845) vi.
42. Rev. W. J. Read, "On the Applications of Photography," Photographic Notes: Journal of the Photographic Society of Scotland and of the Manchester Photographic Society I, no. 9 (August 17, 1856) 129.
43. Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphia, 1864); repr. ed. (Pawlet, VT, 1971) 413.
44. Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, Anne-Marie Glasheen, trans. (New York, 2000) 19.
45. For an extended treatment of the panorama as "an architectural and information component of the new urban spaces and media networks" of the nineteenth century, see Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Deborah Lucas Schneider, trans. (New York 1997).
46. Comment, The Painted Panorama 8.
47. Humboldt went on to explain that "the knowledge of the works of creation, and an appreciation of their exalted grandeur, would be powerfully increased if, besides museums, and thrown open like them, to the public, a number of panoramic buildings, containing alternating pictures of landscapes of different geographical latitudes and from different zones of elevation, should be erected in our large cities." Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. II, E. C. Otté, trans. (London, 1849) 457.
48. The 1858 catalogue of the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company already listed over one hundred thousand cards in stock. Frances Dimond and Roger Taylor, Crown and Camera: The Royal Family and Photography, 1842-1910 (Harmondsworth, 1987) 217.
49. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" The Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859);
50. repr. in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays and Images. Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography (New York, 1980) 56.
51. [Lady Elizabeth Eastlake], "Photography," Quarterly Review 101 (London April 1857);
52. repr. in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 94.
53. Mayer et Pierson, La Photographie 164.
54. Read, "On the Applications of Photography" 184.
55. [Joseph Ellis], Photography: A Popular Treatise (Brighton, 1847), 41. I am grateful to my Society for American Archivists colleague, Connell B. Gallagher, director for research collections, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont, Burlington for bringing to my attention the library's holdings of early photographic literature.
56. Ernest Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques à propos de l'Exposition Universelle et de la Guerre d'Orient (Paris, 1856); repr. ed. (New York, 1979) 20. Author's translation.
57. For a discussion of the "salvage motif" in ethnography, see George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986) 24.
58. The nature, aims, and impact of architectural salvage photography and ethnographic salvage photography can be compared using Edward Sheriff Curtis's twenty-volume photographic project The North American Indian.
59. See Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington 1982).
60. Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques 29. Author's translation.
61. Fisher, Photogenic Manipulation vi.
62. Leonard Boyle, "Diplomatics," in James M. Powell, ed., Medieval Studies: An Introduction (Syracuse, NY, 1976) 78.
63. Fisher, Photogenic Manipulation vi.
64. Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques 200. Author's translation.
65. Read, "On the Applications of Photography" 130.
66. Stephen Bann argues that "modes of visual representation, from the later eighteenth century onwards, became increasingly inflected with what might reasonably be termed the vision of the past." Bann, ""Views of the Past': Reflections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750- 1850)," in Gordon Fyfe and John Law, eds., Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (New York, 1988) 40.
67. [William] Lake Price, A Manual of Photographic Manipulation, 2d ed. (London, 1868); repr. ed. (New York, 1973) 4.
68. Victor Regnault, La Lumière VIII (1864), 392-96
69. quoted in Philippe Foliot, "Louis Vignes and Henry Sauvaire, Photographers on the Expeditions of the Duc de Luynes," History of Photography 14, no. 3 (July-September 1990), 233-50 233.
70. Mayer et Pierson, La Photographie 166-67. Author's translation.
71. Mayer et Pierson, La Photographie 167. Author's translation.
72. Mayer et Pierson, La Photographie 167-68. Author's translation.
73. Ellis, Photography: A Popular Treatise 47-48.
74. Théophile Gautier, in L'Univers Illustré
75. quoted in Braive, The Photograph: A Social History 186.
76. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London 1993);
77. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York 1994);
78. Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986) 1-40;
79. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London 1997).
80. From a review of Francis Frith's Stereoscopic Views in the Holy Land, Egypt, Nubia, etc., published in The Art-Journal (1858), 375
81. quoted in Edward W. Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America. A Cultural History (Rochester, 1979) 30.
82. "America in the Stereoscope," The Art-Journal (July 1, 1860) 221.
83. [Lady Eastlake], "Photography," in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 94.
84. A useful technological perspective is given by Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ 1992).
85. [Duchâtel], "The particulars and motives of a bill" 1-2.
86. Arago, "The Report" 22.
87. Gay-Lussac, "The Report" 35.
88. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature 1-2.
89. Helmut Gernsheim claims that this was written in 1839 "by Dr. J. P. Simon, a Frenchman residing in London." Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography (London, 1982), 47, 267 note 15.
90. For a discussion of "the cultural semantics of photographic terminology," as well as an interpretation of Thoreau's remark, see Alan Trachtenberg, "Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword," in Martha A. Sandweiss, ed., Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Fort Worth, 1991) 17-47.
91. The Art-Journal (1858), 375
92. quoted in Earle, Points of View, (Rochester, 1979) 30.
93. Quoted in Schaaf, "Piazzi Smyth at Teneriffe," Part 2 32.
94. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump esp. 55-65.
95. Read, "On the Applications of Photography" 129.
96. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Daguerreotype," Alexander's Weekly Messenger (January 15, 1840), 2
97. reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT, 1980) 38.
98. Antoine Claudet, "Photography in Its Relation to the Fine Arts," The Photographic Journal VI (June 15, 1860)
99. quoted in Helmut Gernsheim, The Rise of Photography, 1850- 1880: The Age of Collodion (London, 1988) 66-67.
100. "Stereoscopes; or travel made easy," a review of Francis Frith's series of stereoscopic views, Views in Egypt and Nubia, appeared in The Athenaeum 31 (London, March 20, 1858), 371
101. quoted in Julia Van Haaften, "Francis Frith and Negretti & Zambra," History of Photography 4, no. 1 (January 1980) 35.
102. "Stereoscopes"
103. quoted in Van Haaften, "Francis Frith and Negretti & Zambra" 36.
104. Rev. H. J. Morton, "Photography as an Authority," Philadelphia Photographer 1 (1864) 180-81.
105. Miles Orvell, "Almost Nature: The Typology of Late Nineteenth-Century American Photography," in Daniel P. Younger, ed., Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography, 1983-89 (Albuquerque, NM, 1991) 148.
106. Root, The Camera and the Pencil xvi.
107. Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," in Goldberg, Photography in Print 123-26.
108. John Ruskin, from his "Lectures on Art" (1870), in Goldberg, Photography in Print 153.
109. Ruskin, from letters dated 1845-46, in Goldberg, Photography in Print 152.
110. Julie Lawson, The Stones of Venice: Ruskin's Venice in Photographs (Edinburgh, 1992) 13.
111. Ruskin, letter dated October 7, 1845, quoted in Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984) 132.
112. Ruskin, "Lectures on Art," in Goldberg, Photography in Print 153.
113. Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," in Goldberg, Photography in Print 125.
114. Ruskin, "The Eagle's Nest," in Goldberg, Photography in Print 153.
115. [Lady Eastlake], "Photography," in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 92.
116. [Lady Eastlake], "Photography," in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 93-94.
117. For example, Marcus Aurelius Root began The Camera and the Pencil by stating his conviction that photography was "entitled to rank with the so-named Fine Arts." Root, The Camera and the Pencil 19.
118. Ernest Lacan argued, "Nous ne prétendons pas que la photographie doive être placée au rang des arts d'inspiration, comme la peinture, la sculpture, la musique; mais nous voudrions que ses oeuvres ne fussent point considerées comme les résultats d'opérations purement mécaniques." Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques 78-79.
119. [Lady Eastlake], "Photography," in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 94.
120. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1994) 3.
121. Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World (London, 1992) 20.
122. Thomas Richards describes the British imperial obsession with collecting in The Imperial Archive. The theoretical implications of accumulating information are discussed in Latour "Visualization and Cognition."
123. [Duchâtel], "The particulars and motives of a bill" 2;
124. Gay-Lussac, "The Report" 35.
125. Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 60.
126. [Ellis], Photography: A Popular Treatise 45.
127. For an extended examination of the origins of photography as a history of "the desire to photograph," see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA 1997).
128. Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche, Giphantie: Première Partie (A Babylone, M.DCC.LX [1760]) 136.
129. It was subsequently published in English translation as Giphantie: or, a view of what has passed, what is now passing, and during the present century, what will pass in the world (London 1761).
130. An excerpt from the English edition is reprinted in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images 13-14.
131. Price, A Manual of Photographic Manipulation 1-2.
132. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump 55-65.
133. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, Katherine H. Jewett, trans. (London 2001).
134. Joan M. Schwartz, "The Mission Héliographique: Architectural Monuments, Archival Photographs, and National Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France," commentary presented at the Sawyer Seminar of the Advanced Study Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 7 2001.
135. For an extended treatment of the Mission Héliographique, see M. Christine Boyer, "La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory, and the Patrimony of France, 1851," in Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London, 2003) 21-54.
136. Michel Duchein, "Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science," Archivaria 16 (Summer 1983) 65.
137. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis, MN, 1991) 155.
138. Janet E. Buerger, "The Genius of Photography," in John Wood, ed., The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration (Iowa City, IA, 1989) 53.
139. Cook, "What is Past is Prologue" 26.
140. As Cook has urged, "archivists need to explore the field of "memory scholarship' [as well as the history of their own profession, institutions, and media] more carefully, for it puts into context many unquestioned assumptions underpinning archival theory and conceptualization, even if the authors rarely explicitly address archives." Cook, "What is Past is Prologue," 50 note 3.
141. For other references to this postmodern literature, see Richard J. Cox, "The Concept of Public Memory and Its Impact on Archival Public Programming," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993) 122-35;
142. Joan M. Schwartz, ""We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), 73 note 122;
143. see also Barbara L. Craig, "Selected Themes in the Literature on Memory and Their Pertinence to Archives," American Archivist 65, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002) 276-89.
144. The two most prominent Canadian critiques of the fonds concept are Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds in the Post-Custodial Era: Theory, Problems, and Solutions," Archivaria 35 (Spring 1993) 24-37;
145. Bob Krawczyk, "Cross Reference Heaven: The Abandonment of the Fonds as the Primary Level of Arrangement for Ontario Government Records," Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999) 131-53.
146. Moore, "Putting French History in Order" 1.
147. Cook, "What is Past is Prologue" 25.
148. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven, CT, 1994) 13.
149. Preben Mortensen, "The Place of Theory in Archival Practice," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999) 18.
150. Candace Loewen, "From Human Neglect to Planetary Survival: New Approaches to the Appraisal of Environmental Records," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92) 97-98.
151. Terry Cook, "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts," Archival Science 1, no. 1 (2000) 3-24.