Chap 2_a_plenitude_of_portraits

1839-1890

Chapter Two A Plenitude of Portraits

Silhouette

Silhouette

Physionotrace

The Business of Making Portraits by Camera

The Cultural Impact of the Daguerreotype in a “Young America”

“Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.” N. Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

“A Weapon of Truth”

In the book Hawthorne relates the powers of “heaven’s broad and simple sunshine” to “bring out the secret character with a truth no painter would ever venture upon” helped propel the silver camera likeness.

The Daguerreotypist: Holgrave“His present phase, as a Daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his bread to eat; it would be thrown aside as carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other equally digressive means.”

P. T. Barnum by Mathew Brady

P. T. Barnum and Tom Thumb

John James Audubon

To the National Photographic Association in Cleveland in 1873

Southworth said, “I am talking art.”

“Nature is not at all to be represented as it is, but as it ought to be, and might possible have been.”

Construction of Identities