15

Photography

Craig Robertson

While it is often stated that photography was invented in 1839 it is more accurate to posit that photography emerged in the nineteenth century. Invoking 1839 refers to the year that Daguerre made his photographic process public. He sold his invention to the French government, which led to the spread and development of daguerreotypes. These were images that could not be reproduced and initially required more than 30-minute exposures, although, within a few years, this was reduced to less than a minute. Not only were there clear precursors to this, but, contemporary with it, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the forerunner to photographic prints. In 1841, he patented the calotype, later called the Talbotype. This was a negative/positive process with 5-minute exposure time that allowed for multiple reproductions of an image. Over the next half-century significant technical developments occurred: dry plates, flexible film, faster lenses, and handheld cameras. The result was that by the time of the launch of the first Kodak camera in 1888 practices we could recognize today as photography had come into existence. At the same time the halftone process was invented, which allowed for the reproduction of photographs in printed publications.

There are numerous ways to think about photography: as image, a history of techniques, the work of certain practitioners, and as sociohistorical evidence. In media history the somewhat limited attention to photography has tended to favor the analysis of its social use over a formalist critique of images or its technological development. The focus in media history on the practice or function of photography owes a debt to the social history of photography that emerged in the 1970s, notably in the early Marxist work of Allan Sekula (1984, 2002) and in John Tagg's (1988) Foucauldian iteration. In this approach photography as an articulation of institutional practices and power structures becomes the primary field of study.

The relationship between journalism and photography has dominated the analysis of photography in US media history and contemporary media analysis. This is best represented in Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt's landmark collection Picturing the Past (1999). The essays in this volume question the status of photographs as journalistic documentation. The focus of the book skews toward photography and the “documentary” understanding both in terms of collective memory and historical evidence. Cumulatively the book draws from the social history of photography and the general critique of representation as a historically contingent construction. For Brennen and Hardt (1999), “it is not the production of the photograph but the context of social relations, with its practices of making meaning and rendering interpretations, that becomes the appropriate terrain for contemporary observers” (p. 10). This leads them to frame the analysis of photographs in terms of photography as “material culture” or a “regime of truth.”

More broadly the analysis of the development of photography as a medium in the nineteenth century is usually articulated to debates over modernity, not modernism. This is the modernity that transformed the economy through new forms of production, expanded industrialization, and encompassed the growth of cities. It was the context that saw the emergence and rapid expansion of democracy, nationalism, capitalism, and consumerism.

Emerging in this era of change many believed that photography gave reassurance that the world could still be known and understood. Dominant popular tropes that introduced photography were that of the “mirror” and “nature.” The early photographic pioneers insisted that photography “originated in nature and was disclosed by nature” (Marien, 1997, p. 3). This idea was continued in claims that photography was “discovered,” a natural phenomenon not a process invented by humans. As Mary Warner Marien (1997) notes, “photography as natural vision was easily transmuted into photography as neutral vision” (p. 5). Along with the analogy of the “mirror,” the invocation of nature drew from parallels with sight to convey the idea that photography had a consistent, accurate relationship to the world it recorded. However, the knowledge that it revealed was not always automatically accepted. Photography as the “mirror with a memory” encountered preexisting visual techniques and practices and also the argument that the photographer and the conditions of production he or she worked in produced photographs that were not quite a copy or an actuality. In this sense photography is often analyzed through denotation and connotation. In the former photography is critiqued in terms of its “indexicality,” its power to capture reality as “it is,” representation that operates “at least in the first instance [...] before any convention or rules” (Batchen, 1997, p. 195; Zelizer, 2006, pp. 4–5). Connotation suggests that the meaning of an image draws not only from what is depicted (photographic realism) but also from broader symbolic systems.

Viewed as a medium, photography and its early development offers important insights into various debates about evidence, truth, and authenticity. Focusing on the tension between photography as mirror or artifice, this chapter offers examples of photography's contested emergence in the United States from the courtroom, immigration enforcement, and journalism; therefore it has a bias toward photographic images of people. In all these cases photographs provided an initial challenge to the authority of the word (both spoken and written). Photography also called into question existing attitudes about the role of images as relevant forms of representation. The contested authority granted to the visual representation of knowledge, its truth claims, provides an important framework for the analysis of photography's arrival. Photographic realism was rarely completely rejected, even after practical problems led to a questioning of the idea that a single, consistent point of view existed. In contrast with other technologies used to describe and record, photographs still produced results that were relatively more exact and seen to be, if not accurate, at least somewhat successful approximations of reality.

Photography emerged in an era of burgeoning claims to scientific objectivity. Despite questions about the nature of photography as an unmediated depiction of reality it offered a useful articulation of positivism. In this specific articulation of modernity, claims to realistic representation became the championing of positivism and empiricism. Progress was increasingly seen to be dependent on “facts” collected through the scientific method, in an ordered manner; a well-known and ordered society would be a more equal society. Photography, particularly its perceived fusion of technology and nature, came to play an important role in making manifest the possibility of objective truth.

While positivism provides an important support for claims to photographic accuracy, as media scholar Barbie Zelizer (2006) reminds us, photographic “images work differently in the contexts that put them to work. They adopt and adapt to the attributes of the domain into which they are imported, and they do so by putting indexicality into the service of the different aims and meanings that are relevant to each domain” (p. 5). The utility of photographs as a standard to assess truth was not consistently agreed upon in the nineteenth century. Positivism was arguably a regular contributor to the constitution of photographs as an object of meaning. However, indexicality was disputed at local levels, often in pragmatic ways with limited resolutions. Photographs were granted meaning in different ways. Their articulation to the material, institutional, ideological, and discursive constitutes photographic practice. While journalism and various forms of the nineteenth-century state define the “local” for three of the following examples, the chapter begins where most people initially came upon photography – the practices of portraiture.

Portraits

In the United States people tended to first encounter photographic portraits through the phenomenally successful daguerreotype. It produced a unique picture directly onto a polished silver-coated plate. As a positive image without a negative the daguerreotype was extremely fragile. It was protected in a case like a piece of jewelry. In the 1840s it became the most successful commercial concern in the United States, with citizens spending $8–12 million a year on daguerreotypes; by the mid-1850s, with the phenomenon lagging a little, an estimated 3 million daguerreotypes were still produced, selling at two for 25c (Tagg, 1988, pp. 42–43). When paper prints could be produced from glass negatives the carte-de-visite became another way in which people obtained portraits. This was a photographic visiting card 2 × 4 inches.

The popularity of daguerreotypes and cartes-de-visite extended the possibility of possessing a portrait beyond the art world of an elite group. This was celebrated as a democratization of representation in which photography, imbued with ideas of educational uplift, functioned as a proxy for democracy (Marien, 1997, pp. 72–73). However, in its various guises, the social history of photography has tempered this celebration. Historians have located the daguerreotype, in particular, in aspects of modernity other than democracy. Articulating this argument, cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg (2008) contends that it is important to acknowledge that photography emerged “as a representational practice within a culture undergoing unsettling change toward market-centered urban industrial capitalism” (p. 49). For him the daguerrean portrait quickly emerged as a “habitual commodity” (Trachtenberg, 1992, p. 186). Rather than a challenge to art as an indicator of social status, photography is positioned as introducing the visual as a form of mass consumption.

While people accessed photographic portraits as a commodity, this should not take away the excitement and uncertainty associated with the novelty of the relatively instant conversion of experience into image, into an object. The nature of the daguerreotype accentuated this novelty. The image could only be seen at a certain angle, producing the oft-commented on “flickering mirror effect.” The response, at least in published commentary, was a “mixed discourse of science, technique, art, and magic” (Trachtenberg, 2008, p. 172). This mechanically produced material image was frequently described as something closer to the materialization of someone, a manifestation more than a copy. Photography as a fusion of nature and technology became “an important proxy” (Marien, 1997, pp. 72–73) for the effects of science and technology on social life. Some early critics read the perceived accuracy of a mechanically produced image through an early iteration of a critique of mass culture. The portraits by camera, along with landscapes, were viewed as blunting creativity, as separating people from direct experience with nature.

Many of those who produced daguerreotypes entered the debate about the status of photography by trying to move it away from something primarily associated with the marketplace (or for that matter science). By the 1850s a “profession” emerged with national journals, associations, competitions, and awards. This existed both to try and marginalize those “quacks” with limited ability and to identify skilled practitioners as artists. It was in the creation of portraits that early photographers primarily came to think of themselves as artists, invoking in part the history of portraiture (Trachtenberg, 2008, p. 73).

While daguerreotypes and cartes-de-visite greatly increased the number of people who had access to portraits, they did not offer a significant challenge to preexisting portrait traditions. In fact, despite the claim that photography offered an unmediated depiction of reality, the accuracy of early photographic portraits depended on an understanding of “likeness” borrowed from a long tradition of painted portraits. To be seen as real, to be seen as indexical, photographs had to follow a set of protocols. Trachtenberg (1992) argues that the portrait as a camera image was made to “resemble a resemblance, to give an effect of likeness” (p. 187). This was achieved “only under controls (focus, framing, lighting) derived from a formula of likeness” (p. 187) taken from an adjacent formal system of representation in portraiture. Posture and expression were critical to the construction of this resemblance.

Numerous guides existed for daguerreotype portraits. It was assumed that photographic portraits could reveal the true character of the sitter if the photographer paid attention to position and pose. The guides drew from the popular pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology. Physiognomy sought to establish a person's character through external appearance, particularly the face and profile. More popular in the United States was phrenology, which argued that the personality traits of a person could be derived from the shape of their skull. As Trachtenberg (2008) contends “the popular ideology assumed (or desired) a transparent relation between face and character, between expression and truth” (p. 67).

Visual rhetorician Cara Finnegan's (2005) analysis of letters to McClure's in response to its publication in 1895 of an early photograph of Abraham Lincoln illustrates the unquestioned assumption that a person's face revealed their character. Popular understandings of physiognomy and phrenology constituted an “image vernacular” – a specific yet implicit way to talk about photographs that had solidified by the time photography became reproducible on a mass scale barely half a century after its first appearance as a unique image (Finnegan, 2005, p. 34). In the words of one reader, the image of Lincoln provided “valuable evidence as to his natural traits” (p. 40). His eyes signaled a “great heart”; his expression revealed “just purposes” and “unflinching determination” (p. 46). Summarizing one detailed letter, Finnegan writes Lincoln at a young age was “recognized” as a “man who can be relied upon to make the right decisions, a man who is thoughtful, determined, kind” (p. 46).

In this manner it has been argued that through physiognomy and phrenology photography fostered bourgeois notions of the self, which were frequently articulated to ideas of “American” identity. A regularly cited example of this is Mathew Brady's large daguerreotypes on display in his galleries, many of which were subsequently published as Gallery of Illustrious Americans. Images such as these have been positioned by historians as something for the public to emulate, “a space for viewing men in the guise of republican virtue: gravitas, dignitas, fides” (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 48). As photography emerged, the portrait tradition that it drew from came to function as “citizenship training of a sort, offering a democratic space for viewing a democratic art that paradoxically perpetuated elitist definitions of virtue” (Finnegan, 2005, p. 42). These elitist definitions were primarily manifest in the “cultivated asymmetries of aristocratic posture” (Tagg, 1988, p. 36) in which “pose is a function of leisure, and frontality signifies its lack” (Lalvani, 1998, p. 449). Through photographic portraiture “in the course of the nineteenth century, the burden of frontality was passed on down the social hierarchy, as the middle class secured their cultural hegemony” (Tagg, 1988, p. 36).

While “honorific” portrait photography in the form of a relatively cheap commodity that borrowed the signifiers of aristocratic portraiture arguably represented the rise of the middle class, another form of portrait photography emerged to represent a different segment of the population. As with “honorific” portraits, these “repressive” portraits drew on phrenology and physiognomy. However, because of the status of its subjects (e.g., the criminal, the insane) the latter was organized around a frontal image of head and shoulders. The ideal form of the repressive portrait became what we now know as the “mug shot.” French police used daguerreotypes to produce an early version of the mug shot in 1841. In the United States the San Francisco police department began to use photographs in 1854. Within two decades police departments in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland had joined it. These collections of photographs became known as “rogues' galleries.” In most situations these were actual gallery spaces open to the public. It has been argued that these functioned to cultivate a public perception of a criminal type that was manifest in appearance, particularly the face. Their popularity was such that P. T. Barnum added a rogues' gallery to his New York museum (Gunning, 1995, p. 24; Hall, 2009, pp. 65–69).

Identity Documents

Photography was established as a reliable source of empirical evidence in official identification practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. To reveal the “true” identity of the subject demanded a frontal pose with no facial expression, a sharp image with no exaggerated effects; the initial slow speed of early cameras enabled one short-lived act of resistance – the distortion of facial expressions (Gunning, 1995, pp. 25–27). Art historian John Tagg (2009) argues that the use of photographs in identification practices also depended on significant change in representation practices; “it was no longer a sign of power and prestige to be recorded but a sign of subjection and subordination” (p. 54). This iteration of the critique of portraits as a vehicle for democratization draws from Michel Foucault's (1977) argument about modernity and disciplinarity. Representation practices centered on documents and photographs produced an “individual” that became critical to the governing practices of the modern state.

Foucault's work has provided the framework for much of the historical analysis of photography and identification documents (Robertson, 2010; Sekula, 1986; Tagg, 1988). The literature on the emergence of identification photographs tends to approach its object in two ways. It addresses the photographic image through the modern project of classification, specifically phrenology and physiognomy. Second, it isolates the record-keeping practices necessary for photographs to be useful to official identification practices.

As with honorific portraits, the various forms of identity photographs drew from phrenology and physiognomy. In photography critic Alan Sekula's (1986) influential borrowing from Foucault he argues the development of photographic portraits produced a “shadow archive” (p. 15). The knowledge and position assigned to photographic images of the criminal body was a relative one. The recognition of a criminal type as “other” (repressive portrait) was associated with the representation of its opposite, a law-abiding bourgeois subject (honorific portrait). In both instances photography was understood to illustrate character “types”; “the ‘natural’ order of social structure and stratification was thought to be readily available in the evidence of the human body” (Green, 1984, p. 6).

The use of photography to illustrate racial, social, and class types reached its extreme in Francis Galton's “composite” photographs. Rather than identify a specific individual, in these images he sought to extract the typical physiognomic features of a given group from multiple photographs of individuals. For Galton these composite photographs, carrying with them the “truth” of photographic realism, were important as he attempted to give credibility to his theory of eugenics (Green, 1984; Sekula, 1986, pp. 40–55).

Photography was considered useful to identification because of its indexicality and iconic accuracy. This understanding made photography an ideal way to articulate a unique identity to a specific body, but as cultural historian Tom Gunning (1995) notes, “the photograph remains too individual, too specific, to be processed as thoroughly as rapid modes of information circulation demanded” (p. 31). Or as Sekula (1986, p. 16) argues, debates about “optical realism” detract from the critical object in the emergence of “instrumental photography” – the filing cabinet not the camera. The key example in these arguments is the system Alphonse Bertillon created to police recidivism in France in the late nineteenth century. Bertillon created a card-system that produced an identity created to facilitate the retrieval of files. Multiple measurements were taken from a prisoner's body. These were recorded on cards with a photograph attached. The cards were divided into successive subdivisions based on the collected measurements, each division organized into predetermined categories of below-average, average, and above-average. If done correctly this could break a collection of 100,000 cards into groups of no more than a dozen (Sekula, 1986).

Anna Pegler-Gordon's (2009) innovative research on the late-nineteenth-century use of identity photographs in the policing of Chinese immigration provides an important example of the contested emergence of identification photographs. She argues that the photographs on certificates issued to Chinese blurred the distinction between honorific and repressive portraits, which led to officials questioning their confidence in the objectivity of the camera.

In 1893 the US Congress approved the introduction of photographic identification documents for Chinese seeking exemption from the Chinese Exclusion Act. The novelty of the Chinese photographic documents in the 1890s speaks to a general acceptance of written descriptions of physical appearance in official identification; photographs did not appear on passports until World War 1 (Robertson, 2010, pp. 80–91).

The regulations introducing these documents made manifest the faith in the accuracy of the camera. The initial regulations regarding photographs were brief, indicating a trust in the essential accuracy and reliability of a photograph as evidence of identity. The Immigration Bureau required that photographs not be retouched or mounted and that they provide an accurate representation of the face.

The majority of photographs provided were simple frontal portraits focused on an individual's face. However, not all were. These exceptions challenged the blind faith in photography. Chinese used studio photographers and made use of many of the poses and props that photography had borrowed from the portrait tradition. Subjects stood, sat, faced the camera, or looked to the side. While most wore Chinese clothes, some men presented themselves with the markers of Western masculine respectability: suits, ties, and even facial hair. Others adopted a very traditional Chinese cultural appearance. The majority of these images were rectangular vertical portraits, but some had trimmed corners and others were in the shape of arches or ovals. The position of Chinese relative to the categories of exclusion tended to determine the style, content, and form of photographs. Native-born US citizens made use of Western conventions in an attempt to emphasize their Americanness. Women filled their identity photographs with evidence of their class status and home life to try to avoid being identified as prostitutes (Pegler-Gordon, 2009, pp. 42–61).

Beyond playing with photographic conventions, Chinese also deliberately manipulated actual photographs (Pegler-Gordon, 2009, pp. 70–76). This strategy further challenged official trust in the automatic reliability of photography. Chinese attempted to break the link between document and person by substituting photographs on documents and exploiting the “vulnerabilities in the image” (Pegler-Gordon, 2009, p. 71). In the latter case, the image was intentionally altered or retouched. Sometimes even this was not necessary due to the poor quality of the photograph. A blurry image could produce sufficient ambiguity to enable someone to use a document issued in the name of another person.

Officials responded to these actions with regulations that collectively amounted to the realization that a photograph of a person did not guarantee accurate identification. New regulations and the actions of officials seemed to acknowledge that the conditions in which photographs and documents were produced had important consequences for the success of a photographic image as a mode of official identification.

In an attempt to curb the substitution of photographs an official stamp was placed over part of the photograph when it was attached to the exemption certificate. A new regulation specified that the three photographs submitted should be identical photographs, produced from the same negative. Applicants had often sent in different images, a practice that prevented officials using the application form to determine whether a photograph on a certificate had been substituted (Pegler-Gordon, 2009, pp. 74–75).

The Immigration Bureau began to photograph Chinese as they arrived in one more effort to more effectively use photographs to secure identity. Standing outside, immigrants held a small chalkboard with their name and other details. Including the name in the actual image was intended to more securely link the image to a name and hence a file. In privileging another identification technology (the name) officials potentially compromised the photograph as a mode of identification. An official photographed arrivals at Angel Island outside in sunlight. These pictures frequently had shadows that distorted the individual's face (Pegler-Gordon, 2009, pp. 62–63).

By 1914 most photographs had a fairly consistent appearance with people facing the camera hatless. Faces were similar sizes and the photographs were cut to a uniform size with consistent exposure and background; regional variations continued until the mid-1920s. In practice standardization meant the reduction of acceptable images and, therefore, an active attempt to prevent subjects from having any control over their self-presentation. Collectively they constituted these photographs as reliable by solidifying the links between observation, description, representation, and record, and hence “truth” and “knowledge” (Tagg, 1988, p. 78).

Legal Evidence

The status of photographs as evidence also emerged in a contested fashion in US legal culture during the second half of the nineteenth century. As with identity photographs, the initial debates sought to establish the nature of the distinction between the evidence a photograph could provide and written and spoken evidence. However, this quickly became clouded by differences between photographs and other images that could potentially be used as evidence.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, legal evidence usually consisted of words, both spoken and written. The few images sanctioned in a courtroom tended to be either maps and surveys in land disputes or drawings and diagrams in patent cases. As a result of this limited use, visual representation was not a well-developed category of evidence. Legal historian Jennifer Mnookin (1998) argues the attempts to provide a legal doctrine to allow photographs enhanced and challenged the idea that images constituted a category of evidence distinct from words.

Photographs began to be used in US courtrooms in the second half of the nineteenth century. Daguerreotypes appear not to have been used. Paper photographs were admitted in courtrooms but usually only in two types of cases: disputed handwriting cases or to “describe” terrain or buildings in land dispute cases (Mnookin, 1998, pp. 10–11). It was only during the 1870s that photographs occasionally began to be used to verify personal identity.

The contested attempt to bring photographs into the courtroom led to the establishment of a legal doctrine that sought to explain the function of images more broadly. According to the doctrine that formalized their arrival, photographs, like all images, were thought to be identical to witness testimony in verbal form. However, Mnookin (1998) contends that this doctrine was “a formal rule that coexisted with a reality that contradicted it” (p. 50). As a “legal fiction” the photograph in the courtroom made visible two contested understandings that ushered photography into nineteenth-century culture: photographs as unmediated replication and photographs as artifice.

Adhering to the idea that they were constructed objects, photographs were formally admitted to the courtroom as illustrations identical in function to diagrams and maps. A photograph was considered to be a product of technical limitations and skill, be it the focal length of lenses or the complexities of lighting. This judicial critique of photographic realism in terms of human agency meant a photograph was thought of as another form of human testimony and, therefore, something that may or may not be true. At the level of doctrine it was accepted that a photograph could not prove something independent from the words of an individual. The credibility of a photograph depended on the credibility of another witness. As an explanatory aid a photograph needed a witness who could attest that it was a correct representation. A majority of judges, therefore, understood a photograph as something constructed to give visual support to someone's point of view.

In the 1880s the regular use of staged photographs provided an example of the doctrine of illustrative evidence in practice. These photographs often posed people where parties claimed to have been to recreate scenes of accidents or crimes; in other examples witnesses made marks on photographs to signify their position at the scene. However, the reluctance of some judges to admit posed recreations speaks to an understanding of photography that saw it as distinct from maps and diagrams. For these judges the indexical authority of the photograph created the possibility that as evidence it could do more than merely illustrate. Viewed through the popular assumption that photography could replicate reality in an objective manner, some in the courtroom recognized that a photograph could persuade a jury independent of the words of witnesses. The unmediated depiction attributed to photographs had the potential to create images that could be seen as a form of proof independent from a witness and, therefore, not open to cross-examination. At its extreme a belief in photographic realism “threatened to make the fact-finding portion of a trial redundant by providing facts in an uncontestable form” (Mnookin, 1998, p. 6); for some judges the attempt to link photographs to the doctrine of illustrative evidence was constructed in full recognition of this difference between photographs and other visual representations.

The belief that photography was produced by nature and science supported the confidence of those who believed that photography had the authority to be an independent witness. Therefore, contrary to the intention of illustrative evidence, in 1882 a Georgia Supreme Court judge wrote, “We cannot conceive of a more impartial and truthful witness than the sun, as its light stamps and seals the similitude of the wound on the photograph put before the jury; it would be more accurate than the memory of witnesses, as the object of all evidence is to show the truth, why should not this dumb witness show it?” (Mnookin, 1998, p. 18). This perspective turned a photograph into a replication not a representation, and into an independent trustworthy witness. In contrast to the narrow understanding of photographic meaning created through its identification with maps and diagrams, in practice photographs could in fact persuade a judge and jury.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the attempt to tame photographs through identification with preexisting visual images had failed. Although photography had been formally admitted into courtrooms with the understanding photographs were artifice, once admitted they were frequently understood as unmediated replications. The prevalence of the latter resulted in the increased use of visual representations beyond the photograph. The indexical quality associated with photography created a larger space for visual images. Mnookin (1998) argues the attempt to give photography a legal history in fact dramatically expanded the category of illustrative evidence, if not actually invented it. As photographs pushed visual representations closer to being evidence not mere illustration, other representational forms came to be understood in these terms.

Print Media

An even more direct engagement between the developing authority of photographs and the existing authority of words occurred in the world of journalism. As with portraits and courtroom evidence, negotiation over the status of photography occurred within preexisting visual practices. The emergence of photographs in newspapers is attributed to the technological advance of the halftone, which enabled newspapers to publish photographs with relative ease. Photographs began to appear occasionally in newspapers after 1880. However, it was not until 1897 that the New York Tribune became the first newspaper to print photographs daily, making use of halftone reproduction that emerged in the 1880s. By this time a new genre of advertising-driven periodicals targeting the middle class had arrived that made extensive use of halftones. However, rather than a triumph of technology, the emergence of photographs in print media can be seen as contemporaneous with changes in the form and meaning of news.

Despite the cultural impact of the daguerreotype and paper photography, in the mid-nineteenth century there was little sense that photography would become an important part of news (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001, p. 112). Technologies such as woodcuts and wood engraving, various forms of metal engravings, and lithography provided the images considered necessary to print media prior to the emergence of the halftone. The illustrations that appeared in weeklies and newspapers adhered to a distinct visual regime. Historian Joshua Brown situates the images in the illustrated press within the social context of the Gilded Age. He contends that the illustrations helped people master the radical social, political, and economic changes of the period. Brown (2002) argues, “rendering figures whose features and physiques were imbued with the rules of physiognomy, the illustrations in the pictorial press constructed an orderly, detectable, moral map for what seemed so hidden and chaotic in mid-nineteenth century America” (p. 80).

In terms of the specific practices of narrative-driven print media, pre-halftone illustrations were created within a set of practices that “underscored the author, dedicated itself to storytelling and observation, [and] promised vicarious experience to its readers” (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001, p. 18). In this sense illustration did not transcend the world of words. Prior to photographs illustrations existed in a definition of news that privileged narrative; they functioned to capture the “decisive moment” (Craig, 1999, p. 48) that required emphasis within the particular account.

To successfully contribute to the narrative it was common for illustrators to recreate crucial events in a composite image. Leslie's illustration of President Garfield's assassination covered what would have been at least a minute of events. The image included the look of surprise on Garfield's face as well as the apprehension of the assailant. In contrast, two decades later Leslie's coverage of President McKinley's assassination included dozens of photographs of McKinley and other figures but there was no illustration of the shooting itself (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001, p. 126).

The halftone came into use between these two presidential assassinations but the difference between illustrations and photographs represented a change in attitude to news reporting and news images. Media historians Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone (2001) argue photographs became the primary form of illustration only after the art of storytelling was downplayed in news in favor of a commitment to a more “modern” form of realism and objectivity. The “realist ethos” associated with photography did not fit into the authenticity sought through newspaper illustrations. The art of storytelling in illustrated news depended on a belief in authenticity that privileged the authority of the author and the artist. In this context press photography could only make sense if the “real” was separated from the idea of art and the significance of authorship was downplayed.

In journalism the realist ethos was articulated as objectivity. For Dan Schiller (1981), the integration of photography into journalism was related to the rise of positivism. Photography understood by means of science provided a way in which people came to grasp the idea of an objective world. Although newspapers rarely used daguerreotypes, the cultural understanding of early photography provided newspapers with a metaphorical comparison through which to articulate the idea of objectivity in news (Schiller, 1981, pp. 88–89). Photography bolstered the increasingly dominant cultural belief that truth and accuracy required the absence of human intervention, or rather that the accurate representation of truth required that the role of human mediation be obscured. While there is a debate over the timing and nature of the appearance of “objectivity” in news, one agreed-upon consequence of its emergence is that photographs came to be defined as “factual” in contrast to the “bias” of illustration.

In the larger cultural realignment of the real with the technical, photography and reporting both came to be understood through the erasure of authorship. Photographers came to be seen as witnesses, not responsible for their images in the way a sketch artist who gathered images from people at the scene had been. The photographs they took acquired “news values” such as immediacy, conflict, and prominence. Further, in the modern newspaper formation many of the tasks previously assigned to words – dramaturgy, depictions of demeanor, and the description of visual detail – became the task of photographs (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001).

Brown (2002) argues that the understanding of photo-realist conventions as objective did not alter preexisting representational strategies, and therefore they did not challenge understandings of national identity and ideals of citizenship. A portrait tradition continued and with it the use of racial and ethnic typing in images; in fact photographs in print media enhanced the authority of these images as accurate representations. The objectivity of photo-realist methods was articulated to the objectivity of scientific theories about racial and class hierarchies; in the social and cultural context at the beginning of the twentieth century the “halftone effect” (Harris, 1990, pp. 304–317) did not mark a distinct “epistemological or representational break from earlier practices” (Brown, 2002, pp. 241–242).

However, Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) argue the emergence of photographic realism did alter other aspects of citizenship. In the world of print journalism the arrival of photographic realism saw the emergence of a greater passivity on the part of readers as citizens. The use of illustrations in a narrative mode had brought the viewer or reader into the world and implied a republican model of citizenship. In exchanging temporal narrative for immediacy and emotional impact, realist press photography offered a new model of citizenship. This was citizenship that in the name of a realism derived from objectivity divided the reader or viewer from the world. This is evident in the “photojournalist.” Understood as a witness, he or she made manifest that “journalistic realism projects an audience that can neither blame journalists nor take effective action in the public sphere” (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001, p. 138). Photographic images were published with a commitment to “realism” and a commercially driven populism, but not with any sense of civic responsibility.

This new relationship between reader and print media is even more evident in the phenomenally successful “ten cent magazines” that emerged following the advent of the halftone. These instantiated a distinct break in the relationship between readers and the publications they purchased; advertisers, not subscribers, funded the magazines such as Munsey's, McClure's, and Ladies' Home Journal.

The perception that photographs were more realistic than illustrations attracted advertisers. However, this was a “realism” in which the importance of artistic enhancement was recognized. Explaining the use of a staged photograph in an advertisement, one of the pioneers in commercial art theory wrote, “it is a real picture but drawn with a camera” (Phillips, 1996, p. 148). Realism in the context of advertising was the “art of making dull reality interesting” (Phillips, 1996, p. 140).

Photography was once again dragged into debates about the democratization of culture and more directly the rise of national commercial culture. The linking of art and industry through the medium of the halftone was a frequent subject for discussion in photographic and advertising industry trade journals at the turn of the century. For proponents, photographic images in advertising offered the potential to expose more of the population to high culture. For critics, this form of advertising cheapened people's aesthetic sensibilities. It was argued this would likely lead to a rise of superficiality and mediocrity (Phillips, 1996, p. 152).

Conclusion

In the field of media studies, photography is often positioned to provide a critique of historically specific modes of understanding and representation. The photographic image is not ignored, but it is rarely viewed in terms of the actions of an individual or to explain or advance aesthetic debates. John Tagg (2009) argues photography is not something that is simply given, “it has to be constituted and it has to be instituted” (p. 14). For Tagg this makes the analysis of photography a Foucauldian project to examine the unstable and contested discursive conditions in which different “photographies” are constituted. However, for many scholars within media studies, the historical analysis of photography is not a Foucauldian project, but one that identifies social contexts external to photography in which photographic technologies were mobilized and instrumentalized.

However, regardless of the approach within media studies, the analysis of the emergence of photography is articulated to “modernity.” The analysis of photography grants important specificity to modernity; it becomes a historically specific object of study not a largely bibliographic frame of reference used to advance theoretical arguments (Morris, 1998, p. 2). This is not to suggest that when linked photography and modernity dont encourage the contemplation of large, scale historical debates. However, the preceding examples are intended to illustrate that be it linked to understandings of personal identity, citizenship, national identity and democracy, or capitalism, consumption, and mass culture, the complicated set of practices associated with photography provide important instances of how the present of the nineteenth century was imagined and interrogated as new.

Within the particular context of media studies it is important to note that nineteenth-century modernity saw “unprecedented transformation in the conditions of human contact, along two axes in particular: transmission and recording” (Peters, 1999, p. 138). Photography has long been positioned as an important way to comprehend this transformation. The preceding examples emphasized this through the tension between the authority of the written word and the photographic image. Implicit in these specific examples is that nineteenth-century photography suggests a new form of inscription (“-graphy”). As Lisa Gitelman (2000) has argued, new inscriptions “regulated modern experience, making life more legible in complicated, public ways” (p. 11). To that end photography illustrates that “inscription is a form of intervention” (p. 3).

In the distinct local spaces of the living room, the courtroom, and the border, photographic images articulated to other visual practices challenged understandings of truth and memory. Here transformations in recording and transmission come to be understood in terms of an unsettled modernity structured through new relations of circulation; whether it be the circulation of identities, evidence, or commodities, and therefore a modern conception of information centered on exchange value. Historian Matt K. Matsuda (1996) writes of the “memory of the modern” where memory is an activity, an act of coordination (pp. 6–8). In the example of the state, it remembers, it acts through documents, practices, and institutions that constitute the memory of the state. In a similar vein Gunning uses “circulation” to locate one critical aspect of photography within modernity. Beyond the indexical and iconic he argues the “detachable nature” of a photograph “allows it to refer to an absent object separated from it in space and time” (Gunning, 1995, p. 20).

The intention of this chapter is to push media studies beyond a focus on photography in terms of news or print media to look at other sites in the dispersed and complicated emergence of photography. However, it has admittedly done so without challenging the dominant framework that grants pride of place to analyzing the information that is identified and legitimated through the emergence of a range of photographic practices. Barbie Zelizer's recent book makes the specificity of this approach apparent.

In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (2010) Zelizer uses imagination, emotion, and contingency to frame her analysis of photography, specifically an examination of “about-to-die” images. Her project is not about the negotiation of authority in terms of objectivity. Instead, Zelizer (2010) explores the idea that “photographs facilitate making sense of the world in a way that is not necessarily rational, evidentiary or reasoned” (p. 13). Her analysis still privileges the relationship between photography and memory, but it is the role of memory and photography in securing “more affective and extrarational engagement” (p. 314). This is something Zelizer argues runs counter to the idea of journalism as an “-nformation relay” in the present. Her book is a challenge to the uncritical acceptance of journalism as a project of modernity and, therefore, the acceptance of journalism as a rational project in which images will always be secondary to words.

In the context of the current chapter what is most provocative about About to Die is its ability to say something new about journalism and photography. Zelizer is able to do this because she challenges the way “modernity” has been used to articulate photography and journalism. Even if not conceived as such her project speaks to the broader “affective turn” in recent cultural analysis.

While About to Die is largely a critique of contemporary practices it provides another example that photography is not a technology with a single meaning or a single history that plays the same regardless of context. Photography remains a productive site for critical thinking within media studies. This chapter has highlighted some of the social contexts and discursive conditions which an analysis of photography can foreground. However, from the perspective of media history the contested emergence of photography in a period of significant social change makes its early history an important, and still largely unexplored, object for analysis within media studies.

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