This word just popped into my head, a cousin word to “Be-hold.” This is prompted by my renewed involvement with cases for daguerreotypes and other unique images, as presented in our current on-site auction, and by the book “Pour fixer la trace” by Marta Caraion. The book was sent to me by Mark Johnson, who has me designated as the French translator for the Daguerreian Society, and so I receive a sprinkling throughout the year of E-mails and other communications in French which have been sent to the Society. (After the fabulous show of French daguerreotypes at the Metropolitan Museum I doubt that he or anyone else will be sending me French daguerreotypes themselves without some serious, very serious, commitment on my part.)
I wrote Mark that the book doesn’t have particularly to do with daguerreotypes, but rather deals with the relationships between photographic prints and literature of travel in the 19th Century. Rushing off to California (to the M.P.M. show in Emeryville), this was the book I grabbed to read on the plane, and, in that pleasurable state of reading stupor which is only possible (for me) on long airplane flights, I had epiphany after epiphany that I hope I can share with you now.
The case preserves the daguerreotype (and for a while later the ambrotype and tintype) for the intimate private involvement of the person holding it, experiencing the image within the visual and tactile environment it provides. This is the kind of “holding” that I referred to in an earlier Newsletter, ‘THE HAND AND THE WALL.” But at the same time as there was this intimate private Victorian preserving of images (most often family images but sometimes also images of the family home, the animals and conveyances belonging to the family or of the business) there was another much more public aspect of the daguerreotype. This was represented by the large daguerreotypes, sometimes presented in passepartouts and other types of frames for the wall. Assemblages of these often had grand aspirations, such as Brady’s National Portrait Gallery, and the displays of daguerreotypes that were exhibited at international fairs, such as The Crystal Palace, and other International Exhibitions. The current exhibition of French daguerreotypes at the Metropolitan Museum includes multitudes of daguerreotypes that were in no sense “intimate” or “private.”
Until now, I hadn’t quite directed my attention to what would be the situation of commercial sale as opposed to the exhibition aspect of these pieces. Were these works presented purely for exhibition outside of the normal commercial life of the studio, which would consist of making commissioned portraits, or were they offered for general sale to studio clients? If so, who would buy them?
We are told that some of the spectacular scenic daguerreotypes, such as many of those in the U.S. showing the scenes in the California Gold Rush, were commissioned by workers there, to be sent back to their families in the East. But some don’t emphasize a particular person. [Frequently many workers appear, yet each daguerreotype was unique, so multiple copies couldn’t have been made for several of the workers.] Were these offered for sale to the “general public?” Were they made for exhibition only?
I remember having had some catalogs from “Holman’s Book Shop” in Boston, where fabulous daguerreotypes by Southworth & Hawes were being offered to a lethargic public in the early 20th-Century. Were these same daguerreotypes offered for sale 50 years or more earlier, directly by the S & H studio?
With the development of the CDV, and particularly the CDV album, which is the later evolution of the daguerreotype case, there is a profound change. Disderi, the inventor of this process, well envisioned the implication of this change (it was the quotations from his writings in the Caraion book that I found most stimulating). The CDV album allowed the display of family photographs to be accompanied by a wide variety of other photographs, which would be affordable to people of normal means. The relative cheapness of the process, and the way it was offered, allowed the average person to be a collector!
This was accompanied by the full development of the stereo view as a collectible object. As collectors in this format well know, these views were issued in series, listed in catalogs and often listed on the back of the views themselves. The production of 19th- century stereo views was oriented toward COLLECTORS! They would assemble, from what was available, a personalized collection of what would be meaningful to the particular collector, from the totality of what was offered.
Ethnographic and travel photographs would also be issued in series, sometimes numbered series. Travelers would visit a studio, and select the prints that would be organized into an album. Each album would be a “collection” organized according to the taste and experience of the owner, or already selected by the photographer.
From “The Pencil of Nature” and famous early English and French albums up to recent snapshot albums, photographs would be grouped in meaningful collections, series, and portfolios. These would often be assembled by the photographer. In American photography, there are classic examples, for example Civil War albums such as Gardner’s “Sketchbook,” or the various Expedition portfolios by Hillers and Jackson. Frank’s “The Americans” continues in this tradition, or Winogrand’s portfolios, or numerous other 19th and 20th century contextualized groupings you can think of yourself. Published books of a collection of a photographer’s works often make the artist-chosen context of the works available to a wider public who can’t experience or purchase the actual vintage photographs that originally comprised the grouping.
A corollary of the dominance of the “wall” in the Hand vs. Wall conflict as that very often the chosen context of the artist is ignored or disrespected by those who choose interior decorating concerns but mask them as artistic vision. An example is the absurd and tragic fact that most of the extant copies of “Camera Work” have been ravaged by dealers who know that selling individual prints will yield a higher profit than trying to sell the actual issues so lovingly assembled and coordinated by Stieglitz. These are people who “revere” Stieglitz to the heavens, while desecrating his work. Another example is the strange market for Curtis, where individual works will sometimes sell for more than whole portfolios issued by Curtis of similar work.
Contemporary collectors dig into the welter of material that becomes available, and impose their own collecting values that differ in most cases from the values originally intended. In many cases these new values are profound and meaningful.