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Society and in October 1857 attributed the success of
Photographic Notes to the fact that it did not copy ar-
ticles and the demise of the Photographic Record and
Liverpool Photographic Journal to copying. He claimed
to address the ‘whole class’ of British photographers
and not certain sections. He did include material that he
consider useful from French and American journals on
occasion and by early 1858 was making arrangements
to distribute Photographic Notes to America.
The contemporary view of the Photographic Notes is
best summed by J Trail Taylor writing in the manuscript
journal The Photographer and reproduced in Photo-
graphic Notes (15 June 1857) ‘Photographic Notes, from
the beginning, has occupied a high place’ and refl ects
the individuality of the editor ‘who is everywhere pres-
ent from the title page to the closing advertisement. He
writes as he thinks, and his honesty may be relied on,
for the he seems ever ready to retract what he fi nds er-
roneous.’ For this reason Photographic Notes provides
a useful alternative to contemporary debates and issues
and in it’s early years it’s frequency gave it a topicality
not enjoyed by its rivals.
Michael Pritchard
See also: Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré; and
Sutton, Thomas.
Further Reading
Gernsheim, Helmut, Incunabula of British Photographic Litera-
ture, London, Scolar Press, 1884.
Koelzer, Walter, Photographic and Cinematographic Periodicals,
Dusseldorf, Der Foto Brell, 1992.
Photographic Notes, Thomas Sutton, 1856–1867.
PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES
Photography in the 19th century was very much a prac-
tice, from the studio or the photographic van to the card
album and photolithographic publication. The following
presentation will concentrate on practices involving the
use of photographs, a vast topic in view of the formi-
dable spread of photography in the 19th century.
The 19th century viewed, appreciated and used
photographs not just as images but as objects. Because
of the amount of investment, technique, and effort that
was required to produce a satisfactory and durable
photograph, and because the overwhelming majority
of photographs produced were portraits, photographs
were treated not just as valuable images but as pre-
cious objects, especially in the early days. This was
particularly true in non-reproducible processes such
as the daguerreotype and its later imitation the ferro-
type, or tintype. The daguerreotype, nicknamed “silver
plate,” sometimes hand-colored and often gilded, was
inherently a precious object, and visitors to some of
the more ambitious daguerreotype “galleries,” such
as Mathew Brady’s in New York, regularly described
them as fairy-like, glittering palaces. More commonly,
daguerreotypes and tintypes, because they were single
images with hard metal bases, usually small, and gen-
erally portraits, invited procedures of preservation and
exhibition that tended to defi ne them as both relics and
ornaments. Thus the fi nished daguerreotype or tintype
would be framed and inserted in a wallet or case, often
decorated on the outside and lined with red or purple
velvet inside. This made it possible to mail the picture or
to carry it along, as soldiers often did, but also to display
it and treasure it, in the same fashion as miniature paint-
ings had been earlier. In the era of the daguerreotype,
when obtaining a portrait of oneself or of one’s family
or friends was a rare and a costly occurrence, and since
such portraits had a very strong sentimental value, like-
nesses of loved ones were prized objects that expressed
a combination of feeling, novelty, and prestige, as
indicated by early daguerreotypes with sitters holding
another daguerreotype portrait. Daguerreotypes were
shown in the sitting-room, sometimes carried to formal
occasions, but also sent as gifts to far-away friends and
relatives, even across oceans, and the action of opening
the case added solemnity to the experience of seeing a
face that might not have been known beforehand. From
1840 on, the business of daguerreotype frames and cases
was one of the most successful and creative activities
deriving from photography. Although the demand for
cases faded with the decline of the daguerreotypes in
the 1850s, it picked up again with the popularization
of the tintype. Historian Robert Taft reported a case of
an American manufacturer receiving an order in 1862
from a single operator for 3000 gross of these cases.
A cheaper form of presentation for tintypes was to
mount them in envelopes with a window for viewing
the picture. A related practice, although rarer and more
status-conscious, was to insert miniature daguerreotype
portraits of beloved ones or spouses in various kinds of
jewels, such as pocketwatch cases and brooches. All
of these practices amounted to a kind of framing, by
which the emotional appeal of the picture was at the
same time highlighted and confi ned. Similarly, and in
keeping with the constant 19th-century association of
photography with the memorializing of the deceased,
portraits of loved ones in daguerreotype, and then in tin-
type as well as in photographs transferred onto ceramic
bases, were often placed on graves, and patents for the
fastening of such effi gies on tombstones were taken out
starting in the 1850s. These ritualistic, almost religious,
uses were also common with paper photographs later
in the century, as is evident from mentions of them in
novels such as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and
especially Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past, where the ordinary seductions of photographs are