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gold chains, and cloaks. Jan Steen portrayed himself
as an anti-hero, often occupying the central position in
paintings that depicted the chaos of unruly households,
taverns, and debauchery in general. And when Caravag-
gio depicted David holding Goliath’s decapitated head
in triumph, he modeled the ogre’s head after his own.
But photographers of the 19th century approached
the genre with an exceptional degree of freedom and
experimentation. Among others, Charles Negre, Roger
Fenton, Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon, and Francis
Frith enjoyed donning costumes and posing as various
Romantic and exotic fi gures.
Nadar’s and O. G. Rejlander’s self-portraits are
especially notable cases in point. Nadar made numerous
self-portraits throughout his lengthy career, including
straightforward head and shoulders images and family
portraits with his wife and son. He sometimes donned
outrageous costumes and wigs, probably chosen from
the compendious wardrobes he kept in his studio. Nadar
also photographed himself as part of two of his many
entrepreneurial projects. He made at least one self-
portrait in the Paris catacombs as part of a series on the
expansive underground network in Paris. These photo-
graphs represented the fi rst underground photographs
as well as one of the earliest successful efforts to use
artifi cial light in photography. The process of sitting for
the catacomb self-portrait, which among other things
provided a sense of scale for the unfamiliar underground
setting, proved to be an especially arduous undertaking
because of the very long exposure time and the cool and
damp conditions. In a subsequent picture, Nadar spared
himself the inconvenience and used a dummy rather than
himself. Nadar was also an investor in the development
of hot air ballooning, which became something of a
passion for him. He used it as an opportunity to make
the fi rst aerial photographs, and also to pose himself
(looking not entirely comfortable) in the gondola of
one the balloons.
Across the English Channel, O. G. Rejlander was
no less eclectic and eccentric in his interests. He posed
himself in various guises, ranging from Greek phi-
losophers to Garibaldi. He included himself in several
humorous tableaus. In one scene, Rejlander scratches
his head in confusion as a gypsy peddler tries to con
him with an array of products, while in another image
he whispers gossip into another man’s ear about an
unseen young woman. In several of the illustrations
for Darwin’s On the Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals (1872), Rejlander used himself as a
model, histrionically posing in images that supposedly
represented indignation, surprise and other emotions.
He used the combination printing technique that he
pioneered in the mid 1850s to create a self-portrait of
himself presenting an alter-ego version of himself as a
militiaman. In Happy Days, Rejlander and his wife Mary
smile broadly as they embrace one another, an unusually
upbeat depiction of middle-aged love. There is a joie de
vivre in Rejlander’s self-portraits that is rare not only in
19th century photography, but in the entire history of the
genre. Both Rejlander and Nadar in large measure reject
the melancholic and self-important postures that many
self-portraitists adopted, in part, one senses, because
they were simply having too much fun playing with the
photographic possibilities.
Some of the same elements continue through memo-
rable American self-portraits near the turn of the cen-
tury. In a dizzying photograph, William Henry Jackson
posed himself at the edge of a high and precipitous
rock outcropping in Yosemite (c.1895). The legs of the
tripod are spread to the extreme edges of the small rock
as Jackson studies the canyon on the ground glass. In
dramatizing the considerable risks that many landscape
photographers undertook in the practice of their art, such
images valorized the courage of the photographer.
In 1898, F. Holland Day took different kinds of
risks when fasting for several weeks in order to depict
himself as Christ in a crucifi xion series. The series in-
cludes close-ups of Day’s head, topped with a crown of
thorns, as well as photographs of his emaciated, nearly
naked body nailed to the cross. These self-portraits are
extraordinarily realistic, which accounts for some of the
controversy that they occasioned when fi rst exhibited
in Boston.
Two other pairs of self-portraits are emblematic of
how the genre developed in the late nineteenth century.
Edward Steichen made numerous self-portraits through-
out his long career, but two of his earliest are among
the strongest in the medium’s history. In one, made in
Milwaukee in 1898, a young, casually dressed Steichen
stands near the edge of the picture’s frame, peering
rather uncertainly into the camera. Beside his head
hangs a small empty frame on an otherwise blank wall.
The picture has a tentative quality to it, suggesting a
young man who is just beginning to emerge as a distinct
personality. The other self-portrait was taken four years
later, after Steichen had moved to Paris. Now Steichen
depicts himself as a painter (which in fact he was at
the time), applying a brush to a palette in a beautifully
composed and heavily worked photograph. He is dressed
in sumptuous clothes worthy of a Rubens self-portrait.
In this picture, Steichen presents himself as the very
picture of success and self-assurance. Whether these
two photographs represent an actual metamorphosis in
Steichen’s personality is open to question, but there is
little doubt that the two projected selves could not be
more different.
Similarly, Frances Benjamin Johnston constructed
two very different selves in 1896. In The Proper Vic-
torian, Johnston, in her early thirties, poses herself as
a society matron, a genre in which she had developed