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BABBITT, PLATT D.
exposed, with remarkable depth of fi eld and tonal range.
His compositions of the various sites from which to view
the Falls display creative points of view and framing.
Thus, it seems particularly unlikely that he would leave
the arrangement of his visitors at Prospect Point, and
the expense of his exposures, to chance.
Babbitt was a versatile photographer, a man who
seized opportunity to make a saleable image. His work
as a documentarian—as an early photojournalist, even
—rarely receives notice today. But in 1853, Babbitt
created one of the most gripping of any early photo-
graphs. In that year, a man named Joseph Avery was
boating above the Falls with a friend, when their boat
was overtaken by the current, and capsized. Avery clung
to a log that had lodged against a rock in the rapids. His
friend was swept over the brink to his death. It was a
bright day, and Babbitt had the time to move his camera
to water’s edge, where he made an image of the helpless
Avery clinging to the log in the water, moments before
his death. Attempts to save the man failed, and he, too,
was carried across the brink. Niagara was a place for
disasters, and for daredevils, and during his career,
Babbitt documented these events, as well as those who
came to visit.
Babbitt was not the fi rst to document the Falls and its
visitors. M.H.L. Pattinson, an English daguerreotypist
who documented Niagara in 1841 for Noel Marie Pay-
mal Lerebours, publisher of Excursions Daguerriennes
vues et monuments les plus remarqualles du globe, was
the fi rst, followed by several others in the 1840s, no-
tably including Frederick and William Langenheim of
Philadelphia. But Babbitt was the fi rst resident photog-
rapher on the American side, and he knew the Falls in its
changing, annual faces, most spectacularly in the winter,
when few tourists braved the challenging Western New
York weather. His views all along the banks of the river,
and his views from the base of the falls and the Cave of
the Winds behind the falls, are spectacular, technically
skilled and artfully handled, at fi rst as daguerreotypes
in full, half and quarter plates, later in dagurrean stereo
views and glass plate colloidon stereo, window trans-
parencies, and paper stereo prints.
Babbitt led a hard-scramble life in what amounted
to a frontier town. His photography attracted attention
through the 1850s, but late in that decade, the public
record shows, his work became more of a struggle. He
felt called on to defend his territory on Prospect Point
from encroachment by other photographers, and he
would disrupt their exposures with men waving open
umbrellas in front of their cameras. And he fought with
his landlord in a public brawl that attracted newspaper
attention. During the 1860s, he dropped away from
public view.
In 1873, a story in the local paper announces his re-
turn from “several years of retirement,” with an offering
a new glass transparency views of Niagara. And then in
1879, another story in the local press, reports his suicide,
after a period of poor health, suffering from weakness
and fainting spells. His death is marked by irony, for a
man as skilled as he in negotiating the dangerous shores
of Niagara, was found with a rock tied around his neck,
face down in a creek of three-feet of water in a small
town south of Buffalo.
Chiefly remembered for his setup exposures of
tourists at the edge of the Falls, Babbitt is represented
principally by this image in most museum collections
and histories of photography. His work as a landscape
photographer and documentarian is equally fi ne, and
increasing attention has been given to this work, notably
in Frank Henry Goodyear’s Constructing a National
Landscape: Photography and Tourism in Nineteenth
Century America, a dissertation for doctor of philoso-
phy at the University of Texas at Austin, 1998, and the
author’s The Taking of Niagara: A History of the Falls
in Photography, 1982, Media Study/Buffalo.
Anthony Bannon
See Also: Werge, John; and Daguerreotype.Further Reading
Babbitt, Platt D. The Taking of Niagara: A History of the Falls in
Photography. Buffalo, NY: Media Study, 1982.
Goodyear, Frank Henry. Constructing a National Landscape:
Photography and Tourism in Nineteenth Century America.
American Studies Department, University of Texas at Austin,
May 1998.BACOT, EDMOND (1814–1875)
A painting student of Paul Delaroche, Edmond Auguste
Alfred Bacot took up daguerreotypye by 1846 (although
no examples survive) and paper photography by 1850.
His largest and most impressive photographs, made
with glass negatives between 1852 and 1854, depict
historic monuments in his hometown, Caen, and in
Rouen, Bayeux, and other sites in Normandy. With
their focus on Gothic architecture and deep swaths of
shadow, photographs such as Saint Maclou, Rouen rival
the work of Bacot’s Parisian counterparts and evoke the
romantic spirit of Victor Hugo’s writings and drawings.
A Republican sympathizer and supporter, Bacot visited
Hugo in exile on nearby Jersey in December 1852 and
provided photographic instruction to his son Charles
Hugo in Caen in March 1853. An album of 28 lavishly
presented photographs by Bacot (Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York) likely consists of the prints sent to
Hugo and much admired by the writer and his son. Six
architectural photographs also appear in an album as-
sembled by Bacot’s fellow Norman gentleman-amateur,
Louis Alphonse de Bisson (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). More
widely distributed were Bacot’s formal portraits of Vic-