1445
Not much is known about the function of painted photo-
graphs in India, whether they were meant for the leaves
of an album or a frame on a wall, for public or private
space, although this form of portrait would seem to be an
affectation adopted by the Indian ruling classes (similar
pictures of Europeans living in India are unknown). If
nothing else, their striking combination of local Indian
painting traditions and a European image-form such as
photography speaks to the tension generated when one
culture seeks to accommodate the visual conventions,
and political demands, of another.
We might look from India to Australia and fi nd that
paint was used to transform photographs there too. An
albumen photograph was made to celebrate B.O. Holt-
ermann’s discovery of a gigantic gold nugget in 1873
after nine years of searching (he has helpfully added
some relevant statistical information), a discovery which
allowed him to go on to become one of Australia’s most
enthusiastic patrons of photography. What’s strange
about the addition of paint in this instance is that it
turns what appears to have been a faithful record of
Holtermann into an obviously fi ctitious scene, transport-
ing him from the confi nes of a studio into a sweeping
rural landscape. This landscape serves two functions:
it claims to be the setting for Holtermann’s discovery
while also offering itself up as a prize that he can now
acquire. Paint, it seems, helps overcome photography’s
obstinate realism, allowing fantasy full sway.
Memory and realism are uncomfortable bedfellows.
Consider, for example, a cabinet card image of two
sailors who worked on the Columbia River in Oregon
in the 1880s, now held in the Stephen White Collection
in Los Angeles. These sailors have obediently adopted
the self-conscious poses one tends to adopt in a photog-
rapher’s studio, each in uniform and with a hand in his
left pocket, each gazing off over our right shoulder, as
if looking out to sea, perpetually on watch for potential
dangers. Anyone looking at this photograph in the 1880s
would have known what we know—that these men are
posing for a camera, pretending to be somewhere they
aren’t, sitting on an artifi cial rock in front of a painted
backdrop. In this photograph, photography’s realism is
presented as an overt artifi ce.
What’s interesting about this example, though, is
that someone decided to play with this real artifi ce by
adding a further bit of artifi ce of their own. For we can
see that this someone has carefully painted in a piece
of rope that starts from behind this photograph and then
seemingly loops in and out of the right hand edge of the
print, apparently puncturing it, before winding itself
around a group of suitably nautical objects—a capstan,
anchor and compass. This painted addition has a num-
ber of effects on the way we might read this picture. It
merges the symbolic pictorial artifi ce of painting with
the indexical reality of photography to produce a com-
posite image that repeats and enhances the occupational
themes expressed by both components. At the same time
it draws attention to the reality of the actual photograph,
to the physicality of the print before us, pretending to
penetrate that print but also to hide behind it. So there’s
all sorts of play going on here with this photograph—it’s
being asked to act as a window onto another world set
in the past, and simultaneously to declare itself to be
a touchable and opaque object that has an edge and a
thickness right here in the present, an object that is glued
on to this board but also somehow stands away from it
(such that the rope could be both behind and in front of
it). This otherwise fl at pictorial scene is anchored at its
edges by a rectangle of ordinary thumb tacks that jut
out from the cardboard mat, casting shadows back onto
it and thereby giving this object a real, as opposed to an
illusory, depth. If nothing else, the making of this object
points to a critical, or at least skeptical, attitude to the
photograph. It also provides evidence of a willingness
to intervene to make this photograph a more compel-
ling memorial experience. Indeed, it implies that, for
the owner of this object, the photograph by itself was
not able to provide a powerful enough memory trigger
without this added enhancement.
Photograph albums could also be described as ver-
nacular. Many albums are relatively banal depositories
of carte-de-visite family portraits and pictures of celebri-
ties. Some, however, show evidence of a strong degree
of creativity on the part of their compilers. The album
pages produced by English upper-class women in the
mid-1860s, for example, rely on a remarkable degree
of visual invention. They often combine an artful col-
lage of shaped albumen prints with ink and watercolour
drawings, sometimes arranged in rigidly symmetrical
patterns and sometimes in a seemingly careless profu-
sion of forms which recall contemporaneous trompe-
l’oeil paintings or even the visionary fantasies of Lewis
Carroll. The mechanical exactitude of the photographic
portrait is transformed and elaborated into a personal
tribute to these women’s friends and family, and the
desires and dreams associated with them. As with all
collage practices, attention is drawn to the edges of each
page’s constituent images, disrupting the seamlessness
of photography’s representational claims to fi delity
and realism as well as its role as an inscription of the
past—these photographs are harshly located in the here
and now of the page itself.
In the case of the Cator album, produced by an un-
known member of that family, we fi nd approximately
156 albumen prints have been mounted on its forty-six
pages. These pages are often further decorated with ink
illustrations and watercolour paintings. The album’s
cover is made from deeply carved wood, based on a
geometric design of oak leaves and nuts. This cover
speaks of the album’s importance, as well as of its own