688
Friedrich; Robertson, James; Nadar (Gaspard-
Félix Tournachon); Howlett, Robert; Frith, Francis;
Teynard, Félix; Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm; Nègre; Le
Secq, Henri; Giroux, André; Marville, Charles; and
Baldus, Édouard.
Further Reading
Frizot, Michel (ed.), A New History of Photography, Cologne:
Könemann, 1998.
Goldberg, Vicki, Photography in Print, Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1988
Henisch, Heinz K., and Henisch, Bridget A., The Photographic
Experience 1839–1914, University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1994.
Johnson, William S., Nineteenth Century Photography, an An-
notated Bibliography, 1839–1879, London: Mansell, 1990.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte-de-
visite Portrait Photograph, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1985.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, Industrial Madness—Commercial
Photography in Paris 1848–1871, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1994.
Welling, William, Photography in America: The Formative years
1839–1900, New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1978.
HISTORY: 5. 1860s
As one might expect, a study of photography in the
1860s must make allowance for some overlap in seek-
ing to frame the ten years or so during which changes
occurred in the medium with respect to technology,
culture, and society. From a curatorial and scholarly
perspective, the decade has been viewed as part of an
ascending arc, a “golden age” wherein photography’s
rising fortune no longer depended on the rivalry between
photography on paper and the daguerreotype, but on
Frederick Scott Archer’s system of wet collodion on
glass plates. The process in essence provided the best
of both earlier techniques, retention of detail as well as
tonal breadth, and therefore met the requirements of an
age marked by the appreciation of traditional artistry
and the economic, industrial, and scientifi c embrace of
empiricism. The technical shifts, shaped as they were
by both aesthetic and utilitarian considerations, are also
indicative of public ambivalence at the time with respect
to the photographic image as art and as truth.
While the importance of the medium for both docu-
mentary use and artistic expression had certainly been
recognized in its fi rst two decades, the late 1850s saw the
emergence of more organized efforts to use the camera
as an agent in the gathering of visual evidence on a
global scale. The advancement of an educated modern
American and European public included a desire for
knowledge of a world still relatively unknown to the vast
majority. In the fervor of aesthetic debate, the critical
proponents of artistic imagination denied a place for
photography as “Art” in contemporary culture, or only
reluctantly accorded it a secondary position with respect
to conventional pictorial means. Yet scarcely contested
were its alleged superior powers of verisimilitude and
potential for recording all manner of phenomena from
microscopic forms to heavenly bodies. Unlike other
implements of mapping, measuring, and visualizing the
geography of a region for scientifi c, historical, commer-
cial, and political reasons, the camera became an integral
tool in creating an awareness of national identity as well
as of one’s self with respect to the rest of world. In hind-
sight, the general 19th-century view of the medium’s
neutrality has come under increasing critical dispute,
for the production and reception of photographs led to
meanings closely aligned with the ideological persua-
sions of the day. In documentary work, photographers
were guided by a sense of social, cultural, and historical
import of the subjects which they pursued; their achieve-
ment depended to a large degree on how well the results
of their enterprise met the demands of both the public
imagination and government agendas.
Art criticism of the late 1850s carried the debate into
the new decade regarding photography’s role in modern
society. Could photographers legitimately engage in
earnest attempts to create symbolic narratives or tableau
that had previously been the preserve of traditional ico-
nography in painting, drawing, and printmaking? Was
not the medium’s mechanical nature better suited to
applications that simply required recording of subjects
as a means of enlightenment, the production of new
knowledge? In European and American circles of social
privilege, wherein well-established codes of cultural
refi nement and taste were closely followed, many could
not accept photographs as equal to art for conveying the
depths of the human imagination, for translating the raw
material of life and nature into the grand ideals and noble
sentiments of tradition. Reservations abounded, despite
the efforts of sophisticated practitioners with aspirations
to create pictures with artistic appeal.
In England, the infl uential critic John Ruskin had
considered photography useful for artistic studies, and
had even tried his hand at it on several occasions. By the
end of the 1860s, however, despite the element of verac-
ity that was central to his support of Pre-Raphaelite and
landscape aesthetics, Ruskin had judged photographs
the product of a mechanical device, which art was
most certainly not. His contemporary Lady Elizabeth
Eastlake had written of her uncertainty, too, observing
that photography could only ever imperfectly portray
“Nature,” meaning a nature considered in the academic
sense, which required selectivity through “artistic feel-
ing” to represent anything truthfully. Across the English
Channel, French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire had
expressed his sentiments with far greater disdain, as wit-
nessed in his 1859 Salon review: “let it be the secretary
and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exacti-HISTORY: 4. 1850s