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agent among these prior modes of testimony was all but
established by the new decade. Pictures were not only
accessible in both single image and stereograph formats,
in albums, and in books, but as an accompaniment
to printed scientifi c, scholarly, and popular material.
Among the more poignant instances of this accessibility
were images of war. While action views were produced
on a restricted basis, mostly limited to stereo pictures
because of the still relatively long exposure times for
the larger photographs, the 1860s saw a proliferation
of imagery related to the devastation of battle and the
soldiering life. Following his experience in India at the
scene of the Indian Sepoy rebellion in 1857 and 1858,
Felice Beato next traveled to China to produce a photo-
graphic response to the Second Opium War of 1859 and
- Photographs of the U.S. Civil War were initially
marketed by Mathew Brady, who had the original idea
to hire a corps of operators to follow the Union forces.
Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan are the
best known of Brady’s men, both of whom broke with
the senior portraitist to produce albums of the war,
such as Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War
(1866), which included some of the earliest images of
fatalities on both sides. Gardner’s choice of the term
“sketchbook” is perhaps an acknowledgement of the
still tentative reception of photography for on-the-spot
visual reportage, yet undoubtedly also served to remind
viewers that photographs could now graphically com-
municate the weight of the experience as well as any
hand drawn picture.
As marvels of revelatory experience for the 1860s
observer, photographs worked in intriguing, often con-
tradictory ways to serve scientifi c agendas on the one
hand, and the world of popular culture and entertainment
on the other. Nadar took his camera into the catacombs
of Paris in 1861 for a rather startling look at the subter-
ranean, and on more than one occasion between 1858
and 1868 had gone up in a balloon to secure the fi rst
aerial views of the city. G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne
had produced photographic studies of human expres-
sion in the mid 1850s. These were published in 1862
in a book demonstrating his experiments that included
the electrical stimulation of the facial muscles: Le
Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine, ou analyse
electro-physiologique de l’expression passions appli-
cable à la pratique des arts plastique. Scientifi c inquiry
thus went hand in hand with possible applications to the
arts and generally revealed a fascination with strange,
scarcely seen phenomena. In the most extreme of cases
photography was recruited to bear witness to manifesta-
tions of the occult, spirit worlds beyond the living. The
Spiritualist movement had its photographic proponents,
like William H. Mumler of Boston, who also seized an
opportunity for profi t by picturing the “ghosts” of the
deceased together with their living family or friends. His
studio, opened in the early 1860s, served clients as well
known as Mary Todd Lincoln, who posed with the spirit
of her dead husband, the former president. Progress in
science in the 19th century was predicated on empirical
data—fi rsthand experience informed its reports and trea-
tises, but the methods of science were often co-opted to
give dubious or even insidious theories an authoritative
cast. Thus the photograph’s alleged objectivity served
well to reinforce the positivist philosophy underlying
the investigation of the world at this time, while giving
credence to assumptions about life (and death) that have
since been discredited.
Photography’s utility in the authentication of en-
counter, theory, and speculation is further refl ected
in the increase of ethnographic projects in the 1860s.
The camera assisted (and some would say abetted)
systematic attempts to identity distinct groups within
Western society, as well as within geographically far
ranging peoples. In the eight volumes comprising The
People of India, published between 1868 and 1875, the
editors John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye
capitalized on the medium in a colossal pictorial study
with accompanying letterpress, effectively categoriz-
ing Indians by race, caste, and tribe. Far from neutral
or objective, however, different groups are assigned
specifi c traits, indicating for example those who might
make trouble for civil authority, and so proving use-
ful in the continued administration of India under the
British Raj. Hence, through the orderly assemblage of
images and text, pioneers of anthropology attempted to
make scientifi c sense of the disarray of humanity, which
resulted in a typecasting that reinforced an ideology of
European imperialism even as such work bore witness
to disappearing cultures. “Native groups” (as they were
often known in the commercial trade), sometimes posed
with the accoutrements of their respective occupations,
became increasingly common through the commercial
trade in photographs. Related views of vernacular
dwellings and surroundings also fi gured into the an
ever-expanding “knowledge” base that stimulated both
scholarly study and popular dissemination. Commercial
operators cultivated a popular fascination with the exotic
in a manner that projected a notion of the “East” as
different and perverse, but nonetheless oddly compel-
ling to the European and white American imagination.
Constructed versions of certain non-western locales
and peoples have been critically assessed as a facet of
Orientalism, which examines the subtle ideological
currents underlying western cultural representations of
a wide global sweep extending from north Africa to the
Middle East, India, and the Asia of the Far East. The
portrayal of native Americans, especially the Indians of
the Plains and Western territories, forms a separate area
for inquiry in relationship to photography of before,
during, and following the 1860s. Yet, the image of theHISTORY: 5. 1860s