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another favourite theme on which many variations were
played, by such artists as Cuthbert Bede (1855).
The most fruitful source of humour, though, was
found in the studio world of the professional portrait
photographer. Self-delusion is the stuff of comedy, and
the pretensions of photographers and clients alike of-
fered tempting targets. Lip-service was invariably paid
by both parties at the altar of truth. The photographer’s
proud claim was that the camera could not lie. The
client’s fi rm demand was for a faithful likeness. Un-
varnished truth, however, proved very hard to live with.
What everybody really wanted was an idealized portrait,
and photographers were more than happy to oblige. The
magic art of retouching was used to bring out the best
and blot out the worst in the client’s appearance, while
paper fl owers, cardboard trees and ballroom backdrops
added glamour and dignity to the dingiest provincial
studio. Through this gap between rhetoric and reality
there ran a vein of comedy, ready to be tapped by count-
less happy miners.
Soon after it had arrived on the scene, photography
became a stock theme for cartoonists, both sophisticated
and crude, from Daumier, Nadar, and Cuthbert Bede in
the 1840s–1860s, to W.S.Gilbert and Linley Sambourne
in the 1890s. Their work was carried by such popular
illustrated journals as Punch and its many imitators,
which fl ourished all over the world in the same sixty-
year period. Cartoonists, always in search of fresh copy,
seized their chance whenever photography was in the
news, whether as hero or as villain. There were jokes
about the camera helping the police to catch wily crimi-
nals, and jokes about the camera helping its master to
catch unwary customers with “spirit” photographs. Even
certain technical developments in photography itself
proved to be promising material. The invention of the x-
ray photograph in 1896 prompted some uneasy laughter
in the months which followed the announcement.
The comic aspects of photography were explored not
only in cartoons but in essays, stories and light verse.
Edward Bradley, under his pen-name “Cuthbert Bede,”
wrote the fi rst, mildly funny book about photography
in English, Photographic Pleasures, which was pub-
lished in January 1855. This was illustrated with his
own cartoons, some of which had already appeared in
Punch during the two previous years. Lewis Carroll, in
“Hiawatha’s Photographing” (1857) and “A Photogra-
pher’s Day Out” (1860), produced charming accounts,
in both verse and prose, of the amateur’s frustrations in
the making of a family group portrait and of an artistic
landscape view. Frederick Locker , in his witty verses
on “Our Photographs” (1872), described the part played
by a photograph in an ill-fated courtship. Jerome K.
Jerome, in Three Men in a Boat (1889), had fun with the
problems of photographing a friend while at the same
time trying to steer a boat on a crowded river Thames.
For his Utopia, Limited (1893), W.S. Gilbert composed
a song, a deft variation on the Kodak slogan of the day,
“You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.”
The photographer was usually the butt of all the jokes,
but sometimes the tables were turned and he became
the creator of the comedy. In the fantasy world of the
studio he could make his own stage-sets and direct his
own dramas. At the turn of the century, in the 1890s and
the early 1900s, whether as forerunners or imitators of
the fl edgling movie industry, sets of cabinet cards were
issued by many photographic companies. These cards,
when arranged in the right order, told farcical tales of
offi ce romance and domestic discord, or showed that
threat to family tranquillity, a gigantic stork, delivering
one bundle of joy after another to a doomed, forever
housebound father. Optical distortions, frowned on as
fl aws in serious photography, came into their own in
farce. Gigantic feet, or beards, or noses, on puny little
bodies, guaranteed an easy laugh or two on many a
comic card.
In the darkroom it was possible to mix and match
photographs and sketches, to re-assemble the heads
and bodies of different fi gures into strange new hybrid
creatures. This method, of combining a realistic, identifi -
able portrait head with a fantastic, unlikely body, was
often used just for fun, to amuse holiday-makers at the
seaside or at country fairs, but it could be employed, with
deadly effect, in political satire. A carte-de-visite, issued
in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War, defl ates
the pretensions of the defeated Confederate commander,
Jefferson Davis. His photographed, instantly recogniz-
able head has been set on the sketched body of a woman,
and he attempts to escape in the humiliating disguise
of skirt and shawl. Composite cartoons of this kind,
concocted by a Government sponsored photographer,
Eugène Appert, were circulated to demean and ridicule
the leaders of the Paris Commune, after that uprising
had been crushed in 1871.
Photography and society soon became inextricably
entwined, and humour helped to ease the tension of that
tight embrace. In cartoons and commentaries, images
and captions, the two were made to mock each other
and to laugh at themselves.
Bridget Ann HenischSee also: Bede, Cuthbert; Nadar (Gaspard-Félix
Tournachon); Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge; and
Cartes-de-Visite.Further Reading
Braive, Michel F., The Era of the Photograph, London: Thames
and Hudson, 1966.
Henisch, Heinz K. and Bridget A., Positive Pleasures; Early
Photography and Humor, University Park: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1998.