36
commentaries, reports and lectures from British and
French publications, including Photographic News,
The Saturday Review, and The Liverpool Photographic
Journal, which was also known as The Liverpool and
Manchester Photographic Journal and The Photo-
graphic Journal.
The journal also reported on technological innovation
from the United States, Britain and France, in lenses,
studio design equipment as well as cameras, and printing
techniques. For example, the journal published detailed
descriptions, including measurements of the skylight
(facing south, fourteen feet square) at Marcus Aurelius
Root’s former New York studio, are extremely valuable
accounts of commercial portrait technology, which, in
this case, yielded a sitting of “less than one second with
lens at full aperture.”
The pages of the journal reveal how many questions
about the technology and social implications of pho-
tography were debated in the 1850s and 1860s. Ques-
tions of invention, ownership and intellectual property,
for example, can be traced through the coverage of
patent disputes. Along with the two other New York
photographic publications, Humphrey’s Journal and
The Photographic and Fine Arts Journal, the journal
also discussed the social uses of the medium and the
appropriate interests and concerns of photographers,
split in their ranks between intellectual and educated
amateurs and no-nonsense commercial operators. In an
1859 editorial, Seely decried the pecuniary interests of
New York’s “practical photographers” and noted their
absence at Photographic Society meetings. In these
discussions of a photographer’s ideal, the authentic
advocates of the medium were represented as the men
of science, who dominated the society, and sought to
enrich the artistic reputation of the medium through
scientifi c inquiry. Seely contrasted these elevated con-
cerns with those of men who saw photography only as
a business.
Such debates offer rich sources and insights into
discussions of the social and cultural purposes that
photography should serve in its early decades.
Several important fi gures in 19th-century American
photography contributed to the journal, including the
Philadelphia photographer Marcus Aurelius Root,
engineer Coleman Sellers, grandson of painter Charles
Willson Peale, and chemist M. Carey Lea.
The history of the journal illustrates the precarious
nature of the photographic press. In 1860, the journal
absorbed Snelling’s Photographic and Fine Arts Jour-
nal; Seely sold his journal in the spring of 1867 but it
faltered under new ownership and was absorbed that
same year by the competing Humphrey’s Magazine.
Secondary literature in the history of photography has
used the journal to trace the technological and social his-
tory of photography. Robert Taft used the trade journals
in his 1938 Photography and the American Scene; in
the 1980s and 1990s, citations to the journal appear in
newly contextualized studies of photography’s founding
fi gures, such as Mary Panzer’s 1997 cultural biography
of Mathew Brady, as well in essays that applied new
methodologies from cultural studies to the history of
photography, exemplifi ed by Alan Trachtenberg’s 1991
“Photography: a Key Word,” and in 2000, “Cartes de
Visite and the Culture of Class Formation” by Andrea
Volpe.
Andrea L. Volpe
See also: Draper, John William; Snelling, Henry
Hunt; Daguerreotype; and Lea, Matthew Carey.Further Reading
Johnson, William S. Nineteenth-century Photography: an An-
notated Bibliography, 1839–1879. Boston: G.K. Hall and
Co., 1990.
Panzer Mary, Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washing-
ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
Trachtenberg, Alan. “Photography: a Key Word,” in Photography
in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss. Ft.
Worth, Texas and New York: The Amon Carter Museum and
Harry Abrams, 17–47.
Volpe, Andrea L. “Cartes de Visite and the Culture of Class For-
mation,” in Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the
American Middle Class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert
Johnston. New York: Routledge, 2001, 157-169.
Warner, Deborah, “The American Photographical Society and
the Early History of Astronomical Photography in America,”
Photographic Science and Engineering 11 no. 5 (Sept-Oct.
1967): 342–347.
Welling, William, Photography in America: the Formative Years
1839–1900. New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1978.AMICI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA
(1786–1863)
Italian astronomer, botanist, microscopist, and
inventor.
Giovanni Battista Amici invented the Amici Prism,
which combined three prisms for use in refracting
spectroscopes. This system is still used today in mod-
ern spectroscopy to differentiate light into its separate
spectral components. Amici collaborated with Bertrand
to design the Amici–Bertrand lens, which could view an
objective’s rear focal plane. This meant it was possible to
view, for example, interference patterns produced by bi-
refringent crystals (e.g. in plastics). Amici also devised
an achromatic lens and designed refl ecting telescopes.
Amici was Professor of Mathematics at the University
of Modena from 1815-1825, until being appointed Head
of the Astronomical Observatory in Florence in 1831.
Amici established a friendship with William Henry Fox
Talbot, from meeting in 1822; they corresponded for
more than twenty years. Talbot wanted his work on nega-