1444
fessional portrait photographer of the mid-nineteenth
century. The practice of carrying a small painted portrait
of a loved one predates photography itself by quite a
few years. It was logical that, following the invention
of photography in 1839, calotypes, daguerreotypes,
ambrotypes, tintypes and albumen prints would also
fi nd their way into the pins, rings, pendants, brooches
and bracelets that were then so fashionable. By this
means, photography allowed the middle classes to
adopt a cheaper version (twenty times cheaper in most
cases) of the visual habits of their betters. Photographic
jewellery seems to have fulfi lled a range of different
functions (and, of course, the same piece of jewellery
could signify affection at one moment and mourning at
another, depending on the fate of its subject). A single
necklace pendant might have portraits of husband and
wife on either of its sides, lying back to back, never to
be parted. For the object to be experienced in full, it
has to be turned from side to side, a form of perpetual
caress preordained by its designer. Other examples in-
clude photographic lockets containing two facing but
separate portraits, such that the man and woman inside
initially lie hidden, kissing each other in the dark until
liberated into the light of a loved one’s gaze. Pieces of
human hair, sometimes elaborately woven into patterns,
were frequently added to this jewellery, turning them
into modern fetish objects.
A similar gesture can be witnessed in an embel-
lished daguerreotype from the collection of Matthew
Isenburg in Connecticut, USA. In this object we fi nd a
combination of daguerreotype and dress fabric inside a
daguerreotype case, put together in about 1850. When
we open this case we are invited to literally touch a
piece of the cloth that, we can see from the photograph,
once also touched the skin of this long-departed girl. We
touch what she touched, turning this square of fabric
into a membrane conjoining past and present, the living
and the dead. By this creative contrivance, absence and
historical distance are temporarily bridged by a moment
of shared bodily sensation, making the remembrance of
this girl into an experience at once optical and haptic.
Vernacular photographic practices frequently involve
the elaboration of the photograph through the addition
of other materials and iconography. It was common in
the nineteenth century, for example, to surround a pho-
tograph with a wreath as a sign of both mourning and
faith in the eventual resurrection of the photograph’s
subject. One example comes in a large timber frame,
with an albumen photograph of a young woman in its
center. Under this rather formulaic studio portrait are the
words “At Rest,” impressed into a sheet of copper and
pinned to the board behind. At each of its two top edges
are rosettes, woven out of human hair (probably hers).
Around all of this rests an extravagant wreath of fl owers
made from wax, with similarly waxen butterfl ies fl itting
decoratively amongst the petals. It was probably made in
about 1890 by a group of women friends in memory of
the departed. In another, similar example, a small tintype
of a little girl sitting on what we take to be her father’s
knee has, after her death, been surrounded, fi rst by some
fancy metal edging and then by a lovingly embroidered
garland woven into a background of black velvet. The
labor of embroidery ensures that this act of mourning
is a slow one, deliberated and extended through time.
The same gesture was extended to a framed albumen
portrait of General José Antonio Páez, a man centrally
involved in securing the independence of both Colombia
and Venezuela. In about 1873, after his death in New
York, an offi cial portrait of him in his uniform was sur-
rounded by a wreath made out of one of his own shirts.
Through this skillful act of remembrance, history is
made personal, and an otherwise formulaic portrait is
transformed into the equivalent of a sacred relic.
Framed and painted tintypes might also be described
as vernacular. The research of American collector Stan-
ley Burns has shown that these types of photograph were
produced in large numbers from the 1860s through the
1890s in rural areas of the United States (indeed, this is
a practice indigenous to that country), employing frame-
makers, photographers and ‘folk art’ painters whose
portrait businesses had been driven into extinction by
the cheaper and quicker tintype technology. The portraits
that resulted have all the animation of a statue or wax
effi gy. This stiffness is not improved by the subsequent
addition of paint, this being limited in colour range and
usually covering whatever idiosyncratic detail may once
have been present in the photograph. One consequence
is that these portraits exhibit a certain sameness of
expression, monotonous to a contemporary viewer but
perhaps comforting to a clientele seeking familiarity
of genre rather than artistic innovation. This clientele
looks out at us from their standard gray backgrounds
with the fi xed stare of the blind, their facial and bodily
comportment insisting above all on a dignifi ed formality
of presentation. Such formality is fi tting for a procedure
that may have only occurred once in a person’s lifetime.
In many of them the photographic base has been almost
entirely covered by paint or, in the case of some of the
backgrounds, erased through the application of a sol-
vent. The resulting image was then often elaborately
framed and matted, giving the fi nal object both pattern
and depth. This framing also allowed each example of
an otherwise generic image-making process to take on
a unique and distinctive appearance.
Painted photographs were also produced in India from
the 1860s until the early twentieth century. Albumen and
silver gelatin portraits were often covered in lavish and
meticulous patterning and materials (including callig-
raphy and gold leaf) that transformed the perspectival
space of the camera-picture into a fl at, vertical surface.