434
Universelle, Paris, it is estimated that some 17% of visi-
tors arrived with their own “pocket” cameras.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the impact of
mass photography was also becoming apparent in the
way photographs were stored and presented. The family
photographic album was fi lled with images generated by
the family, images that were personal in a way unattain-
able in the portrait studio and images that would incor-
porate the family within the same frame in which public
sites were depicted. Ornate albums gave way to plainer
covers and pages, spaces in which prefabricated imagery
was less important than the personalized arrangement of
homemade photographs. Thus, while nineteenth century
photography began by bringing the visual world into
the home, the amateur photographer who appeared at
century’s end would reverse the process, segregating
the public image and creating the iconography of an
entirely private domesticity.
Renate Wickens-Feldman
See also: Daguerreotype; Albumen Print; Carte-de-
Visite; Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène; Mayall,
John Jabez Edwin; Victoria, Queen and Albert, Prince
Consort; Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of All Nations, Crystal Palace, Hyde Park (1851);
London Stereoscopic Company; Holmes, Oliver
Wendell; Cabinet Cards; Stereographic Societies;
Braun, Adolphe; Talbot, William Henry Fox; Archer,
Frederick Scott; Bertsch, Auguste-Adolphe; Melhuish,
A.J.; Roll Film; Herschel, Sir John Frederick
William; Eastman, George; Kodak; and Expositions
Universelle, Paris (1854, 1855, 1867 etc.).
Further Reading
Alloula, Malek, The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: The Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Freund, Gisèle, Photography and Society. Boston: David R.
Godine, 1980.
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Origins of Photography. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Henisch, Heinz K. and Bridget D. Henisch, The Photographic
Experience, 1839–1914, Images and Attitudes. University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Langford, Martha, Suspended Conversations; The Afterlife of
Memory in Photographic Albums. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2001.
Marien, Mary Warner, Photography and Its Critics; A Cultural
History, 1839–1900. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
Mayall, John Edwin, The Royal Album: Portraits of the Royal
Family of England, Photographed from Life, London: Marion
& Co., 1860.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, A.A.E. Disderi and the Carte de
Visite Portrait Photograph, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985, 48.
Points of View; The Stereograph in America—A Cultural History.
Edited by Edward W. Earle. Rochester, New York: The Visual
Studies Workshop Press, 1979.
Rosenblum, Naomi, A History of Woman Photographers. New
York: Abbeville Publishers, 1994.
Ruby, Jay, Secure the Shadow; Death and Photography in
America. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995.DONISTHORPE, WORDSWORTH
(1847–1914)
Born in the northern industrial city of Leeds, England,
in 1847. His father was an inventor. Educated at Cam-
bridge, Wordsworth Donisthorpe became a barrister but
didn’t practise, becoming instead a political activist.
On 9 November 1876 Donisthorpe applied for a pat-
ent for an apparatus “to facilitate the taking of a succes-
sion of photographs at equal intervals of time, in order
to record the changes taking place in or the movements
of the object being photographed, and also by means of
a succession of pictures so taken ... to give to the eye a
representation of the object in continuous movement....”
It is possible that Donisthorpe became interested in the
idea of motion pictures while still at University, as his
examiner in 1869 was physicist James Clerk Maxwell,
whose own improved zoetrope moving image device
was revealed that same year.
Donisthorpe’s kinesigraph camera was evident-
ly inspired by the “square motion” wool-comb-
ing machine designed by his father, with the
“falling combs” replaced with falling photographic plates.
The camera was built, but how well it worked is not re-
corded; there appears to have been no demonstration of
results. On 24 January 1878, a letter from Donisthorpe,
“Talking Photographs,” appeared in the British science
journal Nature, in which he suggested that his kinesig-
raph, used in conjunction with Edison’s recent invention
the phonograph, could produce a talking picture of Prime
Minister Gladstone: “the life size photograph itself shall
move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making
the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in
real life.” Each individual photograph was to be illu-
minated by an electric spark and projected in sequence
onto a magic lantern screen. The materials available
for photography at that time did not lend themselves
to motion picture work, and nothing else is heard from
Donisthorpe on this subject until 1889, when he patented
a fi lm camera and projector. Another motion picture ex-
perimenter, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, was living
in Donisthorpe’s home town of Leeds at that time, and
it may be that word of Le Prince’s 1888 experiments
revived Donisthorpe’s interest in the problem.
The Patent for Donisthorpe’s new camera, also called
the Kinesigraph, was taken out jointly with his cousin
William Carr Crofts. Crofts had a family connection
with Charles Darwin—his sister married Charles’ son
Francis—and Donisthorpe had been at University with
Francis. As keen Darwinists it may be that the two in-