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tude in his profession...But if be allowed to encroach
upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary,
upon anything whose value depends solely upon the ad-
dition of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse
for us!” (Goldberg, 1981, p. 125) Thus the camera was
relegated to the status of recording instrument, a product
of the industrial age.
Despite such criticisms, professionals and skilled
amateurs alike produced evocative landscapes, portraits,
and tableau of pronounced sentiment. Among British
photographers, several have displayed qualities that
have secured them a place in the “canon” (i.e., widely
recognized as culturally and historically signifi cant)
including Julia Margaret Cameron, Lady Clementina
Hawarden, Oscar Rejlander, and Lewis Carroll. These
Victorians would not allow the medium’s relationship
to the material world and surface appearance to stand as
obstacles in the way of expressive purpose. Cameron, for
instance, is well known for her subtly mannered portraits
of contemporary literary and theatrical personalities, and
her staging of poetically effusive characterizations of
children and adults. She used the vagaries and variables
of exposure and focus to aesthetic advantage in order to
soften features and heighten the expressive properties of
light and dark. Rejlander, Cameron’s friend, was perhaps
the most extreme in his attempt to approximate Victorian
painting of the genre and anecdotal variety. For dramatic
ends in his fi nal prints he frequently manipulated two or
more negatives in combination, thereby partially liberat-
ing photography from its direct causal (or in semiotic
terms, indexical) relationship to the subject before the
lens at the time of exposure.
The portrait photograph, though evident as a key
subject area in preceding decades, became a thoroughly
entrenched commodity amid the growing urbanization
of Europe and the United States and the spreading
of western social institutions in the colonized world.
Nadar’s (née Gaspar-Félix Tournachon) bold pictorial
record of celebrated personages of Paris in the late
1850s and 1860s best exemplifi es how pose, careful
lighting, and attention to technique could secure a place
for luminaries belonging to the cultural vanguard of the
city. Portrait photography vastly exceeded the painted
portrait in popularity during the decade. Nadar’s career
had begun in 1853 with his investigations into photog-
raphy while attempting to create a series of lithographs
that collectively displayed notable visages of Parisian
culture—his Panthéon Nadar—but abandoned the print-
making project for the camera. The cult of personality
in today’s media can perhaps be traced to this particular
moment in the history of the portrait in photography,
during which the faces of acclaimed or notorious indi-
viduals entered the public domain in ever increasing
numbers. Political fortunes could be staked on such im-
ages. One of the best known instances involves Mathew
Brady’s small photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken
before his election to the presidency in 1860. The im-
age was reproduced in the press during the campaign,
thus spreading Lincoln’s clean-shaven, pre-Civil War
likeness throughout the U.S. and beyond. By the late
1840s Brady had already established daguerreotype
portrait studios in New York and Washington, D.C.; he
had envisioned a “Gallery of Illustrious Americans”
that would have implications for the acceleration of
similar endeavors at least through the 1860s. Portrait
operators like Nadar and Brady thus helped to shape a
modern society dependent on the visibility of public fi g-
ures through the media, as much for entertainment and
personal fantasy as for an awareness of the infl uential
political and cultural fi gures of the age.
While Nadar, Étienne Carjat, and other talented
practitioners in Paris of the 1860s set a high standard
for artistic portraiture, photography also enabled the
production of relatively cheap pictures of people from
all stations of life. Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, also op-
erating in Paris, had patented in 1854 a commercial
breakthrough in the form of multiple exposures of a
sitter on a single plate. The process resulted in the carte-
de-visite (Brady’s Lincoln is an example), a small, easily
exchanged photograph mounted on thin cardboard stock.
Carte-de-visites reached their peak of distribution in the
1860s; in exchange for the expense and labor involved
with an elevated artistic portraiture was an economy of
production, and hence an increase in the mass reception
of images unlike anything that had occurred prior to the
period. The carte-de-visite, the cabinet card, a slightly
larger format which appeared later in the decade and
fulfi lled a similar social function, and the tintype (which
would replace the ambrotype in the ‘60s) would enable
the public to afford the acquisition of images of one
another, of individuals of distinction, of peoples and
landscape views from geographical locations around
the world. Add to this the growing numbers of stereo-
graphic views, extremely popular among the middle
class at least through the remainder of the century, and
one begins to realize how photographs became pervasive
in the private lives of ordinary people. Though diffi cult
to isolate as a function of our timeframe, the impact of
images during the decade on the formation of a mass
subjectivity or collective psychology must seriously be
considered—matters related to all the emotional turbu-
lence of an individual’s life: love, trauma, death, faith,
childhood, aging, memory, fear.
The growth in photography of individuals can been
seen as part of a larger phenomenon that advanced
considerably in the 1860s. This may be characterized
as a zeal among advancing nations for making more
tangibly visible people, places, and occurrences which
had formerly been conveyed through paintings, draw-
ings, and words. Photography’s position as a credibleHISTORY: 5. 1860s