Among the more bizarre and disturbing uses of early photography in the mid-nineteenth century were post-mortem portraits mourning the dead. Death haunted the commonplace where people lived\u2013at home. Especially vulnerable infants and children\u00a0in precarious health died in high numbers prior to successful medical science interventions. An inexpensive photograph ministered a permanent solace and a living memory of the innocent departed pictured within the intimate \u201cfamily circle.\u201d \u00a0Posed for the camera, often propped up by surviving siblings and parents, the dead now appeared to be sleeping peacefully, almost alive, and forever present in your thoughts of a better place.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Post-Mortem “Family Circle”<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
By the 1860s, photographs surpassed all forms of print. \u00a0Former slave Frederick Douglass became the most frequently photographed American in the nineteenth-century. \u00a0He argued in written lectures that with the the progress made by the innovative appearance of the photograph, a “great want” for a positive African-American race identity was now a reality. “The humblest servant girl, whose income is but a few shillings per week, may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures could purchase fifty years ago.” \u00a0In studied detail, Douglass’s personal features from a serious young man who wrote Narrative of a Life<\/em> (1845) to the severe appearance of a post-Civil War national leader of his race projected the gravity of a life committed to opposing demeaning stereotypes of shuffling slaves.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/07\/626px-Frederick_Douglass_portrait-e1499202138746.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCivil War recruits and draftees ceremoniously visited a photographer\u2019s studio dressed in uniform before embarking for camp, leaving behind a lasting youthful memory on the mantles of parents and family. Many never returned.\u00a0\u00a0Alexander Gardner\u2019s Photographic Sketchbook of the War<\/em> (1865-1866) framed the \u201charvest of death\u201d over four bloody years of war. Pictorial magazines such as Harper’s Weekly <\/em>graphically illustrated heroic charges across the ground of battlefields. In Gardner and Bradley photographs\u00a0heroism was not to be found in the slaughter of war. The field photographer gazed morbidly on the ditches and trenches strewn with disfigured corpses after a battle. \u201cVerbal representations of such places, or scenes, may or may not have the merit of accuracy,\u201d Gardner insisted, \u201cbut photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.\u201d<\/p>\n
- \n
- Battle of Gettysburgh by Alexander Gardner<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Enlisted Man’s Perspective by Alexander Gardner<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Photographic images, often redrawn by lithographic artists, began routinely appearing in nineteenth century magazines, guide-books, and advertisements. Many who migrated to Chicago in this period, for instance, had seen a scene of the city in a picture book before actually seeing it with their own eyes. Some later wondered, which viewing had come first.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/08\/884-A-FAILURE-Puck-Comic-595x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/09\/913-GETTING-THE-TOWER-STRAIGHT-1024x972.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA proliferation of photo studios on city streets sprung up specializing in individual and family events at affordable prices. Disposable income was rising in the later nineteenth century.\u00a0The purchase of stereoscopes to \u00a0view Western landscapes, Carte de visite portraits for insertion in letters and visitation announcements, picture trade cards and postcards including postcards of lynchings, and an “indecent” stereoscope pornography “peep” show on the Midway at the 1893 Chicago World’s\u00a0 Fair–all multiplied\u00a0exponentially.<\/p>\n
- \n
- See Pictorial Chicago: Visualizing the Feel of a Cosmopolitan City<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Mark Twain included his Carte de visite photograph within the thousands of letters he wrote and distributed. He became among the most publicly recognized and instantly identified persons in the later nineteenth-century, a latter-day Ben Franklin. \u00a0Never missing a beat to cash in, Twain saw his opportunity in favorable branding circumstances. His image \u00a0and endorsement appeared on multiple advertisements from scrapbooks to soaps for linens.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/06\/MARK-TWAIN-e1498762090386.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA keen amateur interest in photography escalated with the appearance of Eastman Kodak\u2019s portable Brownie camera priced for popular distribution ($1.00) and ease of use. The \u201cbutton-pressing\u201d amateur photographer became Kodak\u2019s primary mass market. The heavily advertised corporate slogan \u201cYou Press the Button, We do the Rest\u201d had global reach, with the emphasis, “We do the Rest.”<\/p>\n
- \n
- Kodak circa 1900<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Camera: Popular Cartoons<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The 18th century voyeur or \u201cPeeping Tom\u201d was reincarnated in the early 20th century prying \u201cKodak fiend<\/em>\u201d and \u201ccamera fiend<\/em>.\u201d A peeper with a \u201cdetective camera\u201d could snoop around dark corners exposing the hidden lives of celebrities and cheats. An emerging profession of hired private investigators embraced the new tool with its capacity for stealth and power to invade private spaces. Judicial courts were now accepting photographs as evidence in divorce and abuse cases.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/06\/914-50K-HUG-PHOTO-LAW-1-573x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cSnapshot\u201d or a mental and visual \u201csurvey\u201d of a slice of reality quickly became an everyday figure of U.S. speech representing a new take on social knowledge. For instance,\u00a0\u00a0promoted in Field and Stream magazines the Kodak became the \u201cweapon of choice\u201d of hunting clubs formed nationally,\u201cThere are no game laws for those who hunt with a Kodak.\u201d When the \u201ctrigger\u201d was squeezed a camera attached to a rifle “snapped” an instant \u201cshot\u201d of an animal scene in the rough.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/09\/912-CAMERA-FIEND-WAIT-FORGOT-TO-CHANGE-THE-FILM-Life-illus-1024x959.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nInnovative half-tone technologies made for a cost effective production of photographs on cheap newsprint . Photojournalists at newspapers such as the Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em> and the Chicago Daily News<\/em> began building \u00a0photo archives which editors used to enhance and intensify the reader experience, and expand the audience in competitive markets. \u00a0In 1903 the Daily<\/em>\u00a0Tribune<\/em> displayed newly discovered photographs of Abraham Lincoln. In 1905 the\u00a0Daily News<\/em> photographers pictured pitched confrontations on local streets between hostile ethnic and racial groups during\u00a0the Chicago Stockyard strike.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/06\/903-LINCOLN-NEWLY-DISCOVERED-PORTRAITS-1024x494.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat a phenomenon looked like from the visual perspective of a photograph began to make a difference in how readers fixed on the indelible features of a story. In 1904 E. D. Morel, a British journalist and abolitionist active in the Congo Reform Association, pictured with a Kodak native rubber workers in King Leopold\u2019s Congo, a Belgium colony in Africa. \u00a0The King \u00a0promoted the colony for its “civilizing” example of Empire supplying a necessary raw material to advanced Western economies. Theodore Roosevelt numbered among the King’s admirers.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/07\/KING-LEOPOLD-1900-e1499168033560.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nInside the “heart of darkness,” Congo enforcers boasted of collecting hundreds of amputated hands and limbs as trophies during Leopold’s military campaigns against the enslaved native workers in the countryside.\u00a0Morel\u2019s collection of missionary Kodak images of mutilated workers with hands chopped off and severed\u00a0limbs by Leopold\u2019s thugs documented the perversity of the horror. The display of the atrocity highlighting native misery was a visual refutation beyond words of the nineteenth-century liberal celebration of peaceful harmony and enlightened progress among nations.<\/p>\n
- Camera: Popular Cartoons<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Kodak circa 1900<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Enlisted Man’s Perspective by Alexander Gardner<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Battle of Gettysburgh by Alexander Gardner<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/07\/MOREL-LEOPOLD-3-1024x714.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n