Photography

Photography. From its arrival in 1839 to its 1990s immersion in the digital world of computers and on‐line information, photography both reflected and influenced American culture. The first widespread form of photography in America was the daguerreotype process, which produced images on a small silver plate. This “mirror with a memory” attracted entrepreneurs who bought inexpensive kits that included a camera, materials, and such studio accessories as pastoral backdrops and a neck brace for the long exposures. Daguerreotype businesses ranged from ornate palaces in major cities to itinerant flatboat studios on inland rivers.

In the 1850s the daguerreotype gave way to a cheap hybrid, the tintype, and to a new form of negative‐to‐positive photography known as wet‐plate or wet‐collodion. While the tintype served the mass‐portraiture market, wet‐plate lent itself to landscapes, cityscapes, and mass‐reproduced celebrity portraits. West Coast photographers like Carleton Watkins and Isaiah Taber exploited the mass‐reproduction capacity of the new process to take landscape photographs that advertised the West's scenic wonders, especially those of Yosemite. Eastern studios produced images of presidents and ministers, writers and orators. Mathew Brady's studios in New York City and Washington, D.C., disseminated canonical portraits of public figures; Abraham Lincoln's public image was effectively invented and refined by the Brady Studios. The Civil War sent the studio photographers into the field to record the conflict and produce narrative books that combined memorial texts with resonant images of battlefields, sometimes with the dead still awaiting burial.

Postwar photographers turned to the next great cultural adventure: westward expansion. While Andrew Joseph Russell and Alexander Gardner tracked the transcontinental railroad's construction, others like Eadweard Muybridge and William Henry Jackson, working as private entrepreneurs or government surveyors, recorded and celebrated the West. This golden era of landscape photography produced a subgenre of images of American Indians that memorialized the vanishing races while justifying Euro‐American expansion. Urban America, meanwhile, inspired tourist photographs and then, in the 1890s, documentary reform photography. The journalist‐reformer Jacob Riis's pictures of New York City slum life in How the Other Half Lives (1890), and Lewis Hine's photographs of street urchins and child laborers, helped inspire the Progressive Era reform effort.

By the turn of the century, photography had become ubiquitous in journalism, illustrated books, cheap postcards, and family “snap‐shot” albums. The advent of flexible film, miniature cameras, the popular “Kodak” box camera, introduced in 1888 by George Eastman (1854–1932), and cheap film‐development services democratized photography. Meanwhile, art galleries began to display the delicate, painterly work of Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, and others. The circle around Stieglitz brought photography into the world of high modernism and largely created elite art photography in America, nurturing such luminaries as Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

The rise of picture magazines like Life and Look in the 1930s provided a mass‐market alternative to high modernist photography. Exploiting the new medium, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration instituted numerous photography projects. The most legendary was that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) run by Roy Emerson Stryker, who hired such important photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Russell Lee. While displaying nostalgia for a vanishing rural and small‐town America, their work also adeptly propagandized for the New Deal. Ansel Adams, meanwhile, carried on the tradition of western landscape photography. World War II produced many memorable photographs, including the raising of the American flag over Iwo Jima, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and haunting images of the Nazi death camps.

The twentieth century's three dominant photographic communities—snapshot amateurs, elite artists, and photojournalists—often came together, especially during the 1950s, when the profitable photography market drew amateurs and artists alike into the professional realm. This combination was embodied in the Museum of Modern Art's 1955 exhibit The Family of Man, curated by the Stieglitz‐acolyte Edward Jean Steichen. The exhibit presented photography as an ideal medium to editorialize, to inspire, and to unite the disparate cultures of America and the globe into a commodified universal human culture.

This theme dominated advertising, editorial, and much art photography throughout the Cold War, but it also engendered a reaction as in the caustic photographs of Robert Frank, whose The Americans (1959) brought a Beat sensibility to the medium, shocking critics and inspiring a generation of ironic documentarians. Photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus abandoned lucrative commercial careers to haunt the social landscape, creating a genre known as the “new documentary.” That their work garnered influential exhibitions, gallery shows, book contracts, and high sale prices caught the attention of a new generation of photographers trained not in journalism or advertising but in university art departments. Schooled in literature and painting, these practitioners moved the medium into the center of postmodernist artistic discourse. Photography's omnipresence, its blurring of the constructed and the “real,” and its immersion in consumer culture all made it a central icon of postmodernism, though individual photographs often disappeared into larger collaged works in which painting, sculpture, literature, and the mass media uneasily coexisted. The insertion of photography into postmodernism signaled a significant change. Once a medium of Truth, photography had lost its authority, becoming, instead, simply one among a host of image‐making processes.
See also Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; New Deal Era, The; Tourism; Yosemite National Park.

Bibliography

Beaumont Newhall , The Daguerreotype in America, 1961.
Weston Naef , Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–1885, 1975.
Jonathan Greene , American Photography: A Critical History, 1945 to the Present, 1984.
Naomi Rosenblum , A World History of Photography, 1984.
Martha A. Sandweiss, ed., Photography in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1991.
Peter Galassi , American Photography, 1890–1965, 1995.

Peter Bacon Hales