GOOD SUBJECTS, BAD OBJECTS

Abstract

This article discusses the material culture of the commercial photography studio in nineteenth-century America, examining a succession of objects that made portrait photographs work: technologically, by controlling and shaping bodily movement in order to meet the shifting demands of photographic apparatuses, but also socially, by helping to construct and display bodies in culturally appropriate and putatively revealing ways. It focuses on three varieties of photographic objects, which appeared in studios in roughly chronological order: first, the ubiquitous and much-discussed head rest; second, purpose-built photographic furniture; and third, supplementary accessories intended to produce photogenic states of absorption. Taken together, these materials — and contemporaries’ responses to them — demonstrate how early commercial portrait photographers and their subjects understood photography’s capacity to represent the body and to mediate social identity. They also demonstrate how, through bodily expression aided by industrially produced objects and calibrated to anticipated spectators, contemporaries negotiated and normalized rapid changes in imaging technologies in modernity, and exploited the possibilities that modern visual media offered for the presentation of the self.

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