Constantly Unfolding and Consistently Present: The Active Life of Historical Photograph Albums

Throughout the history of photography, certain ideas have characterized the photograph and its relation to time.¹ One persistent belief, associated with the description of the photograph as a “still” image, goes back to the very beginnings of the medium’s history. In 1839, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre declared that his invention was successful when, through the actions of chemicals and light, “shadows should not have time to alter their position.”² William Henry Fox Talbot also struggled to fix mercurial scenes cast onto paper through the camera obscura, the “fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” He mused “how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper!”³ This concept of photography, stemming from the desire to stay the flux and flow of the living and constantly shifting world, also produced the unfortunate belief that the subjects of the images were fixed in the past as well. The photograph’s active qualities, its capacity to move through the world, gather stories, and form communities of engagement, were for the most part ignored.

Characterizing photography in this singular way discounts all the activities associated with the medium and the many temporalities the photograph represents. These include the events occurring at the time of taking and the conditions in which subjects find themselves, be it in a studio where the photographic session is more formalized, or in a less restrictive setting that encourages spontaneity. As the photograph travels and enters different contexts, it gains new meanings and uses. Most importantly, the photograph gathers community; it is held and passed around, stories are told, information exchanged, and bonds of intimacy created.

As objects, photographs are gathered and engaged with in various ways. Within the family unit, they are often regarded as cherished items in need of care, protection, and sometimes display. Outside the private sphere, certain photographic objects enter other types of collections, each defined differently in terms of their constitution and intent. Institutional collections, such as that of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), have established their vernacular historical collections through different sources, such as art fairs, auctions, and commercial dealers. One important process is donation, as was the case for the Matthew Isenburg collection, examples of which appear in this paper. Isenburg was a voracious collector of early, mainly Americana photography, and assembled the largest comprehensive collection in private hands of objects associated with photography’s first four decades (late 1830s to 1860s).⁴ Other examples appearing here include donations of albums to the NGC from private sources as well as albums in the national archive, the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) collection.⁵

Although the photographs and albums referenced in this paper derive from institutional contexts and are highly delineated through inscription in various departments and their specializations, they nonetheless challenge traditional methodologies of historical research. They allude to what might be understood as a definitive interpretation through their fluctuation between that which is known and that which is forever lost. Determining provenance, authorship, and geographical origin is often elusive or even impossible given their peripatetic history. As objects produced within historical processes, photographs and albums express a myriad of cultural concerns, yet their very constitution operates against complete disclosure. In terms of their present-day consideration, the album involves the researcher in what Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe have termed “a dialectic of creation and reception.” This dialectic includes not only the creator’s assembly of an object and the circumstances surrounding its viewing, but also the recreation of its purpose and conditions of its reception by the modern viewer. It is through the comparisons of these altered perspectives that one obtains an awareness of and insights into both past and present values.⁶

Consideration of many historical photographs and by extension albums as objects in a constant state of becoming invigorates their purpose within contemporary research and writing. The discovery of photographic lives lived pre-empts seeking a singular “photographic truth.” This approach redresses methodologies that base historical validity on authorities invested in institutional records and documentation. If such authorities are absent or obliterated through wars or the dislocation of peoples, historical objects are orphaned. This paper explores the known and unknown temporal and spatial trajectories of photographs through emphasis on their materiality above the image’s indexicality, with the understanding that the latter quality is crucial to other types of historical research. As Geoffrey Batchen notes, photographs and albums are physical objects that retain traces of contact with others; they were held, exchanged, spoken about, and placed within a constellation of relationships that elicit even more stories and memories.⁷ Elizabeth Edwards argues that an object “cannot be fully understood at any single point in its existence but should be understood as belonging in a continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning. As such, objects are enmeshed in, and active in, social relations, not merely passive entities in these processes.”⁸ Photographic albums are especially positioned within the sphere of social activities, and as objects they elicit various responses on the part of assemblers and viewers, some of which are performative in nature. Viewers of photographs and albums engage with the images presented to them, and when the photograph and album “as tactile, sensory things that exist in time and space” move through numerous contexts, they become “constituted by and through social relations.”⁹ Different material conditions offer different possibilities of engagement. Following Edwards, a large album could link several individuals in the act of viewing its contents, creating a shared social encounter that would differ in its physical experience from that of viewing a smaller album, which would require closer proximity to the object and one other viewer.¹⁰

These considerations of the photograph’s and album’s materiality also reveal their multifaceted functions. Although on one level photographs and albums act as a reminder of the past, they are also a declaration of something desired, a gesture toward the future. David Green and Joanna Lowry argue that the photograph is “a kind of performative utterance, a means by which things are not so much represented as designated.” Photography, “as an act of ostentation […] bestows significance on something by pointing to it,”¹¹ with the consequence that to take a photograph, to have a photograph taken, to place a photograph in an album, or send one in the mail to a distant friend or relative are performances and acts that gesture to the future from the present.¹² Margaret Olin additionally argues that the photograph itself is the product of numerous associated activities. There are many gestures “that surround photographs wherever they are, executed at all levels of photographic practices, from making to viewing.”¹³ This understanding of the active life of photographs, which includes how people pose for the camera, point the camera, share images, and even look at the world for subjects to photograph, “inform[s] the expectations people have of photographs […] and how photographs acquire their meanings or do their jobs.”¹⁴

The many activities invested in the life and work of photographs also include their assembly into albums. Throughout the nineteenth century, albums played an important social role as a site to consolidate personal and societal relationships, in addition to functioning as a repository for memories, ideas, and feelings (figs. 1 and 2). Two types of albums were prevalent over that period: the pre-photographic sentiment or friendship album, and the photographic one, made popular by the arrival of the carte de visite in 1860.¹⁵ Both types engaged viewers and assemblers in a variety of activities, but with important differences. The sentiment album, popular from the 1820s to 1850s, was compiled by young upper-class women who solicited drawings, poems, watercolors, and autographs from friends and acquaintances. Some women, such as Lady Belleau (1811‒1884) (fig. 3), maintained these albums throughout their lives. However, a critical difference between the sentiment and the photographic album was that the former was passed around a social circle. The owner would leave the album with an individual to give them time to pen a poem or do a sketch. Due to the open and public manner of its assembly, this type of album ran the risk of being socially embarrassing because entries could be misconstrued, or too revealing of the owner’s and contributor’s education and taste.

The vogue for assembling these albums was eclipsed when the commercial photographic industry became more widely established in the 1860s. The photographic album quickly gained popularity in the domestic sphere. This type of album was less disconcerting to view than its precursor because the photographic studio standardized the public presentation of the self through socially accepted visual conventions. Assemblers could slip such images into pre-cut windows, sometimes decorated with lithographic imagery, or place them in creative arrangements augmented with drawings or watercolors – a domestic occupation described in the “Work Department” sections of women’s magazines.¹⁶

Although different in their manner of assemblage and reception, both the sentiment and photographic album consolidated social and personal relationships through activities of assembling, viewing, and sharing thoughts, feelings, and stories. In return, the pages of the album reflected to the assembler evidence of their personal relations and values.¹⁷ Through this imagined space of the album the assembler negotiated their desired identity and those of others, via codes of behavior that defined larger social, professional, and familial spheres.¹⁸

The space of interiority that the album provided is a critical cultural contribution. Moreover, this imaginative space was not just visual but also haptic. In the Belleau album, the assembler surrounded a photograph with a display of pressed flowers, a lock of hair, and drawings. In photographic albums, assemblers manipulated photographic prints to create pleasing presentations. These interactions speak to a cultural learning process of handling images and engaging with their material qualities. In this sense, another photographic invention should be considered for its contribution to the cultural history of image materiality – the daguerreotype. In addition to other visual objects such as the miniature and silhouette, daguerreotypes were one way the public became acclimatized to the physicality of the image. Like the album, daguerreotypes were cased, singular objects meant to be held and opened. The increased association of materiality with images was also supported by daguerreotype casings, which could be augmented with mother-of-pearl inlays (fig. 4), or designs pressed into the thermoplastic cover. As occurs with the photographic album, images could be arranged in pleasing displays. For example, within a large holding case, the assembler could place, arrange, and rearrange daguerreotype photographs in accordance with their desire, and speak to their configuration and significance through selective narratives (fig. 5).

It was also possible to creatively augment cased objects with personal touches in the same manner assemblers enhanced print-based imagery; painted landscape scenes and flowers could be shown simultaneously with individual portraits (figs. 6). Additionally, the inset was often stamped, and the framing of the image enhanced with designs. In the case of the work Portrait of a Child, a floral motif was used, the pattern of which echoed that of the pillow behind the subject (fig. 7). The child’s face is also slightly pigmented – a flush of color on the cheeks. All these touches are very evocative, and as much as they enhance the viewing pleasure of those looking at the image, they are also a reminder of both the subject’s and viewer’s mortality.

The structure of both the daguerreotype and the photograph album is also worth noting because they were held – the daguerreotype perhaps more intimately so. This physical activity is very close to that of reading, which may explain why so many photographs of this topic were taken (figs. 8 and 9). Although the reading subject is also a demonstration of the sitter’s literacy, more importantly such images acknowledge the private and subjective life of the mind.

This idea of the album as an imaginative, creative space reflective of the assembler’s interiority, as well as a site of tactility, is also supplemented by orality – that is, the capacity of the assembler or album owner to articulate changing narratives. This function enfolds another sense, that of hearing or listening to the tales told and imaginatively engaging with them. The oral/auditory aspect of photography invites another observation on the cultural significance of the album. The reflective, interior, evocative space of the album, which invites creative and imaginative engagement as a private space, also opens to a public and shared space through performance and other creative means of expression. The photograph in its nomadic journeys moves out into the world carrying with it its function as reminder, memento, a stand-in for memory, and a spur to speech and narrative. Through this mobility, the photograph establishes networks of communication through exchange, collection, and manipulation.

While the carte de visite capitalized on photography’s capacity for multiplicity (either through reproduction or by taking several identical images through a multi-lens camera in one sitting), it also accustomed the public’s imagination and appreciation of the spatial agency of the medium. A person’s likeness had global reach, with the same image theoretically engaging numerous individuals in various locations at different times. Moreover, the photograph enfolded other temporalities, many of them performatively based. There were the initial performances of the studio visit and act of being photographed, instigated by the subject to declare their desires as real. These actions then gained authority through the denotative function of the medium, with the photograph offered as proof of certain values and beliefs. Moreover, this record of performance does not simply reside in the past. Rather, it initiates other performances, to the extent that all photographs, including historical ones, are consistently present to viewers, interacting with them at different points in time.

For example, a common subject in photography is that of the mother and child (fig. 10). The photograph acts as a record of a photographic session, and an act of display that declares an action to be real and a confirmation of value and belief. The commercial session is used performatively by the woman to proclaim her motherhood in the present. This action also maintains its temporal presentness in the future, prompting remarks and gestures that collapse temporalities through an affirmation of the mother–child relationship: “This is me with my child.” Equally, the photograph can prompt an opposite temporality, such as “This was me with my child.” As Roland Barthes and others have noted, these responses indicate the photograph’s multi-temporality, its capacity to express concomitantly diametrically different experiences of time: what was and what is, the here-now and the there-then.¹⁹

The performances associated with photography also have substance through the photograph’s materiality. As objects, photographs have presence and prompt action. In the nineteenth century, mounted studio photographs were objects of exchange: people sent one another photographs as tokens of friendship and to consolidate familial bonds. This photographic gesture enfolds multiple temporalities: the photograph that was taken maintains the presentness of the moment performed for the camera; its reception by someone else consummates the desired future action of the sender, who wishes the receiver to acknowledge the past event and the temporal presentness of the image. The receiver may embrace the photograph’s presentness: “Here is Mary with her child” – or express other responses, such as absence and loss: “Here is Mary with her child. I remember their visit and miss them.”²⁰

In addition to the various temporalities that can be experienced through the performances photography initiates, there are also temporalities embedded in the photograph’s physical basis. Photographs are objects which retain messages from the past: the smudges, penciled-in messages, embossed stamp of the studio, and other markings that attest to human interaction and presence of an indexical nature (this time as trace). Although such mark making acts as evidence of those who are now absent, it can also be appreciated as a proxy of their presence. As occurs when viewers gaze upon the photographic image, contemplating a handwritten signature or note makes the absent person become more present, even though the viewer might be far removed from them spatially and temporally.

Within the photographic album, the photograph’s multi-temporal aspect operates in a provisional and flexible manner, allowing assemblers to create various narratives about people represented in accordance with their desires. Subjects appear and disappear from albums, absences sometimes marked with an empty window (fig. 11). Displays of pasted photographs in albums provide a more permanent statement on the assembler’s view of the depicted subjects. For example, in the Sewell Family Album, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the assembler placed a photograph of one individual, Jack Heigham, in a position of prominence on one page, at the top of a pyramidical arrangement (fig. 12), and then on another page his image is nearly buried at the bottom of a card pile motif (fig. 13).²¹ Although the reason for these arrangements is unknown, the varying placements of individuals demonstrate the concept of photography’s performative character – that is, the active life of the photograph beyond the taking of the image.

Photographs do considerable work in the construction and maintenance of the social. Christopher Pinney notes that it is important to recognize how “photographs act rather than represent”; “much writing on photography has – in its concern with the ideological effects of picture taking – lost sight of the dialogic space that frequently emerges during the process of picture making.”²² The ability of the same image to engage with numerous individuals in various locations at different times, and entangle viewers and assemblers in the experience of multiple temporalities, creates real and imagined communities. Not simply representing community in a documentary way, photographs “participate in and create relationships and communities […] and [the] ways communities gather around photographs.”²³

However, it should be noted that the flexible quality of the photographic medium has other capacities. Although much is revealed in a photograph, much more is not, a quality that imbues the seemingly sturdy framework of image making with instability. And, as albums were nearly always a work in process, the empty window is also evocative, alluding to a constant condition of anticipation or unfulfillment. Moreover, while albums provide many opportunities for revealing and substantiating personal histories, they also offer the opportunity to conceal or erase them.²⁴ Through selective images and narratives, albums provided individuals with a flexible means to negotiate private and public spheres by maintaining a façade of respectability, both within and without the family home.

While photography’s capacity to engage, evoke, and provoke can create bonds of intimacy and displays of propriety in the familial sphere, it can also be employed to consolidate professional needs. The question of intent inherent in photographs is ambiguous and unresolved because it is based on who is viewing and for what reasons. This idea is critical to consider when examining albums. For example, colonial officials and other professionals assembled albums to substantiate scientific theories or other agendas. Studio portraits of Indigenous peoples are especially problematic because their ability to express aspects of their own cultures was severely compromised as colonizers framed them within Eurocentric pictorial conventions and retained possession of the photographs.²⁵ However, as has been argued, since the performative qualities of the photograph and album accommodate numerous interpretations, Indigenous readings of photographs and their groupings would confirm the importance of the photographed individuals to their various communities, and thus offer counter-narratives to the colonial one. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole-Muscogee-Diné) argues similarly, noting that, “When I begin to tell my stories to my many nieces and nephews, I will first create a photographic album in their young minds […]. A photographic album full of beautiful brown people, a photographic album of visual affirmation.”²⁶

Through the various actions and performances associated with photographs and albums, portraits of assemblers, viewers, and subjects unfold via multiple sensory motifs and temporalities. In their capacity to prompt engagement, albums and photographs retain not simply images, but traces of events resulting from continued photographic performances. These engagements retain the past as a continued element, confirming not absence but an active and cherished present, with all its possibilities of futured sharing and community.