Early, pioneering photography at the Getty

When Photography put the United States in Focus
“Paper Promises” are kept at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Taking a picture is pretty simple. You point your camera at something, try to hold still for a moment, and press a button. Furthermore, the result is immediately reviewable. Of course, it wasn’t always this easy or without controversy. Controversy? Come over here, and let’s step back into the 1850s.
“Paper Promises: Early American Photography” just opened at the Getty and, to quote the director, Timothy Potts, it “chronicles mid-nineteenth-century attempts to develop photographic forms suitable to the varied social, commercial, and documentary interests of the burgeoning nation.”

The photographs in this exhibition are deemed to be rare (or, for emphasis, let’s make that “quite rare”), and the reason for this is that the techniques for producing metal daguerreotypes and paper photographs were simultaneously introduced into the United States from Europe, but throughout the 1840s it was the daguerreotype that really caught on. As Mazie Harris points out in the catalogue that accompanies the show, “As late as 1860, the United States census recorded more than twenty-five hundred daguerreotypists, while evidence suggests that only around seventy photographers worked with negatives in the 1840s and 1850s.”
Why the lopsided preference for daguerreotypes? Well, they seemed more substantial and thus more permanent, although, without intervening negatives, they were one-offs or one-of-a-kind. However, and I guess this didn’t count for much at the start, negative-positive techniques allowed for reproductions or what we would call reprints. And so, to some extent, the show addresses the search for commercially viable processes that eventually put the daguerreotypist on the endangered species list (the extinct species list, some might say). Just consider the public’s fascination with celebrities. Knowing what we know now, reproducible paper photographs was surely the way to go.

In the early days of photography, many kinds of paper and chemicals were tested. The salted paper print was invented in 1840 by William Henry Fox Talbot, and as the name implies a sheet of paper was sensitized by placing it in a salt solution before coating one side of it with silver nitrate. Almost all of the images in “Paper Promises” are salted paper prints (others include daguerreotypes, paper negatives, tintypes, and albumen silver prints).
In Europe, however, at least one new technique was brewing: “By the 1860s,” Harris notes, “salted paper prints were phased out in favor of albumen prints, in which the sensitized emulsion is suspended in egg white, creating a more stable image atop rather than within the paper, a light surface sheen, and enhanced durability.”
We’re a little bit off-topic, but not entirely: it’s good to know the context when considering the less than self-assured rise and advance in photographic technique.
Mazie Harris contributes three essays to the catalogue, and the first one is a general overview of the time, photographically speaking. Her second essay, “Face Value,” explains why the public was skeptical of photography, especially the negative-positive technique that allowed for multiples. The reason? About 40 percent of all banknotes were actually counterfeit, and (shine a spotlight on this, please) they were thus dismissively referred to as “paper promises,” and hence the name of the exhibition. Can you imagine going into the supermarket and paying with a $20 or $50 bill, and four times out of ten the cashier won’t take it? But the public fear was premature, because photographic accuracy was not all that sharp. At any rate, the reason why we have two-sided greenbacks (originally banknotes were printed on just one side) evolved in large part to stay ahead of the counterfeiters. Obviously it remains a problem even now as we see each time a cashier scrutinizes the large bill we hand her or him. You wouldn’t encounter that treatment with a silver dollar, would you?

The third essay, and I should mention that Harris is an assistant curator of photographs at the Getty, is entitled “Patent Politics,” examines the debate at the time as to “whether photographic processes should be openly shared or operate within a free-market system of individual intellectual property.” She focuses largely on Titian Ramsay Peale II (youngest son of Charles Willson Peale, renaissance man and founder of the Philadelphia Museum), who worked in the patent office and was very careful about granting patents. On the other hand, the nemesis in this example, James A. Cutting managed to acquire a number of patents that were far too general in what they covered or allowed. As Harris writes, “Appropriation and adaptation, rather than invention, became the mark of ingenuity in the American photography community.”

Closer examinations
The “Paper Promises” catalogue is enhanced by two additional essays, the first being “A New Kind of Evidence,” by Christine Hult-Lewis, which “describes how land litigants of the late 1850s exploited paper photographs to sway court cases.”
The premise may sound dull, but the author holds our interest. In former times, the evidence for property or boundary disputes was often confined to a drawn map, with landmarks often ambiguous. Hult-Lewis describes one specific case in which Carleton Watkins wound up being employed by both litigants to photograph the disputed areas, one of which was a “monumental” rock and another a large “red” rock. Pretty sketchy, wouldn’t you say? But this is how photographs entered the courtroom as evidence, and I bet you had no idea, did you?

“Plantation Tourism,” by Matthew Fox-Amato, focuses on James M. Osborn and Frederick E. Durbec, who produced stereographs of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1960, or just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. Stereographs, as I’m sure you know, but there’s always one reader out of 100 who doesn’t, are two near-identical images placed side-by-side so that, when looked at through a hand-held viewer, voila, they seem to appear as a singular 3D image. So called plantation scenes were among the work they produced for commercial consumption.

Whatever the motives of Osborn and Durbec, Fox-Amato writes that “One finds no images of slave markets, grueling labor, or slaveholders beating enslaved people–no images, in other words, foregrounding drudgery or the violence that was central to maintaining the slaveholding regime.” Instead, “Osborn and Durbec offered calm scenes of plantation homes, the interior and exterior of a slave chapel, cabins, docks, and plantation workhouses.”
The political implications of these images then as compared to the political implications now are no doubt vastly different, but by employing a term like “slaveholding regime” and later referring to these images as “mythologizing views,” indicates where Fox-Amato’s sentiments lie. He sees these pictures as propaganda, but I do have to wonder if anyone was truly thinking “propaganda” at the time. I just don’t know. Clearly he’s right in that the underside of slavery isn’t shown. However, by way of an analogy, during the several years I lived in a southern state I never heard anyone refer to statues associated with the Confederacy as symbolic of white supremacy or suppression. The statues seemed to be poignant reminders that the land had a history, that empires come and go, values change and time passes through our hands.
Not what you wanted to read? All right. But then photography in the South was stymied because suppliers of photographic materials were largely based in the North and blockades were imposed on southern ports.
Eventually, “paper promises” shed its negative implications and marched forward through the ages. Even so, there are still the occasional hurdles (with copyright and other legal matters), but if we look behind the mounted images we see that this exhibition describes a crucial phase during the early years of this now ubiquitous medium. In that way it’s an invaluable addition to our understanding and appreciation of photography from the 1830s to the present.

“Paper Promises: Early American Photography” is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum through May 27, as is “Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography,” which contains roughly three to five large-scale works by a half-dozen photographers, two of whom were born in the 1960s (Thomas Demand and Soo Kim), three in the 1970s (Christiane Feser, Matt Lipps, and Christopher Russell), and one born in 1980 (Daniel Gordon). As the title implies, the photographers haven’t merely shot and printed a photograph, they’ve also manipulated it in some way. While three of the photographers did end up with seamless images, when all is said and done, the other three, by cutting and layering, have produced work with a relief or slightly ruffled 3D surface. Each one of the six is deserving of more ink than I’m giving them here, for they are representatives of photography in the modern day of experimentation. What would the photographers in “Paper Promises” make of the work of their artistic descendents? We can only speculate. But I imagine, as artists themselves, they would be astonished at first, and then curious as to the tools and techniques employed.
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