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A Celebration of How Americans Co-opted Photography

“We did not invent photography here in the US, but we made it our own and this is a show which kind of begins to tell that story, or stories.” Jeff Rosenheim, inauguration of THE NEW ART AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY 1839-1910

I might not have grasped the full meaning of this seemingly simple statement if I hadn’t just arrived from Vienna, Austria, where I spent three days immersed in 19th-century Austro-Hungarian photography history. What an incredible contrast now with the Albertina’s exhibitions, the Habsburg court portraits, and the ethnographic photographs of Austrian and Hungarian explorers competing with other Europeans to be the first to chart hostile territories with challenging climates.

More specifically, I might not have noticed the uniqueness created by what’s absent from the exhibition—or rather, the absence of constraints that gives this collection of early American photographs a sense of individual freedom rarely seen in the curation and selection of images.

Indeed, here, there’s no sense of dynastic weight or political interpretation: no court etiquette, no social class struggles either in the images, the attitude of the sitters themselves or in how they’re presented.

There is a small representation of New England’s prominent families in the room dedicated to paper photographs—this European tradition of calotype and paper printing wasn’t widely practiced in America before the arrival of collodion around 1860, except in the Boston and Philadelphia areas.

The exhibition is divided into three rooms according to the practices of these early photographers; this classification would be quite unpopular in Europe. It might even be impossible to choose such an approach there, yet it makes perfect sense because, even if we’ve forgotten it, cameras evolved significantly, and each technique produced images with its own specificity and uniqueness. The first room is dedicated to daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes—three families of photographs on hard supports, also three families of images that are neither positive nor negative but direct images that, at a certain angle of light and with control of environment or black background, allow the human eye to reconstruct them as positive visions.

Here I should mention that the New York museum has created an installation that’s a marvel of lightness and intelligence for viewing daguerreotypes. Certainly, budget constraints helped avoid costly solutions in favor of a much more advantageous result.

The second room is dedicated to paper photographs. American calotypes from the 1850s are very rare, and practices differed greatly from those in Europe. However, these images document the country’s construction and reconstruction after the Civil War and the enormous need for infrastructure starting in the 1860s, with an aesthetic unique to this territorial organisation after expansion.

The third room is dedicated to the carte de visite format and the stereographic photography—a format that virtually disappeared after the 1910s but which documented America’s great history. This is certainly the field in which collector competition is fiercest because the range of possibilities is immense. Stereo cards and cartes de visite number in the millions, and only practiced expertise, coupled with a fierce determination to select according to taste or well-established criteria, allowed William Schaeffer to build a collection where these supposedly modest images find their rightful place in the Photography Department headed by Jeff Rosenheim.

Again Americans had co-opted Disderi’s carte de visite, and the stereo format to their own use.

Many photographs, particularly daguerreotypes, have neither identified artists/operators nor identified subjects. Yet the exhibition notes are precise and absolutely fascinating, inviting and visitors to think alongside those who have described and documented these objects.

What encouragement for younger generations to show that there exists at least one museum in the world willing to take risks – displaying things never before seen, admitting when they don’t know exactly what something is, but offering thoughtful approaches to understanding it. A place that values beauty, that dares to showcase an individual collection thanks to the support of a few private individuals – in short, where the word “curator” doesn’t rhyme with “conservative.”

Just as Tocquevilleo understood the difference between Europeanpp and American, this show illustrates with photography those differences.

This democratic approach to history of photography makes the exhibition particularly American in spirit – celebrating both the elite studios with their “colorful velvet tapestry, frescoed ceilings, six-light chandeliers” and the “average worker who desired a simple likeness”. It is a perfect embodiment of Jeff Rosenheim’s statement that while “we did not invent photography here in the US, we made it our own.”

La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni …

Senigallia, città della fotografia, ospita tre nuovi spazi dedicato alla collezione di fotografie.

Atelier 41 si trova 41 via fratelli Bandiera.

Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni.

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