In 1839, a Scotsman named Sir John Robison wrote of the daguerreotypes he had seen on a visit to Paris, comparing Louis Daguerre’s invention to Hippolyte Vincent’s novel plaster casting method, both techniques which had attained an extraordinary level of mimesis. Robison’s report reveals that, although casting predates photography, a new realism emerged in casting at the same time that photography made its first appearance. Mechanisation and industrialisation had enabled both photography and plaster casting to arrive at a new mimetic fidelity. These technologies extended and developed what Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1920s and ’30s, called the mimetic faculty, a human capacity especially evident in childhood. Photography and casting were ‘mimetic’ in the broad sense of imitating aspects of nature, but like childhood mimicry, and as Benjamin noted, the process of copying also yielded new perceptions of the world.1 In Robison’s descriptions of daguerreotypes and plaster casts, it is the imperfections in the original that reveal the perfection of the copy. The image or cast drew attention to tiny, seemingly irrelevant details, which were highly valued in scientific study, though abhorred in aesthetics. This chapter argues that daguerreotype and plaster cast hold a joint attraction in the context of an early- nineteenth-century, and specifically Scottish, interest in signs of nature’s transience, informed by certain religious and scientific ideas about decay and waste.
As feminist writers Naomi Schor and Donna Haraway have shown, ideas about realism, mimesis and the detail are historically related to anxieties about the feminine, decadence and decay. Both writers have addressed the intersections of aesthetics and science, and how gender and race hierarchies are produced through concepts of nature and through specific mimetic material practices. Following aspects of Schor and Haraway’s work, the present chapter sets out a feminist reading of the significance of the mimetic realism of daguerreotype and plaster cast. It situates Robison’s attention to detail within a larger set of discourses on the detail and on decay, suggesting that it may have been overdetermined by older anxieties amongst the Edinburgh élite regarding social upheaval and revolution, in particular a certain ‘patriarchal paranoia’ (Taylor 2014, 300). Recent photography history and theory suggests that the invention of photography is dependent on a historically-specific photographic desire, rather than solely the availability of materials and the appropriate social conditions (Batchen 1997). While this chapter agrees with the view that photography’s invention was dependent on certain historical notions about nature, perception and realism (among other things), it also emphasises the historical specificity of various photographic processes, in particular the increasing dependence of photographic mimesis on nineteenth-century industrial byproducts. Against the tendency to see photography as a means to arrest time and therefore decay, the chapter suggests that photography may also have been valued for its ability to reveal the ravages of time and decay.
1 The Faithful Daguerreotype
In 1839, on first seeing a daguerreotype, a number of writers expressed their astonishment at the minute detail contained within this exquisite and magical ‘mirror with a memory’ (Holmes 2013, 69). In a characteristically showmanlike gesture, Daguerre handed a magnifying glass to the first visitors to his Paris studio, encouraging them to examine the first samples thoroughly. One of these early visitors was Sir John Robison (1778–1843), Secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Robison reported on his visit before the Society of Arts and, in a paper published in the Edinburgh new philosophical journal in July 1839, he explained that the daguerreotype, when examined at a level ‘not perceivable to the naked eye in the original objects’, remained perfectly faithful to reality. Here, ‘a crack in the plaster’, there ‘a withered leaf lying on a projecting cornice’, there an ‘accumulation of dust in a hollow moulding of a distant building’.2
It is, in Robison’s account, the tiniest imperfections that most profoundly express the perfection of the daguerreotype. They are also, in a sense, interlopers: elements that were not intended to be recorded, that made their way into the image unnoticed. Perhaps Robison meant to suggest, as other early commentators on photography did, that these details are imperceptible, not necessarily because they are miniscule or far away, but because our attention neglects them. We might assume that such detritus was usually less the object of attention of the gentleman scientist than of female cleaners and manual workers. However, Robison’s list also evokes a sense of gradual, imperceptible ruination. Cracks in plasterwork, withered leaves, gathering dust: these describe moments in a process of gradual deformation, accumulation, corrosion or perishing. In a painting, such things might act as memento mori, reminders of death and of our own materiality. In the context of the daguerrotype, they point to its ability to capture a moment in time, but also to catch material substance in flux.
To understand the significance of Robison’s observations, we need to know something about the meaning of withered leaves, cracks and dust, and the smallest imperfections or blemishes, both for him and for the Edinburgh audiences to whom he presented his account. One of the two vice-presidents of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1839 was the Rev. Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), a preacher who would become the founder and leader of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, famously photographed by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson using the calotype process (fig. 12.1). Chalmers had been a student of Robison’s father, also named John Robison (1739–1805), whose teaching as Professor in Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh had helped shape Chalmers’ particular brand of natural theology. Unlike some other advocates of natural theology, the evangelist Chalmers’ vision was not one of a benevolent God and a harmonious nature. Rather, he emphasised the corruption of nature, ‘an utter derangement into which nature has been thrown – so that all her elements are impregnated with disease’, and the inevitability of decay and degeneration, such that ‘even the mute and inanimate things are subject to the power of a decay’.3
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Portrait of Thomas Chalmers, c.1843–1847, salted paper print from paper negative
Collection of the Metr opolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Public domain
The association with Chalmers suggests that Robison’s observation of the minute details in the daguerreotype may have been led partly by such interests, cultivated in a milieu in which signs of decay and transience meant something quite different to what they signify to a contemporary reader. Religion, the arts, the sciences and social theory were closely bound in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, when the borders between specialist academic disciplines were only beginning to harden, and where the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment was embodied in a plethora of learned societies, well informed about the latest developments in continental science and eager to learn about Daguerre’s new invention. The Edinburgh intelligentsia had a particular interest in questions of modern progress, and an equal interest in notions of the decay of matter and the decline of civilisations. As this chapter will show, since the late eighteenth century, Scottish natural history and natural philosophy had become increasingly concerned with the transience of matter. Social theory also addressed questions of social decline and degeneracy. The lack of sharp separation between the disciplines meant that new theories in science, political economy, and aesthetics shared models of decadence, decay and transience. Aesthetic questions were closely bound up with questions of morality, and treatises on taste were careful to warn about the threat of decadence, effeminacy and corruption consequent upon too much refinement or too much luxury.
Robison tied his observations about the realism of the daguerreotype to observations about another technical development which also promised an astonishing verisimilitude, Hippolyte Vincent’s new method of plaster casting:
It is a curious circumstance that, at the same time that M. Daguerre has made this beautiful and useful discovery in the art of delineation, another Parisian artist [Vincent] has discovered a process by which he makes solid casts in plaster of small animals or other objects, without seams or repairs, and without destroying the model […] I am in possession of several specimens of his work, among which are casts of the hand of an infant of six months, so delicately executed, that the skin shows evident marks of being affected by some slight eruptive disease.4
As in the daguerreotype, mimetic perfection is expressed through imperfection, here blemishes on the skin. Imperfections underscored the realism of the copy: where once both scientists and artists leaned toward ideal types, in the second part of the nineteenth century, new concepts of realism and truth to nature began to require an increasing attentiveness to particularity. Photography appeared at a transition point: it nourished the new aesthetics of realism and the scientific commitment of truth to nature, but violated the first principles of the neoclassical aesthetics that dominated the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to the Englishman Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art (1790), an over-attention to detail marked an inability to deal with the general, the ideal, or the spiritual; it was a threat to the virility of art, a marker of the decline of civilisation, symptom of a slide into decadence and effeminacy. Mimetic practices which faithfully recorded the most arbitrary, contingent detail were dismissed as ‘detailism’, understood as a particularly feminine error (Schor 2007, 3–19).
Plaster casting also leaned toward the particular rather than the ideal, yet it was simultaneously the principal means for the dissemination of the classical ideal through the reproduction of Greek and Roman sculpture. As Hannah Kinney’s chapter in this volume shows, in the early eighteenth century, the Medici court had exercised control over copies of classical statuary, limiting the taking of moulds from the sculptures in its possession. The demand for new classical copies was such that, as Marden Nichols (2006, 117) writes, ‘Reproduction kept pace with excavation’, meaning that as soon as an ancient sculpture was unearthed, copies began to circulate. For example, the Venus de Milo, discovered in 1820, was immediately cast. A full-size cast appeared in the Louvre in 1821, and miniatures, made using Achille Collas’ sculptural copying machine (introduced c.1836), were mass-produced in 1839. The first photographs were populated with such classical casts: Daguerre’s 1837 Still life is the earliest example, and probably one of the ones that Robison saw on his visit.5 The first daguerreotype of a miniature Venus de Milo was also produced in 1839. This use of plaster existed alongside techniques of casting ‘from life’ such as Vincent’s, and the use of plaster in the production of death masks and medical moulages.
While early photographers often described themselves as little more than mechanical operators, and their photographs as produced by the sun, or nature ‘herself’, at the same time they staked a claim to art not only by adopting the genres of painting, but also, Geoffrey Batchen suggests, through the depiction of plaster casts (fig. 12.2). In this way they encoded in the daguerreotype or calotype the ideals of liberty and democracy associated with classical sculpture, immediately situating the daguerreotype in artistic tradition. In Daguerre’s compositions with plaster casts, Batchen (2004) identifies both a display of technical, reproductive virtuosity, and a potential address to ‘artistic power brokers’. The depicted cast worked both for and against the photograph’s cultural status. It invoked classical ideals while at the same time it implied an analogy between one copying technique and another. Yet, to the extent that the photograph was a detailed and faithful copy, it would struggle to be recognised as an artwork.
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, Still-life with plaster casts or L’Atelier de l’artiste (1837). Daguerreotype, 16.5 cm × 21.5 cm
Collection of the Société Française de Photographie, Paris. Public domain
2 The Mutant Detail
From the moment the daguerreotype was made public, photography’s reputation for non-selectivity began to be cemented. Unable to distinguish between the relevant and the irrelevant detail, the camera recorded everything. Photographs recalled seventeenth-century Dutch art, sometimes positively, as in the Art-union’s 1846 description of photographs as ‘triumphs of the Dutch school’, but often not, since Dutch painting had long been criticised for a ‘drudging’ mimesis, with a combination of ‘low and confined’ subject matter and an emphasis on the particular over the general or the ideal.6 The neo-classicist aesthetics of Reynolds and others was premised on a notion that detail detracted from the sublime grandeur of an overarching whole.7 Dutch genre painting did have its defenders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who valued its technical craft and its attentiveness to the ‘humble’. By the 1830s, they increasingly associated it with Dutch political liberties, with Protestantism and republicanism (Demetz 1963, 102–112). But it could only be defended if distanced from a too-faithful mimesis, for realism’s privileging of detail remained contentious.
In her book Reading in detail: Aesthetics and the feminine (2007, 46), Naomi Schor traces the association of the detail with the feminine and the decadent across aesthetic theory. She shows how some of the same nineteenth-century French critics who celebrated Dutch painting participated in ‘a remarkably coherent discourse on the detail’, which she characterises succinctly as follows:
the totalizing ambitions of realism that claims to account for the entire domain of the visible are deplored; the privilege accorded the horrible detail is decried; the loss of difference between the insignificant and the significant […] is lamented; the possibility of reconciling the respect for the whole of classicism with the attention to minutiae which characterises realism is duly debated; and finally the invasion of the arts by an anarchic mass of details is pronounced the unmistakeable sign of cultural dissolution.
As Schor points out (2007, 100 and 9–11), ‘a long critical tradition condemns the superfluous detail as symptomatic of decadence’, and associates it with the feminine, in line with the Western philosophical tendency to identify maleness with form and the female with matter. In this long tradition, women are seen as unable to transcend the concrete and the particular, incapable of abstraction and ‘by nature mimetic’. Reynolds viewed excessive detail as turning art away from the ideal and toward matter and the contingent, and as undermining the (masculine) sublime. He described how a painter’s eye, attuned to laborious visual study, ought to see ‘blemishes and defects’ if only to eliminate them; the practitioner of a ‘naive mimeticism’ will ‘pollute his canvas with deformity’.8
The term ‘deformity’ suggests a larger anxiety about the detail in aesthetic theory: Schor traces the obsession with imperfections of skin and flesh in G.W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: ‘little hairs, pores, little scars, warts’ and further on ‘folds of skin […] freckles, pimples, pock-marks, warts etc’. Here detail becomes pathological, flesh ‘in constant danger of a morbid mutation’.9 Such a focus on aberrations of skin was not confined to philosophical aesthetics: from the eighteenth century, as a number of writers have argued, smooth skin becomes associated with a healthy body and an emergent modern sense of individual personal identity. On this basis Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena, for example, speculate (2013, 2–3) that ‘damage to skin took on greater psychic and cultural weight as the nineteenth century dawned’.
No wonder then that the results of photographic portraiture were initially met with horror. In the 1840s, articles about photographic portraiture warned potential sitters, especially women, of the new technology’s unflattering nature (see for example Winter 1846). Yet Robison’s discussion of the ‘eruptive disease’ visible in the plaster cast is not concerned with flattery. Plaster casting and photography appear, in Robison’s account, as technologies able to extend the human power of vision, to reveal the traces of the past but also to anticipate the future as decay or eruption. Compare Hermann Vogel’s 1875 description of the taking of a portrait in Berlin using the dry-plate process, which revealed specks on the subject’s face: ‘A day later the lady sickened of the small-pox, and the specks, at first invisible to the eye, became then quite apparent. Photography in this case had detected, before the human eye, the pock-marks, very feebly tinged yellow’.10 It was the spectral range of the photographic emulsion that enabled it to register this faint yellow as dark marks, and Vogel’s example emphasises its diagnostic potential. The example had added resonance in the second half of the nineteenth century, after smallpox vaccination became widespread and scarring from the pox more stigmatised.11
Deformity and mutation could appear as positive aspects of photography and plaster casting only to the extent that these were reproductive practices outside the purview of neoclassical aesthetics. The mechanical recording of minute and imperceptible detail may corrupt and pollute the ideal and the sublime, but is invaluable in scientific study. Indeed, as Mieneke te Hennepe has shown, dermatology as a distinct science grew in the 1840s and ’50s, and made early use of photography, with dermatological atlases deploying photographs from 1865 onwards.12 While manual techniques such as drawing and painting had been deployed for both scientific and artistic purposes, the non-selectivity of new techniques of plaster casting and photography suited them to scientific recording rather than to aesthetic expressions of the sublime or the ideal. If plaster casting was the principal means of reproduction of classical sculpture, and thus of an idealised aesthetics, it also increasingly lent itself to extreme mimesis of the kind Vincent pioneered, in the form of casts ‘from life’ (‘moulages sur nature’). Meanwhile in the art market, as Patrizia Di Bello says in her book Sculptural photographs (2018, 35), ‘Photographers, reducing-machine workers, or cast-makers were not fine-artists but mechanical workers’.
Robison’s comparison suggests that he understood photography principally as a reproductive technology. The photograph was frequently compared to the cast: the French painter Jean-François Millet, for example, reportedly stated that ‘photographs are like casts from nature, which can never be equal to a good statue. No mechanism can be a substitute for genius. But photographs used as we use casts may be of the greatest service’.13 Photography was also compared to sculpture copying machines, used to reproduce and miniaturise classical statuary, busts and medallions. Di Bello points to how contemporary accounts linked daguerreotype to Achille Collas’s machine for reproducing medallions, and she cites David Brewster, the other vice-president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, who in 1843 compared photography to James Watt’s 1814 prototype for a sculpture copying machine. This device was refined and built by Benjamin Cheverton. Di Bello (2018, 23–25) writes that by 1843, several such machines were already in use, their products frequently exhibited alongside calotypes and daguerreotypes.
By the mid-1860s, faithful and detailed imitation of reality was a common yardstick by which to measure the quality of a photograph. For example, Julia Margaret Cameron, though widely admired in art circles, was snarkily dismissed in photographic journals, with one writer of 1865 arguing that she managed to produce ‘photographs in which almost all that constitutes the charm of a photograph, faultlessly minute detail and truth, are carefully eliminated’.14 Though some critics advised against too much precision and suggested mimicking the softening techniques of Rubens and Titian, in the mid-nineteenth century haziness was generally seen as a flaw – it was only towards the turn of the twentieth century that art photographers (‘pictorialists’) turned increasingly to artisanal techniques that simulated the limitations of human vision with blurs, atmospheric effects and distortions.15
If the claim to art of the photograph was doubted, its ability to record the detail and especially signs of ruination and the passage of time, was not, and in this respect it leaned towards a Romantic aesthetic. In 1845 John Ruskin declared of his daguerreotypes of Venetian palaces that ‘It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself – every chip of stone & stain is there’.16 Photography had the edge over other reproductive techniques in its ability to document the signs of damage and ageing in artworks. Revealing the decaying state of frescoes and paintings, ‘all accidental flaws, scratches, breaks and proppings-up’ as well as ‘the misdeeds of Cleaners and “Restorers”, photography seemed not only to record the traces and testimony of the past, and to appeal to the Romantic love of the ruin, but also, in line with natural theology, to expose both human corruption and the inevitable decline of civilisation.17
3 Decay, Decadence and Waste
The culture that shaped Robison’s reception of photography was preoccupied with natural decay, economic disaster, revolution, and cultural and social decadence. These threats were rooted in events and ideas dating from half a century before Robison’s encounter with the daguerreotype: in anxieties provoked by the French Revolution and its aftermath; in environmental changes produced by the Industrial Revolution; in attempts to contain the insurgent potential of women, the working classes and colonised peoples; in concerns regarding the instability of the free market and growing secularisation.18 The assertion here that this culture is characterised by a fear and fascination with decay is not premised on a general diagnosis of patriarchal capitalist society, but relates to specific religious, scientific and cultural theories that tempered cultural optimism and the belief in progress with an emphasis on downfall, withering or decline. To some extent, these views are native to Scotland and to the evangelical Presbyterian narrative promoted in Chalmers’ natural theology, which used Robison senior’s natural philosophy to stress the transitoriness of the visible world. They can also be traced back to the political climate of the end of the eighteenth century, a time when the prevailing atmosphere was, as Jack Morrell (1971, 46) puts it, one of ‘pervasive prejudice, intolerance and uneasiness’.
The Scottish Tories in this period repeatedly denounced popular institutions, reformers and Whigs as Jacobin and treacherous. The elder Robison himself was instrumental in stoking this atmosphere, via his book Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried On in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (1797), which attributed the French revolution to an international plot, aimed at universal revolution and led by a secret society called the Illuminati. It went through four editions in just over a year. Michael Taylor has argued that this book was highly influential among conservatives between 1797 and 1802, and that the theory was inserted into the ongoing debate on the role of women in British society and the reaction to the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, as well as into an attack on continental philosophy. Robison gave a specific role to women in the Illuminati conspiracy, just at the point when feminist voices such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s were beginning to be heard. According to Taylor, ‘British patriarchs were already on their guard against the danger of female subversion’.19 Robison’s conspiracy theory attributed the corruption of women to the Illuminati, thus implicating the nascent feminist movement in a conspiracy against nation and state.
It is clear that the French revolution and its aftermath, as well as events in Ireland, entrenched the patriarchal paranoia embodied in Robison’s conspiracy theory. The Scottish intelligentsia of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a patriarchal elite, steeped in Calvinism, committed to modernisation but doubtful about progress and fearful of losing their position. John Playfair, Robison’s colleague, wrote an obituary for Robison in which he noted that his conspiracy theory was a response (though a disproportionate, ‘indiscriminate’ one) to the astonishing rate of change of post-revolutionary France, the ‘extraordinary spectacle’ in which ‘in a few months one might behold more old institutions destroyed, and more new ones projected or begun, than in all the ten centuries which had elapsed between Charlemagne and the last of his successors’.20
The spectacle of French institutions ground to dust fed into a much more longstanding set of narratives concerning the rise and fall of civilisations. These also shaped aesthetic theories: for example, Hegel, in his Aesthetics, uses the classical organic model of artistic development in which each style and culture has periods of growth, flowering and withering. In late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Scotland, ideas of aesthetic decadence were tied to wealth. Moral corruption could result from luxury, opulence and over-refinement (faults associated with the otherwise admired Dutch). One symptom, or consequence, was effeminacy and loss of manhood, thus eighteenth-century treatises on taste were careful to distinguish a gentlemanly taste associated with masculine virtues of discipline and morality (Hemingway 1989, 14–21).
This was a culture in which the material and the moral were deeply entangled. Several historians now view it as anachronistic to speak of ‘economy’ in relation to the long eighteenth century, since the term actually denotes a modern sphere of practice and discourse concerned with the production, distribution and management of resources and with monetary exchange. Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett argue that the period under consideration instead practised ‘oeconomy’, the Greek origins of which imply ‘bringing order to the domestic sphere’. This was not simply an early form of economy, but a distinct sphere of material and moral imperatives, guiding and regulating the stewardship of land and natural resources, including the reuse of waste materials, according to ‘the virtues of order, prudence and moral responsibility’.21
In the decades preceding 1839, notions of balance and equilibrium associated with mechanics increasingly underpinned political (o)economy as well as the natural sciences. Playfair himself understood the French revolution in these terms, as the result of France’s unbalanced political institutions.22 This metaphor of the balance was challenged in the 1830s. One of the influential figures in this was the conservative Englishman William Whewell. In his Bridgewater treatise, Whewell (1833, 202–203), like Chalmers, advocated a natural theology, emphasising the finite nature of a universe in which ‘it now appears that the courses of the heavens themselves are not exempt from the universal law of decay; not only the rocks and the mountains, but the sun and the moon have the sentence “to end” stamped upon their foreheads’. The mechanistic equilibrium model suggested the universe could persist eternally, but, as M. Norton Wise (1989, 399–404) shows, the ‘universal law of decay’ enabled Whewell to posit an end to the universe and therefore a beginning – a creation. Against the idea of balanced tendencies, Whewell posited that the natural tendency toward dissipation and decay could only be countered by moral force. It was during the 1830s that Chalmers, too, arrived at an emphasis on the instability of nature, partly through his reading of Whewell. For Chalmers, the transitory character of nature, its tendency toward decay, supported an idea of moral intervention and Christian conversion. Decay and dissolution were built into nature, a consequence of original sin.
Whewell conceived of waste in terms of his ‘universal law of decay’, and avoidance of waste as an oeconomic imperative (Wise 1989, 423). Although this kind of moral concern with waste was present in the eighteenth century, as part of oeconomic discourse and practice, ideas about waste changed in the 1830s as (according to Wise) the steam engine metaphor replaced the mechanical balance. One representative of the growing tendency to justify avoidance of waste not in moral terms but in terms of efficiency was Charles Babbage, who defined the task of engineering as the effort to increase efficiency by overcoming waste, understood as a ‘waste of materials, waste of time, waste of power, waste of skill, and waste (wear) of machines’.23 Nevertheless, waste, putrefaction and decay were still often conceived in moral and religious terms, as perversion of nature or part of God’s plan.
By the 1860s, at least, the coal reserves that had fuelled Britain’s early Industrial Revolution were understood to be exhaustible. In his 1795 publication The Theory of the Earth, the Scots geologist James Hutton had described coal as a key part of the dynamic cycles of nature, reinforcing the need, as Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel summarise (2008, 63), for ‘human stewardship of a global system whose ongoing fertility depended on maintaining its dynamic balance’. Hutton’s theory of geological time famously suggested that the world was much more ancient than previously thought, yet rapid industrialisation seemed to be changing it irrevocably. It was in this context of anxieties about progress and environmental degradation, as well as concerns about cultural and revolutionary decadence, that notions of photographic realism were shaped.
4 Reality Effects
A similar constellation centred around the ‘fear of decay’, though in a different time and place, is suggested by Haraway in her article ‘Teddy bear patriarchy. Taxidermy in the garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936’ (1984). Haraway argues that realism became a means by which early-twentieth-century American monopoly capitalists armed themselves against decadence. She describes the American Kodak magnate George Eastman as ‘an object lesson in the monopoly capitalist’s greater fear of decadence than death’. Haraway’s argument is that scientific knowledge, far from being a neutral pursuit, is caught up in the larger culture and aesthetics of patriarchal white monopoly capitalism. In the late 1920s, men like Eastman and Carl Akeley, the taxidermist-hunter for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, worked actively to produce knowledge in ways that harnessed the mimesis of photography and taxidermy, producing a realism that might ‘bridge the yawning gaps in the endangered self’, and ‘ensure against disappearance’. This sense of endangerment came from several directions, from anxieties about decadence, race and sex. In particular, Haraway reads photography and taxidermy in this period as part of larger eugenic meaning-making technologies intended to intervene in ‘a potentially fatal organic sickness of the individual and collective’. The AMNH saw its educational task in terms of the promotion of public health; its public activities were designed ‘to arrest decay […], assure racial purity […], preserve resources’, and ‘arm the culture against decadence’.24
It is striking how the cultural climate in which photography was received in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland similarly linked concerns about cultural and social decline with ideas of nature and decay. However, Haraway is talking about eugenics, a concept unknown to Robison and his colleagues in 1839 – though they would have been familiar with practices of selective breeding of livestock and Malthusian arguments about population. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, Akeley and Eastman were concerned with perfection. Ideas about truth, perfection, and racial and gender purity underpinned their commitment to new standards of realism in both taxidermy and photography. Their ‘realism’ actually implies the neoclassical, organicist notion of verisimilitude. For instance, Haraway (1984, 36) emphasises Akeley’s commitment to ‘truth’ and to the ideal and perfect specimen: on a giraffe hunt, ‘several animals were passed over because they were too small or not colored beautifully enough’.
This notion of realism as organic perfection and as insurance against decay contrasts sharply with the kind of realism associated with photography in the mid-nineteenth century, with its emphasis on the superfluous detail, its non-selectivity that encompassed the aberrant alongside the beautiful. Nineteenth-century commentaries on the photograph’s capacity to preserve the past perfectly, to halt the passage of time, or to diagnose disease or error, also drew attention to how it lingered on the flaw, how it brought out the signs of the erosion of monuments and the everyday deterioration that had previously been glossed over.
After 1848, photography’s influence began to register in literary fiction, and here it seemed to threaten the organic unity that would later be so prized by Akeley. Increasingly, photography became the means by which the ‘real’ was defined in literature (Armstrong 1999). Contemporary reviewers repeatedly compared realist writing to the daguerreotype for its lack of compositional unity and emphasis on irrelevant detail. Both photograph and realist novel seemed to make the detail a means to destroy hierarchy, losing any sense of an overall structure or coherent form. In France, Flaubert, Balzac and Champfleury’s writing was compared to the daguerreotype in order to denigrate it: literary realism seemed to violate the principle that art required choices to be made, hierarchies to be established (Kelly 1991, 201–202). Against an organicist model of the artwork as a whole (in which no detail can be inessential), the inessential detail is, in Roland Barthes’ words (1982, 11), ‘scandalous’, ‘profligate’, a ‘narrative luxury’.
Barthes (1982, 15–16) named as ‘reality effects’ those tiny details that do not contribute to the plot or have any meaning in themselves except to give a sense of the real. Writing in the late 1960s, he saw them as part of a larger development across a number of disciplines and media in the late nineteenth century. The reality effects of realist literature underwrite the realism of the text, rather than contribute to the depth of its meaning, but they are nevertheless meaningful even if they say ‘only this: we are the real ’. Later, in Camera lucida, Barthes (1984, 4) suggested that the contingent details of the photograph do not do this. Rather than signify, the accumulated details of the photograph designate the real, the photograph ‘points a finger’, says ‘that’. However, for Robison and others, skin eruptions, pock-marks, withered leaves and cracked plaster did more than designate the real, or even say ‘this is the real’; instead they became reality effects with a specific significance – they said: ‘this is how the real is’: transient and inexorably decaying.
5 Rendition and Material Copies
Photography came to Edinburgh in a period in which science, industry, politics and aesthetics were all understood through a religious and patriarchal framework that articulated threats to the social and moral order in terms of decadence, feminisation, and decay. Yet decay was also understood, in British natural theology, as evidence of God’s creation and design. Mimetic technologies such as those of photography and plaster casting were valued for their capacity to directly reproduce the minutiae of transience and ruination; this gave them scientific, but also moral value.
The copy is a rendition, a version of something other than itself. The term originates in the French verb ‘rendre’, now used predominantly in the sense of ‘to return’ but originating in the sense of ‘to deliver’ or ‘to yield’. In the contemporary use of rendition in the phrase ‘extraordinary rendition’, the connection to ‘surrender’ or ‘yield’ is evident; it refers to the illegal abduction and delivering-up of a subject by the United States government for torture in another country. But, as Nicole Shukin explains, rendering also refers to the processing of animal remains, as in the rendering of bones to produce gelatine. The suspect is yielded up for torture, an animal’s body is melted down to yield its constituent parts, an object yields its copy. She uses ‘rendering’ as a key conceit in her 2009 book Animal capital to talk about the relationship between the mimetic function of (cinematic, photographic) film and the processing of animal remains on which this mimesis relies (in the form of gelatine emulsions). In particular, she discusses Eastman Kodak’s 1930 acquisition of a Massachusetts glue company, intended to ensure control over their gelatine supplies and remove their dependence on Germany. Shukin’s aim, in evoking the multiple meanings of ‘rendering’, is to draw attention to film’s materiality and link cinema to ‘resources economies trafficking in animal remains’.25 In another instance of its taxidermic realism, film represents animals at the same time as being literally constituted by them.
Rendition offers one way to articulate the continuum between the industrial materiality of photography, its mimetic capacity and moral concerns about waste. Although early processes such as the daguerreotype and William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype were not gelatine-based, the industrialisation of photography in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was premised on gelatine, which made it possible to mass-produce pre-prepared light-sensitive materials (dry plates), and also unexpectedly increased light sensitivity. Plaster casting came to gelatine earlier. It was Hippolyte Vincent’s innovative use of gelatine moulds that facilitated the new, exquisite realism so valued by Robison. Élisabeth Lebon writes that Vincent began to study the possible use of gelatine as early as 1833, exhibiting his innovation at the Exposition des produits de l’industrie in 1834, and receiving a silver medal at the 1844 Exposition. As Robison suggests, Vincent’s process required fewer seams, and therefore fewer repairs, in each cast produced. Lebon writes that the process was promoted as having the advantage of rapidity, economy and reproduction, since it was possible to take ten to twelve casts from one mould.26 It was a difficult process, but when done well, even the finest and most fragile details could be copied with the utmost fidelity and minimum manual intervention. It was this fidelity to the fragile and the momentary that particularly struck Robison.
In both cases, gelatine improves fine detail and mass-reproducibility. While gelée or jelly was an animal product long used in art and in cuisine, gelatine was a specifically industrial product, the consequence of new techniques in rendering developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.27 In 1814, the industrialist Jean-Pierre-Joseph d’Arcet patented a technique ‘for the manufacture of glue or broth by a new procedure by means of which one converts into glue or broth all the gelatine and cartilage contained in the bones of animals’ – a rendering process.28 Gelatine rendering techniques were developed from experiments in the 1790s, notably by d’Arcet’s own father (Jean Darcet) in order to produce cheap foodstuffs amid post-revolutionary deprivation in Paris, but d’Arcet’s process was also used for the manufacture of colle-forte, the strong glue used in in manufacturing and the arts. As this product became available, other competing manufacturers sprang up on the basis of similar patents, and its uses multiplied. In the 1840s, the juries of the 1844 and 1849 Industrial Expositions recognised the new glues as having reached a pinnacle of quality (Lieffroy 2007, 45–47).
Increased gelatine production was one means by which the growing chemical industry harnessed urban waste – at the start of the century, Céline Lieffroy (2007, 37) recounts, there were at least 20 tons of bones produced daily by Parisian butchers and by the knackers’ yards. E.C. Spary (2014, 214, 233) writes of how Jean Darcet presented his experiments ‘as a demonstration of the material benefits of rational economic knowledge’ which showed ‘how much could be made out of little’. The process developed by his son, d’Arcet, appeared as a ‘chemical sleight of hand’, magically transforming ‘the inedible into the edible’. Vincent’s gelatinous plaster casting technique was also a quasi-magical process, harnessing a waste product for immaculate renditions or copies.
The drive to reduce waste also drove the development of photography even prior to its adoption of gelatine. Iodine, a crucial component in the production of the daguerreotype, was discovered in 1811 during saltpetre manufacture; waste coal tar was found to be useful for producing dyes, leading to new sensitisers for photographic emulsions; gelatine was the medium that facilitated dry plates and emulsions. This practical, industrial impulse was linked to the older oeconomy which lent the reuse of waste a virtuous edge, and would counter and compensate for the tendency of nature to decay. Looked at this way, photography was a unique accomplishment: a copying process that might yield up (render) the whole of reality and that was able both to render the imperceptible signs of decay visible and to transform waste products into the practically invisible supports for this rendition.
At the same time, copies were duplicitous, since their realism depended on them downplaying their own material qualities. Thus the successful plaster cast mimics marble or human flesh, and the photograph invites us to look through it to what is represented, rather than lingering on the surface. Mimesis yields copies that are not only seen as inferior to artistic renditions and the originals in nature, but threaten to replace art or nature altogether. Techniques of artificial reproduction could inflame or assuage patriarchal anxieties regarding the breakdown of gender, class and racial hierarchies. In late eighteenth-century Britain and during the nineteenth century, as Harriet Guest argues, sexual difference was thought to be key to civilised society, and threatened by a growing commercial culture. She identifies as a ‘leitmotif of later eighteenth-century theories of civilization’ the notion that how women were treated and educated could upset the fine balance between ‘corruption and refinement, degeneration and progress’, and notes that even Wollstonecraft warned of a corrupt and affected femininity, of a certain kind of woman enthralled by the superficial and the artificial.29 By the 1840s, feminine dissimulation and deception could be contrasted with the camera’s unsparing vision. The daguerreotype in particular seemed simultaneously to appeal to feminine vanity, as it was rapidly adopted for portraiture, and to frustrate women’s attempts at fakery – in revealing ‘warts and all’ it might disclose a corruption beneath the feminine surface.
Anxieties about the collapse of hierarchy are predicated on the unacknowledged belief that the hierarchy is not inevitable and never-ending, but must always be propped up. Photography could appear both reassuring and threatening on this count. It would counter waste through the repurposing of industrial byproducts, yet as it rapidly industrialised, it became a major producer of waste and pollutants; and as it became reproducible, its proliferation of copies seemed to undermine aesthetic, moral and social hierarchies.30 In its early manifestation as the daguerreotype, its ability to arrest decay (and thereby preserve the past) was perhaps less significant than its ability to reveal the inexorable decay and dissolution of nature.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to E.C. Spary and Marjolijn Bol for their thoughtful and helpful feedback on the drafts of this chapter, and to Rowan Lear for sharing my interest in the materiality of photography and helping to renew my interest in feminist theory.
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Endnotes
On Benjamin’s theory of mimesis, see Buck-Morss 1989, 263–267. On technical reproduction, see Benjamin 2002
Chalmers, cited in Smith 1979, 62.
Robison 1839, 157
.
Robison (1839, 156) mentions that he saw still life compositions of ‘various groups made up of plaster-casts and other works of art’
Art-union, June 1846, cited in Fawcett 1986, 187; Richardson and Reynolds, cited in Demetz, 100.
Schor 2007, 182. Peter Demetz (1963, 99) writes that in the 18th-century European art academies the ‘imitation of nature’ signified a perfected version, what nature intended, ‘had not destructive time and the deficiencies of the material interfered’
Reynolds, cited in Schor 2007, 9. Reynolds does recognise ‘the uses of particularity’, but Schor focuses on his persistent anti-detailism.
Hegel, cited in Schor 2007, 22–24.
ogel 1875, 65. From 1873, Vogel had pioneered new photosensitive emulsions that extended the limited spectral range of early dry plates, producing greater sensitivity to yellows.
Newsom Kerr (2013) suggests that 18th-century inoculation practices domesticated the pock-mark, but by the turn of the 19th century, early vaccinators encouraged an increasing idealisation of the unblemished face.
Te Hennepe 2007, 125–151. Schnalke (1995, 83) writes that the plaster and wax moulage process was only institutionalised in dermatological hospitals from the 1860s onwards, beginning at the Hôpital St Louis in Paris
Millet, cited in Roxana et al. 2010, 26, n. 11. See also Di Bello 2018, ch. 1. The analogy persists into the 20th century in the comparison between photograph and death mask; see Henning 2017.
Anon. 1865.
Poivert 2009; Martin 2010.
Shapiro 1972, 220.
Athenaeum 1855 and Charles Heath Wilson 1874, both cited in Fawcett 1986, 191, 205.
See Hemingway 1989; Morell 1971; Smith 1969
Taylor 2014, 294–301. On the relationship of the Illuminati theory to the British use of ‘Illumination’ to describe the Enlightenment, see Schmidt 2003.
Playfair 1815, 523
Roberts 2014, 134 and Roberts & Werrett 2018, 6.
Playfair 1815, 530–531. Playfair’s politics could not be further from the elder Robison’s, whose conspiracy theory he described (1815, 527) as the result of lamentable ‘prejudices which had taken possession of an understanding in other matters so acute and penetrating’.
Wise 1989, 420; see also Werrett 2018, 54.
Haraway 1984, 63, n. 97, 42, 53, 57.
Shukin 2009, 21. For the discussion of the glue company acquisition, see Shukin 2009,
Lebon 2012, 86. Vincent’s life and work are not well documented, although some French histories of plaster casting mention him, including Lebon 2012 and Rionnet 1996. According to Rionnet (1996, n. p.), gelatine was used for plaster casting in public ateliers in Paris from the middle of the 19th century. Vincent’s process was perfected by Roubier-Paillard and Opigez in collaboration with the Louvre atelier.
As Spary writes, ‘The invention of gelatine created a space for the exercise of chemical expertise which was separate from the everyday world of cooking and eating’ (2014, 216).
From Darcet’s patent, cited in Lieffroy 2007, 40 (author’s translation). See also Spary 2014, 223–224.
Guest 2000, 23, 158, 276–277.
Benjamin 2002, 106.