Photography’s Humble Beginnings
At the dawn of a new technology that would become known as photography, this newspaper ad for an 1860s Boston portrait studio described its service as capturing likenesses. Curiously, its specialties included portraits of the deceased, which was apparently a thing in those days with the Southworth and Hawes studio promising captures of dead folks “so natural as to seem, even to artists, in a quiet sleep.” Lovely.
Introduced in 1839, Daguerreotype images involved a complicated chemical process using light-sensitive coatings applied to metal plates. By the 1860s, however, it was being eclipsed by more advanced methods.
The ad’s wonderfully charming illustration, beautiful typography and florid language, typical of the era, are beguiling. The studio’s Tremont Row address was situated across from the Boston Common, adjacent to today’s Emerson College, where I taught publishing courses and frequently referenced the history of photography and how the interlacing of the medium with publishing had profoundly influenced the course of history. Every advancement in the science of capturing light onto substrate and reproducing it onto paper propelled the publishing industry to greater achievement, in turn, to the benefit of society.
This advert appeared the year following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, himself the first president who attributed to photography the decisive factor in his 1860 primary election victory. Suffering from disparaging personal attacks by the press depicting him as a gangly, sub-human monster, Lincoln was not the odds-on favorite to prevail in the Republican primary ahead of the general election. Intuiting the power of the new medium, he harnessed it to his advantage, effectively dispelling the monstrous characterizations that had dogged him until this point. By issuing the world’s first publicity photo to the nation’s newspapers, voters’ preconceptions were flipped and politics would never be the same. Crafted by Matthew Brady, famous chronicler of the War Between the States (with battleground access granted by President Lincoln), the historic portrait session took place at Brady’s Manhattan studio, a short walk from the Cooper Union, on the same day as Honest Abe’s famous address at the college. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that such a visionary leader could foresee the potential for the nascent technology of photography before others did to influence public opinion, an analogy to contemporary politicians whose success owes to their early adoption of social media. —JH
