Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US 1850–1900

By Katherine Manthorne

• Brings to light the hidden histories of two generations of women photographers in 19th-century America
• For all interested in photographic, 19th-century American, and women's history
• Includes stories of amazing ingenuity, including using a skirt as a portable darkroom

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781507302330

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Katherine Manthorne

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930444

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Cover and Interior Designed by Ashley Millhouse

Cover image: Unknown maker, American. Woman Daguerreotypist with Camera and Sitter, ca. 1855. Ambrotype, 3 ¼ x 2 ¾ inches (8.3 x 7 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc., 2005.27.5

© Nelson Gallery Foundation.

Image Credit: Thomas Palmer

Back cover image: Yes or No Series: Letter C, postcard, ca. 1900, private collection.

Type set in Neutra Text/Baskerville

ISBN: 978-0-7643-6016-9

978-1-5073-0233-0 (EPUB)

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DEDICATION

To my father, Joseph Parker Manthorne,

the family photographer who inspired me

&

To my husband, James Lancel McElhinney,

who helped me shed light on the Women in the Dark

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. THE PIONEERS & EVOLVING PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES

Introduction

Making Ambrotypes on the Bowery in the 1850s: Mary Ann Jube

Photographer of Civil War–Era New Yorkers: Matilda Moore

Photographing the Faces of a Mississippi River Town: Candace Reed

The Tintype Trade: From Martha Fletcher to Catherine Smith

II. CIVIL WAR ERA

Introduction

Civil War Soldiers through Female Eyes

Spirit Photography & the Cult of Memory in Boston: Helen F. Stuart & William H. Mumler

Gallery of Kentucky Notables: Mrs. James O’Donoghue

III. FAMILY MATTERS

Introduction

Wedding Bells

The Booming Baby Business: Emily Stokes of Boston

Remember Me: Postmortem Photographs of Babies

Sisters

The Family Album

Dutiful Daughter: Lucretia A. Gillett of Saline, Michigan

IV. A VISIT TO A WOMAN’S PORTRAIT STUDIO

Introduction

Patronizing a Female Photographer: Mrs. G. W. Sittler

Say Cheese! How to Sit for Your Photograph

For Best Effect: Dress, Hairdos & Hats

Retouchers

Public-Relations Wizard: Rosa Vreeland-Whitlock

Dredful Picture, or the Portrait That Goes Wrong

V. OUTDOORS: LANDSCAPE & ARCHITECTURE

Introduction

Landscaping in California: Eliza Withington

Contemplating the New England Coast: Marian Clover Hooper Adams

Recording History in San Antonio, Texas: Mary Jacobson

Straddling California & Mexico: Sarah Short Addis

Riding the Rails: Mary Jane Wyatt of Holdrege, Nebraska

VI. THE NEW WOMAN & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Introduction

Dress Reform: Amelia Bloomer

Lowell Mill Girls’ Heirs: Costillia Smith

Swedish National Identity in Chicago: Anny Lindquist

Advertising Photography: Beatrice Tonnesen

Women’s Revenge: Pirie MacDonald’s Men-Only Policy

Role Model for Women Photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston

CONCLUSION

A New Photographic Era Dawns: The Kodak Girl

Appendix 1

How a Woman Makes Landscape Photographs by Eliza W. Withington, Philadelphia Photographer, 1876

Appendix 2

What a Woman Can Do with a Camera by Frances Benjamin Johnston, Ladies Home Journal, 1897

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From the moment that I began pursuing these American women photographers over a decade ago, I have benefited from the help of many colleagues and friends. Anyone who works on this material owes a debt of gratitude to the late Peter Palmquist for his many insightful publications (many of which are cited in these pages) and his photographic collection that he bequeathed to Yale University’s Beinecke Library. In the same repository is the Julia Driver Collection of Women in Photography, whose online database is also indispensable to all of us in the field. I availed myself of many other libraries and museums that are making their collections increasingly accessible, but here I want to mention two in particular: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose open-access policy has been a boon to researchers, and the New York Public Library’s Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC), where David Lowe generously shared his knowledge. Shauna Howe, William Simmons, and María Beatriz H. Carrión, an art history doctoral student at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, were a great help in compiling materials. But my greatest appreciation goes to the hundreds of people I never met who collected and preserved photographs of these faces from the past so that future generations could enjoy and study them.

INTRODUCTION

Absence

About the time that New York’s National Academy of Design held its annual fine art exhibition in the spring of 1869, its former president Asher B. Durand visited the studio of leading photographer Abraham Bogardus on Broadway and 27th Street to have his portrait taken. The resulting carte de visite was typical of the work that established the Bogardus name as synonymous with quality, showing the wizened landscapist—often called the dean of the Hudson River school—seated in half length with his head and torso rendered in high detail against a plain background (1869, Archives of American Art). This was at the height of the American craze for the carte de visite, an inexpensive photographic print produced from a negative in multiple copies and affixed to a card measuring 2 1/2 by 4 inches. Incredibly prolific, Bogardus opened a studio and gallery in the early days of photography in 1846 and became highly successful portraying prominent American men: During the first popularity of the Cartede-Visite Mr. Bogardus kept three skylights busy, we learn, and delivered from 68 to 100 dozens of Cartes per day.¹ With the photographic boom continuing in the aftermath of the Civil War, he saw the need for an organization to promote the field’s professional standards and artistic aspirations, and in 1868 helped found the National Photographic Association (and served as its president for the first five years).

IN-1 & 2 Recto & Verso Matilda Moore, New York, Civil War Soldier, carte de visite, ca. 1861–65, private collection

A group portrait taken of the members at their first conference in 1869 in Philadelphia shows an august body composed of many of its well-known practitioners. No women were present. They were barred from joining this or any other photographic organization at the time. In truth, however, the portrait was far from representative of the profession, which by that date included legions of women working in every phase of production—not only in New York, but also across the entire country. They were an integral part of the field, working not only as photographers, but also as studio managers, gallery owners, retouchers, colorists, mounters, and authors of how-to manuals. The accounts of the female photographers in this book demonstrate the role they played in advancing their profession and visual culture more broadly during the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States.

Take the example of Matilda Moore (b. ca. 1832, active ca. 1860–1883), who ran a successful studio in New York City for over two decades on Canal Street, between Varick and Sullivan Streets (fig. IN-1). Mrs. Moore, as she signed her work, was an active member of New York’s photographic community in the 1860s and 1870s, yet her name rarely appears in the literature. Attempting to reinsert women such as Moore and her sisterhood into the historical record presents the opposite challenge to the majority of women in the visual arts. With painters, some references remain of their long-forgotten artistic reputations, but the body of work they produced is often scattered or lost. Moore, by contrast, is known primarily through a few hundred surviving photographs (compared to 200,000 by her leading male contemporary, Bogardus) only by the fact that she stamped her logo on their versos. Every portrait she made, every photographic she sold, was identified on the reverse side with her logo, Mrs. Moore, 421 Canal Street, New York (fig. IN-2). Her personal back mark, printed on these small cards, is the equivalent of the crumbs dropped by Hansel and Gretel in the forest, and leads us back to her. This commercial branding of female identity forces us to abandon the stereotype of the middle-class white women sheltered from the world of commerce. These enterprising women set up their establishments side by side with men, whether it was in a nascent western town or—as in Moore’s case—on one of the most heavily trafficked streets of one of the busiest cities in the world, and made their livings as photographers.

Carving Out a Place in History

Once photography was born in 1839, it quickly evolved into one of the century’s most popular formats for recording faces and places. By the 1850s, hundreds of women operated cameras and created images that contributed to the history of the medium. Every city and town in America had a photographic district, and often that district was home to at least one female photographer. They brought photography to embryonic towns or city neighborhoods, hoping they could contribute to the growth of the community, and gambling in turn that its development would nurture their struggling businesses. They were enterprising, talented, and resourceful. By the century’s end the number of female photographers was estimated to be in the thousands. Yet, with a few exceptions, the history of nineteenth-century photography is told largely as a story of male achievements. Who are these women, what can we recover of their stories, and how distinctive are the images they shot? And what was their role in the forging of the nation and of its visual culture in these seminal decades? This book seeks to start answering these and related questions. The title Women in the Dark refers both to the conditions of the darkroom in which these women performed their magic and to the fact that they have remained largely forgotten.

By 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England had created competing, pioneering formats: the daguerreotype consisted of a unique image on a mirror surface with stunning detail, while Talbot’s calotype produced a paper negative from which multiples could be made, albeit far less distinct. In 1851, Frederick Archer invented the collodion process, which combined the best aspects of its predecessors: a negative image on a transparent support that could be printed over and over on albumen paper with sharp resolution. Albumen print portraiture became a mainstay of photographic studios, especially compact card portraits: the carte de visite had its heyday in America during the 1860s and 1870s, after which the larger cabinet card replaced it. Women were prolific in both these formats.

Cartes de visite (abbreviated cdv) are fascinating documents: small photographic portraits printed on paper and mounted on 2½-by-4-inch cards. There was a robust market for such images of celebrities and leaders: President Abraham Lincoln, African American leader Frederick Douglass, and actor Edwin Booth were all huge sellers. But the majority represented everyday folk who posed nervously in the photographic studio, eager for an inexpensive portrait to share with loved ones and record them for posterity. We seldom know the identities of these sitters who stare out at us through a sepia haze, and rarely do we think about the photographers who took them. Yet, turning the card over often reveals a maker’s mark and precious historical information. Such research collectively provides a roster of female photographers. Women in the Dark focuses on American women who made cartes de visite, tintypes, and related photographs from the 1850s through the 1870s. By 1880, dry-plate photography came into widespread use, which greatly streamlined the treatment of the plate. Simultaneously, the larger cabinet cards replaced the cdvs, which allowed for a bigger image and greater technical consistency. We examine the cdvs and cabinet cards successively against the concurrent settling of the western frontier, the rise of eastern urban centers, and the first women’s movement in America.

This narrative crosses the boundaries between high and low art. It opens up new avenues of research and new approaches to narrating history. The women who are the subject of this book are largely under the radar. Groups of photographs tell the stories of Mary Ann Jube of New York City, Illinois’s Candace Reed, and Emily Stokes in Boston: stories of immigration, migration, changing technologies, and female survivors. Some women colored or retouched photographs and then moved up to camera operator, while others were in business with husbands and, when they lost the men to war or disease, carried on alone. Mostly they worked indoors in the studio, but a few—such as Eliza Withington of Ione, California—devised a portable camera outfit and went out into the landscape. This book also includes the material culture of photography, from the chair in which a sitter posed to the album in which the photograph