French Postcards
A contemporary Stanhope rosary from Michioacan, Mexico.
Looking through the lens embedded in the cross presents a view of the Virgin of Guadalupe levitating strangely within a hazy space.
A seizure in 1863 involved a type of photograph that was particularly adaptable to pornography—microphotography. These tiny images, sold as transparencies, were impossible to read with the naked eye and were packaged with special magnifying viewers (called Stanhopes). Numerous patents for microphotographic techniques were filed in 1861 (by Martinache for “microphotographs of jewelry”; Regad, “Prints for microscopes”1862 (Brin fréres; Nachet et fils) during the peak of interest in this novelty. Caught this time with “micro nudes” were Guth and Laufer, who were middlemen rather than photographers. Other firms that tried to register microphotographs with the Ministry of the Interior had similar problems getting their images approved. The list of “planches sans ou avec texts non autorisées” in 1862 included macroviews by Dagron et Compagnie entitled Surprised Bathers, La Joyeuse orgie, L’ Indiscret, Léda; Voland’s micro Enlévement de Psyche and Venus et Adonis; and Villeneuve’s Le Balancoire and Le Hamac (all photos of artworks, which represented another type of illegal image). Some of these works were marked “á la condiction expresse de ne pas mettre á l’étalage” or “pour l’export,” which suggests that they were conditionally approved.
Captains of Industry
The industrialization of the pornographic photo market is suggested by the huge volume of images seized during raids in the late 1850s and 60s. Philippe Dubourjal, a thirty-year-old wine merchant and photographer at the time of his first arrest in 1859, had 1,748 obscene prints in his possession when he was arrested for a second time in 1980. In his home in Belleville, 36 daguerreotypes, 69 paper prints, and 97 negatives were found. Joseph Auguste Belloc, who had run photography studios since 1849, had been noticed as early as 1856 for dealing in pornography. When his hand-colorist was raided in October 1861, police found two strongboxes, a desk, and a darkroom containing 1,200 obscene photographs, boxes of stereoscopic views disguised as books bearing the title Oeuvres complétes de Buffon (samples are now in the collection of the Bibliotéque nationale), 3,000 prints on paper, 307 negatives, three trays with photographs being processed, four albums of nude women, 102 large-format prints of women in “licentious positions,” and two cartes de viste sold by the popular boulevard photographer Ken.
By hiring middlemen to copy negatives to print, hand-color, and mount the images, enterprising pornographers could reap maximum profits from a limited number of sittings with the nude model while hiding their production from the police. The difficulties of reading photographic style, the division of labor, and the use of the same models by a variety of photographers made it next to impossible to identify the criminal responsible for the production of pornographic photographs unless he or she was seized flagrante delicto.
The very anonymity of photographic production, unlike the telling artist’s touch in traditional visual imagery, contributed to the success of pornographic photography.
Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848-1871 p. 160.
