Say Ahh
“Man with open mouth,” unknown French photographer, c. 1852
Careering
I can’t stop thinking about the career arc of John Plumbe. Though the article in the Des Moines Register claims that he learned photography as a “young man,” a bit of calculation shows that he was at least 30—Plumbe was born in Wales in 1809, and photography was invented in 1839. Further, photography wasn’t Plumbe’s first speculative venture.
Clifford Krainik’s Sinipee, Atlantis on the Mississippi tells the tale of Plumbe’s dream of a railroad connecting the coasts (in 1838) and the loss of this Iowa town to flood. I hope Krainik does finish the biography he’s promised on Plumbe—I’ll read it. The failure of this riverport town would have been just prior to Plumbe’s adventure of founding a chain of 25 photographic studios (in railway towns). Plumbe was the first photographer to picture a president. He also founded a magazine.
He lost it all again around 1848—he sold his stake in the company to the operators and left for California in 1849. He returned to Dubuque, Iowa (apparently having achieved some success) in 1854. He began speculating again on the possibility of a railroad into the port. The crushing financial panic of 1857 put an end to that. Plumbe would have been 48 by then.
He slit his own throat from ear-to-ear (Iowa’s first suicide?) in 1857. This was coincidentally the same year that H.H. Bennett moved into the Wisconsin Dells. I find this “American success story” a little perplexing.
Favored Developments
Technique has kept man busy since the early days of mankind. It began when the first tool-like object was used. The evolution from the primitive tool to the concentration of technical invention in modern times has been a long one. The ultimate achievements have been the outcome of collective efforts spread over thousands of years. They were now and then marked by the rise of ideas well in advance of their time. Some of these ideas fell back into the dark until the time was ripe to receive them and to apply them for useful purposes.
Human ways of feeling and thinking, too, change with the times and materialize accordingly. Periods with religious or mystical feelings will breed less inventive power than periods with rational and scientific thinking. Certain progressive powers may be conceived, but the power to realize them may be weak, or missing, and so may engineering capacity, experience, and knowledge. Only when they all meet can practical results materialize and survive. That is what took place in the nineteenth century, when all the circumstances in every domain of life encouraged technical inventions and favored their realization. A stage was reached which could no longer do without them. A development of this kind is illustrated by photography.
“Introduction,” A Hundred Years of Photography by Lucia Moholy (a 6p Pelican Special, 1939).
Histories
I haven’t done an exhaustive study, but it seems as if the “history of photography” emerged as a genre around five years of photography’s introduction (c. 1844). Most of the early histories were focused on technological progress (who did what first) and were filled with bickering regarding each country’s preeminence as the “innovator” in photography. Perhaps the logical fruit of that mode of historical research was Josef Eder’s History of Photography (c. 1897), which traces photography’s technological roots to ancient Greece.
The arc of internet histories seems much the same. After enough ink has been spilled over the “innovations” then the social and aesthetic aspects start to come to the fore. In photography, Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography (1937) weaves the technical changes into the fabric of art history, trimming the “ancient” roots used in the account to a minimum. The book centers on North America and Europe, primarily the US. Newhall is impressive, but narrow in his story—photographs are the centerpiece, and practices of consumption and circulation are not given much weight, nor are the “economics” of photography as a business. Art for Art’s sake wins the day.
What struck me recently though is the marked difference between the “first” social histories of photography. Gisele Freund’s Photography and Society claims primacy although it wasn’t published in English until 1980—the first part of the book was her doctoral dissertation (in sociology) presented to the Sorbonne in 1936.
