Catalogue Abstracts

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Early Masters of Illusion

Technical limitations in the nascent field of photography forced its earliest practitioners to become masters of illusion. Needing bright light, the first portraits had to be taken outside in direct sunlight with furniture pieces and simple backdrops simulating interior settings. New scientific advances soon allowed portraiture to move inside the studio... >>

Anonymous Identity:
The Daguerreotype in Antebellum America

The daguerreotype process, named after its French inventor Louis-Jacques-Mande´ Daguerre, produced more visual images from the 1840s to 1860s than any other medium in America, yet the significance of the relationship between the daguerreotype and antebellum American society has rarely been addressed. When photography in the form of the daguerreotype was introduced to America, a young, increasingly mobile and urbanized nation embraced the new medium with ardor... >>

The Form and Face of the American Child

The Seaver Center for Western History Research is home to a valuable collection of American case art, which consists of hundreds of photographic portraits of American adults and children of varied social and economic classes, made possible by the invention of photography. This democratization of the portrait genre created the opportunity for individuals, who were not members of the upper class, to develop their own tradition of portraiture... >>

The Quickening of the Dead and the Dying of Death:
Postmortem Photographs from Nineteenth-Century America

"Photography" and "death" seem, at first sight, separate, unrelated words. Even cursory contemplation of a photographic portrait, however, discloses the surreptitious kinship linking the two. Recognizing that the human subject of a photographic portrait is paradoxically "dead and . . . going to die," Barthes poignantly bears witness to the relationship between photography and death... >>

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