Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas - Softcover

Alan Trachtenberg is the Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American studies at Yale University, where he taught for thirty-five years. His books include Shades of Hiawatha (H&W, 2004).

Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas
PART ONEONEMIRROR IN THE MARKETPLACEAmerican Responses to the Daguerreotype, 1839-51 
 
First published in The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, edited by John Wood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 60-71. 
 
 
 
 
 
IIN the salon of a Broadway hotel on December 4, 1839, the first French daguerreotypes made their initial New World appearance. In the preceding months American examples of the fledgling art of picturing had already been seen in New York shop windows, but here were specimens from the hand of the inventor and master himself, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, offered to the public by his ingratiating agent François Gouraud. With impeccable credentials as "friend and pupil of Mr. Daguerre," Gouraud announced his "charge of introducing to the New World the perfect knowledge of the marvelous process of drawing, which fame has already made known to you under the name of 'The Daguerreotype.'" Already known by name, the curious objects with their flickering images of Parisian boulevards and monuments nevertheless challenged the credulity of the select audience. Seeking an appropriate language to describe "their exquisite perfection [that] transcends the bounds of sober belief," Lewis Gaylord Clark, patrician editor of The Knickerbocker, struck upon a perfect solution from the apparatus of everyday life--a looking glass:Let us endeavor to convey to the reader an impression of their character. Let him suppose himself standing in the middle of Broadway, with a looking-glass held perpendicular in his hand, in which is reflected the street, with all that therein is, for two or three miles, taking in the haziest distance. Then let him take the glass into the house, and find the impression of the entire view, in the softest light and shade, visibly retained upon its surface. This is the Daguerreotype! ... There is not an object even the most minute embraced in that wide scope, which was not in the original; and it is impossible that one should have been omitted. Think of that!Like Plato's whirling mirror, Clark's panorama of Broadway beguiles the mind with flashing images of the real. Of course, Plato's conundrum of appearance and reality, in which the mirror induces a kind of inebriation in the deceptive pleasure of mere illusion, is hardly the case here; Clark's mirror stands simply and unambiguously for exactitude, and the author's quite anti-Platonic awe at imitation itself: "Think of that!"Exuberant awe and fascination prevailed at the inauguration of photography in America, as it did everywhere in Europe. Here was proof again, like lithography, the steam engine, the railroad, of an age of "progress," of enlightened reason prevailing over dark superstition, and science over magic. But the chorus of celebration was not without its discordant notes. The very wonder excited by first sight of the new objects occasionally harbored a more reserved, disbelieving response, such as we hear from Philip Hone, another visitor to Gouraud's exhibition, who included among his words of praise in his diary this flickering hint of uncertainty: "One may almost be excused for disbelieving it without seeing the very process by which it is created. It appears to me a confusion of the very elements of nature." This note of discomfort, quickly muffled in Hone's hymn of celebration, finds an answering echo in the reaction of Phoebe in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851): "I don't much like pictures of that sort,--they are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to escape altogether." Phoebe's unease invokes a little-regarded moment in the early career of photography in America, a moment of shudder, suspicion, and refusal. "I don't wish to see it any more," she cries. Tobe sure, most Americans proved eager enough not only to see but to possess a specimen of the new art, and a thriving trade in daguerrean images developed rapidly. Photography fit so neatly the rhetoric of the "technological sublime" common in the age of steam in America, how are we to understand the few but insinuating signs of a countervailing response?For the cultural historian such rifts within the linguistic environment of a technological innovation provide telling signs of an uneven process of change. In regard to photography, the process of acclimatization was neither as spontaneous nor as unequivocal as is often assumed. The compacted overlay of implication within the language of response can help us reconstruct and understand a climate of mind within which photography achieved its initial cultural identity in America. Language in its figurative uses especially--images, allusions, metaphors--preserves nuances of meaning that can be read as indices to the cultural effects of historical change. The figures by which people represent new phenomena to themselves and each other is especially valuable to the historian, for by such language the new is brought into relation with the old and the familiar--in Emerson's words, is perceived "to be only a new version of our familiar experience." By familiarizing new objects, tropes such as Clark's mirror on Broadway serve as more than descriptive terms; they signify an entire process of ingesting new experiences, making a place for them within existing systems of thought and feeling, and in the process modifying old structures in ways only a sensitive attention to language can reveal. Particularly apt and promising for close attention, then, is the metaphor of the photograph as mirror, especially as Clark imagines it: a mirror in the New World marketplace of Broadway.II"Talk no more of 'holding the mirror up to nature'--she will hold it up to herself, and present you with a copy of her countenance for a penny." Thus exclaimed N. P. Willis in the Corsair, April 13, 1839, the first published news of photography in the American press. He had notset eyes on an actual specimen, had only read William Henry Fox Talbot's account of his experiments in the English Literary Gazette (February 2, 1839), but instantly imagined the medium as a kind of mirror press by which nature imprints itself as a cheap picture. Seizing the Englishman's remark that the invention would abridge "the labor of the artist in copying natural objects," and that "by means of this contrivance, it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself," Willis calls up a scene of panic among displaced craftsmen: "Steel engravers, copper engravers, and etchers, drink up your aquafortis, and die! There is an end of your black art--'Othello's occupation gone.' The real black art of true magic arises and cries avaunt ... . The Daguerreoscope1 and the Photogenic revolutions are to keep you all down, ye painters, engravers, and, alas! the harmless race, the sketchers."The cleverness of the conceit was not entirely a joking matter. New York in the winter and spring of 1839 still felt the worst effects of the catastrophic Panic of 1837: financial collapse, ruinous defaults and bankruptcies, uncontrollable deflation, and an economic slowdown of an order never before experienced in the United States. Over the next ten years, virtually until the discovery of California gold in 1849, the city remained gripped by unemployment, rising pauperism and homelessness, sporadic riots, and an increase in violent crime. In light of what one writer in 1843 called "these Jeremiad times," in which "only the beggars and the takers of likenesses by daguerreotype" can survive, Willis's "real black art" reveals a distinct social meaning.Among the early writers on the new medium, mostly gentlemen scientists and artists like Samuel F. B. Morse, Willis is virtually alone in imaging the situation from the point of view of practicing draftsmen, engravers, and printers. The depressed condition in fact created a favorable climate for the commercial development of portrait daguerreotypy. To set up on one's own required only a minor outlay of capital and small expenses, and thus photography could take up some of the slack among unemployed craftsmen. Not that he himself refersexplicitly to the hard times visible on the streets of New York, but his imaginary scene of discarded craftsmen, their "occupation gone," serves as a sharp reminder that photography appeared in America in the midst of the first modern depression and mass unemployment, the first signal of an unstable economic system keyed to the mysterious vagaries of capital, of money. It seemed to many at the time that blame for the depression lay at the hands of private banks and their issuance of paper money not backed by specie, a practice that encouraged unrestrained speculation. While this is difficult to prove, it is not improbable that loss of the authority of printed money and the consequent widespread perception of instability in society's basic token of exchange affected the reception of photography, a new technique that itself threatened, as Willis foresaw, to destabilize the entire craft of picture making and, not least, to deflate another kind of standard currency: the representational value of handcrafted pictures.Willis imagines further ambiguities and encroachments in the realm of daily life.What would you say to looking in a mirror and having the image fastened!! As one looks sometimes, it is really quite frightful to think of it; but such a thing is possible--nay, it is probable--no, it is certain. What will become of the poor thieves, when they shall see handed in as evidence against them their own portraits, taken by the room in which they stole, and in the very act of stealing! What wonderful discoveries is this wonderful discovery desti...