Itinerant photographers today are mainly active in regions like rural India and the Andes where camera ownership is small and studios rare. But in the 19th century, itinerants, mainly portraitists, abounded in Europe and North America, initially outnumbering fixed studios.
Among the earliest travelling daguerreotypists was the Swiss Johann Baptist Isenring, who toured southern Germany with a mobile studio in 1841-2 before eventually settling in St Gall. Also well documented are operators in the north German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein between 1839 and the revolutions of 1848-9. Information about the daguerreotype process had reached towns like Kiel and Lübeck by the autumn of 1839, and the first pictures were soon available there. Between 1839 and 1848, c.65 photographers (all but one exclusively daguerreotypists) were active in the duchies, including 48 itinerants, some of whom also visited Hamburg, Denmark, and Norway. Usual practice was to set up in rented premises in a market or coastal town, advertise in the press, and stay for a few days or weeks until demand flagged. Many individuals also plied additional trades, as opticians, miniaturists, or showmen of technical gadgets. An interesting case study is that of Gregor Renard (1814-85), who had trained as a silhouettist and portrait and porcelain painter before taking up daguerreotypy in 1843. Then, using whichever skill was needed, he toured Denmark and the duchies before finally opening a studio in Kiel in 1847. Two of his brothers had similar careers. Many of the surviving portraits by Renard and his contemporaries, of merchants, farmers, small-town bigwigs, and their families, are of respectable quality. The plunge in prices during the decade suggests a marked increase in production.
Itinerant photographers were also numerous in Victorian and Edwardian England, especially in country areas. Many of the pictures of harvesters, village schoolchildren, and tradespeople preserved in rural museums, or published in collections like Gordon Winter's A Country Camera 1844-1914 (1966), were probably taken by them. According to Audrey Linkman, the first English daguerreotypist to obtain an itinerant's licence was Edward Holland, for Doncaster racecourse in 1842; but others worked unlicensed. John Werge, himself an itinerant in the 1850s, wrote, ‘For many years most of the early daguerreotypists were birds of passage frequently on the wing.’ While Werge usually rented rooms, the Scotsman John Beattie (who eventually settled in Bristol) and the Canadian-born Oliver Sarony (1820-79; who later established himself magnificently in Scarborough) used elaborate travelling studios. Trade was generally good, although by the decade's end all three had switched from the daguerreotype to the easier wet-plate process.
From c.1860, as studios proliferated and increasingly monopolized the upmarket end of the business, itinerants became more marginal, part of the Victorian floating world of pedlars, tinkers, knife grinders, and travelling entertainers. (The distinction was blurred, but only slightly, by the fact that studio photographers—such as Henry Taunt of Oxford, for example—might send assistants, or even travel themselves, to work the crowds at bank holiday venues like Boulter's Lock on the Thames.) They frequented fairgrounds, beaches, and popular leisure spots like London's Hampstead Heath, and appeared often in contemporary prints and cartoons. The product, from the late 1850s onwards, was the glass positive (ambrotype) or, increasingly, the tintype, using photography's first effective instant process to make relatively crude images at rock-bottom prices. Itinerants were constantly denigrated by their studio colleagues: for using touts and dubious practices to drum up trade, for undercutting lower-end studios, for working on Sundays (when clients were plentiful, and dressed for the camera), and for passing off shoddy wares; as one critic complained, ‘these itinerants bear something like the same relation to the skilled photographer that the organ grinder has to the musician’. Still, they had become a feature of the expanding leisure scene, and remained so well into the 20th century.
The USA had hundreds or even thousands of itinerants in the 19th century who operated successively with the daguerreotype, the ambrotype—which enjoyed a brief but spectacular vogue in 1856-7—and the tintype. They criss-crossed the country on foot, or by stagecoach, riverboat, or train, the more successful working from hired railway carriages or steamboat suites. Those who travelled long distance remained perpetual outsiders, rarely or never able to establish a rapport with a particular community. However, another type of American itinerant, with no studio but a regular regional clientele, was evidently common until c. the Second World War. One such was the self-taught Otto Ping (1883-1975) who, c.1900-c.1940, served the scattered rural population of Brown County, Indiana. Clients were photographed on porches or in the open, against walls, vehicles, or crudely improvised backdrops. Subjects were mainly portraits, of individuals, couples, or groups, from children to the very old, but with some shots of farmyards, animals, and operations like sawing or stone breaking. Post-mortem images also survive. For much of Ping's career the cost of taking, processing, and delivering a commissioned picture was about a dollar, and quality was basic. (The rarity of wedding photographs in Ping's archive, held by the Indiana Historical Society, suggests that for such occasions clients would pay more for a studio photographer's skills.) Ping travelled about by buggy or truck and had various other occupations, none of them lucrative. His ultimate abandonment of photography was probably caused by official curbs on itinerants, prompted by studio lobbying during the Depression, and increasing camera ownership among his clients.
In Britain, itinerants flourished between the wars, and a tintypist was still operating on London's Westminster Bridge in 1953. Seaside ‘smudgers’, using either conventional or instant-film cameras, survived for another couple of decades, to be finally edged out by the
— Robin Lenman
See also photowallahs; portraiture.Bibliography
- Chapell, G., The Itinerant Photographer (1936).
- Steen, U., ‘Die Anfänge der Photographie in Schleswig-Holstein’,
Nordelbingen ,56 (1987). - Linkman, A., The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (1993).
- Hartley, W. D. (ed.), Otto Ping, Photographer of Brown County, Indiana 1900-1940 (1994)
