The fact that photographs are not simply images but also things that people use in their everyday lives, collect in museums, or display in galleries is often overlooked. However, the physical nature of photographs has been central to their understanding and social functions since the advent of the medium. There are two categories of ‘thingness’. First is the material form of the photograph itself: for instance, albumen prints or collodion negatives. Second are the presentational forms of photographs such as stereocards, cartes de visite, or albums; or, indeed, the manner in which photographs are framed and displayed. These two are linked to a third, the material traces of the use of photographs, from scratching on the negative and retouching to grubby handling marks or texts written on the print. These last may radically alter the reading of an image: for example, inscriptions discovered on the backs of unexceptional snapshots of a voyage from Germany to South America, expressing a Jewish family's anguish at bereavement, dispossession, and exile; or captions in an album crossed out and overwritten, suggesting the ending of relationships.
Photographs are composite objects made of various materials, such as paper, chemical emulsions, card, glass, acetate, or cellulose nitrate. Although they have seldom been fully articulated, material considerations were integral to early processes. Henry Talbot referred to his photographs as ‘specimens’, as they were for him experiments with the behaviour of chemicals on paper. The daguerreotype was highly tactile. In its embossed Union case, it had to be manipulated in the hand so that the polished surface could reveal its image. The ambrotype and, to a lesser degree, the tintype required a similarly tactile response.
Material factors have affected both the aesthetic and monetary evaluation of photographs. The concept of the vintage print, for example, comprises both ‘ideal’ and material elements: on the one hand, notions of authorship and authenticity; on the other, often, the use of time-specific historic materials. The pictorialists of the late 19th and early 20th century cited the unique qualities of surface texture and pigmentation, produced by complex manipulations, in support of the photograph's claim to be fine art.
Choices about materials reveal the intentions of photographers for their work. For example, the choice of tintype over ambrotype was not just a financial decision but one about the robustness of the image as object. The choice to print on platinum-over albumen-or, later, gelatin-based papers suggests a desire for permanence; the Survey movement in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s required contributors to submit images as platinum prints ‘without the polluting touch of silver’ as a guarantee of longevity.
Photographs have had a wide range of formats and supports, from diminutive cartes to mammoth prints, and been displayed in a rich variety of albums, frames, and mounts. In the 19th century the development of new material forms was an important motor of the photographic industry. The photographic press was full of novelty formats to lure customers—such as small ‘gem’-sized photographs—and albums and mounts specifically designed for them. In the past, photographs were incorporated into all kinds of objects, such as jewellery, buttons, and boxes, or printed on ceramics. Today, they are available as jigsaws, and on mugs, mouse mats, and the ubiquitous T-shirt; even on women's handbags. Many photographic forms mimicked other classes of precious object. For instance, plates with photographs on them belong to a tradition of commemorative tableware going back at least 500 years. Similarly, many 19th-century albums refer to medieval devotional books with heavy embossing, gilt-edged pages, and metal clasps. Indeed, as a ‘core’ possession of the household, the photograph album became a kind of secular bible. Even modern flip-page wallets often resemble books, with gold ‘tooled’ detail stamped on plastic ‘leather’.
The presentational forms of photographs shape the viewer's relations with them. For instance, 19th-century photographic jewellery, including lockets containing human hair (a second trace of the subject), was worn next to the skin. The size and weight of an album determines how it will be viewed: laid out on a table or held intimately in the hands. For two people to view the latter requires close physical proximity. Decoration and materials may reflect the subject matter of the photographs, for example white-wedding albums—or modern ‘wedding books’—embossed with silver bells. In the colonial period it was not uncommon for the bindings of albums to reinforce the ‘exotic’ reading of the photographs, e.g. albums from South-East Asia adorned with Malay metalwork, or Japanese albums with lacquered covers.
Frames concentrate attention on the image by isolating it from its surroundings and presenting it in a socially appropriate way. They can also be used to extend the meaning or value of the image, e.g. by encasing significant photographs in velvet or silver. (Inscribed and illuminated mounts, like those used for 19th-century Indian royal portraits, fulfil the same function.) Framed photographs are often grouped, as if in a domestic shrine, on a bookcase, piano, or television set, with the categories in each group—for example, wedding or graduation pictures—reflecting their significance. Images may also be grouped within a frame, to create a narrative of an occasion or journey. Finally, the form in which photographs may be offered as gifts is meaningful: a framed and autographed image suggests a very different relationship between giver and recipient from a simple enprint.
Physical alteration of a photograph's surface may also carry an important cultural or emotional charge. Some interventions, like montage, may create an entirely new object, juxtaposing one image, or parts of it, with significant others. Others involve the addition of new materials such as hair or cloth. The tinting of daguerreotypes, and the extensive overpainting of photographs found in modern India and West Africa, are attempts to enhance the perceived realism of the image.
In the digital age, the significance of the material object remains. Culturally inflected decisions are made about which images will be printed out as snaps, which as framable enlargements, and which will be discarded. Another palette of choices relates to manipulation of the original file. Such possibilities continue to underline the importance of materiality in our relationship with photographs.
— Elizabeth Edwards
Bibliography
- Henisch, B. A. and H. K., The Photographic Experience 1839-1914: Images and Attitudes (1994).
- Batchen, G., Photography's Objects (1997)
Bibliography
- Edwards, E., and Hart, J. (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (2004)
