Throughout history people have sought to produce images either of themselves or of others. The problem is that the skills required to make portraits are in short supply, and therefore expensive. Until the eighteenth century, therefore, portraits were generally regarded as the privilege of the wealthy.
In any case, artists are able, through this medium, not only to depict what they see, but what they believe or prefer to portray. There are several instances in which a famous personality has been painted on numerous occasions, and have such striking differences that it is difficult to know what the sitter really looked like!
The eighteenth century saw a demand for portraits which were less expensive, and this resulted in two developments. One was the use of miniature portraits, which were relatively much less expensive; the other was the popularity of profile pictures, usually traces from the shadow cast by a lamp, sometimes cut freehand from paper. This technique was named after Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), who made profiles, and such silhouettes, often embellished with gold, became very popular.
The invention of photography marked a watershed as far as portraiture was concerned, and it is not difficult to understand why photography, from the earliest days, had such an instant appeal both in America and in Europe, particularly in this area. Portraiture, once only for the well-to-do, was now available to all, as a natural leveller. There was a lot of money to be made out of the practice. One of the earliest photographers, Richard Beard, was said to have earned forty thousand pounds in one year (a large sum today - a fortune then!)
However, this profession could also be precarious. Beard himself became bankrupt in 1847, and Scott Archer, who invented the Wet Collodion process, died penniless. Sutcliffe, the brilliant photographer of Whitby, failed in Tunbridge Wells, and had to sell out and return to Whitby. Consequently some photographers diversified. Thomson in addition to being a photographer, was a tobacconist, and like others, would offer a photograph and a cigar for six pence (2.5p) Others combined photography with more traditional art.
The portrait, though much sought after, was often an event which one had good cause to remember:
- As the process was only sensitive to blue or white, one had to dress in appropriate colours. Henry Peach Robinson used to provide very specific hints;
- the portrait could only be taken if the weather was suitable; clients would often have to climb a number of stairs, as most of the studios were located on the top of a building;
- there were various methods of keeping a sitter still, a popular one being a metal clamp (hidden from the camera) behind the sitter's head. (This was not new to photography, one must add - it was quite commonly used on conventional portraiture).
One sitter recalled the ordeal:
"(He sat) for eight minutes, with strong sunlight shining on his face and tears trickling down his cheeks while...the operator promenaded the room with watch in hand, calling out the time every five seconds, until the fountains of his eyes were dry."
Full length portraits often reveal how carefully one posed people in order to keep them still and yet provide a natural posture. An interesting photograph is "The Bird Cage" by Hill and Adamson (a section of which is shown on the left); one should note how carefully the hands are placed in this picture, and note also the tell-tale shadow behind the head of the lady on the right, which suggests that there was some device to keep her head still during exposure.
One problem which Hill and Adamson were not able to resolve was eye control. Exposures were very long indeed, and it is likely that Hill (the artist of the two) advised sitters to close their eyes unless they were very good at keeping their eyes open without blinking.
Here is one way to solve the problem! One of Fox Talbot's pictures, of his wife and daughters: they are facing the other way, and we only see their hats! (Picture dated 19th April 1842)
Trying to keep a sitter still for this long process must sometimes have been quite a feat. The most extreme form of persuasion comes from an article in the American Journal of Photography, 1861, where we read of one operator who had tried all sorts of means of persuasion,
"...when it occurred to him that the strongest of all human motives is fear. As soon as he had completed his adjustments, he suddenly draws a revolver, and levelling it at the sitter's head, he explains in a voice and with a look suggestive of lead and gunpowder: 'Dare to move a muscle and I'll blow your brains out....'"
Another, advertising photography "without pain" proposed to use gas on his sitters, and once they were out for the count, he would take the picture. Yet another suggested
"A good dose of laudanum (opium) will effectively prevent the sitters from being conscious of themselves, of the camera, or anything else. They become most delightfully tractable, and you can do anything with them under such circumstances....."
Though there are many examples of work before the invention of Collodion, it was the discovery of this process which triggered off the enormous boom in portraiture. In April 1857 Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, whose husband had been the first President of the Photographic Society, wrote: "Who can number the legion of petty dabblers, who display their trays of specimens along every great thoroughfare in London, executing for our lowest servants, for one shilling, that which no money would have commanded... twenty years ago? Not that photographers flock especially to the metropolis; they are wanted everywhere and found everywhere. The large provincial cities abound with the sun's votaries, the smallest town is not without them; and if there be a village so poor and remote as not to maintain a regular establishment, a visit from a photographic travelling man gives it the advantages which the rest of the world are enjoying. Thus, where not half a generation ago the existence of such a vocation was not dreamt of, tens of thousands.... are now following a new business, practising a new pleasure, speaking in a new language, and bound together by a new sympathy."
It has to be said that this was a period in which portraiture was perhaps more characterised for the quantity of production, rather than by its quality. To some extent the early photographers may be exonerated, because of the technical aspects which so dominated the process. Nevertheless, many of the Carte-de-visite portraits were verging on the banal, their authors being apparently more concerned with making a quick profit than to "portray" the sitter. The lighting for many of these was uninteresting, the setting often so stereotyped that one can almost date the photographs by the props! Bluntly, many images show evidence of very fast impersonal photography where the practitioner was out to make a quick kill and had little time or interest for the sitter as a person.
The length of exposure, coupled with a conveyor-belt mentality by some photographers, is the main reason why so many pictures, particularly daguerreotypes, appear so impersonal. Sitters would either stare into the camera or would look into the distance, as Lewis Carroll put it in Hiawatha's photography:
"With a look of pensive meaning
As of ducks that die in tempests"
The "style" being used was not only determined by financial considerations but to some extent by the demands of the sitter; it was fashionable to have pictures which took people out of the real, possibly harsh world and presented them as more well-to-do than in real life, hence the use of standard props which provided such an image. Not all photographers of the period may have welcomed this, but the customer has always to be right; Robinson is said to have commented upon the many people who buy clothes specially for the occasion, and to have said "How am I to get a likeness of a person who does not look like herself?"
Many of the images are full-length photographs, which show more of the props and mock glamour than the faces being portrayed, and given the fact that a straight photograph (unlike a portrait) can be cruel, such an arrangement may have satisfied the needs of both photographer and sitter!
Nevertheless, there are some remarkable exceptions to this rather dismal trend, where there is evidence that the photographer went to great lengths to portray the sitter as would a painter, by making them feel at ease, by producing close-ups of the face that revealed their personality, by using more adventurous lighting, and by discarding trite backgrounds. Some interesting advice to patrons was provided by Edward Wilson, especially on what to wear.
For such photographers, the motive was not profit but quality. Among such workers are Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and, sometime later, Alvin Langdon Coburn. Another photographer who used portraiture, but for medical reasons, was Hugh Welch Diamond.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.
