Carol Armstrong 2C From Clementina To K C3 A4seboer-The Photographic Attainment of The 22lady Amateur 2C 22 October Winter 2000

From Clementina to Ksebier: The Photographic Attainment of the "Lady Amateur" Author(s): Carol Armstrong Source: October, Vol.
91 (Winter, 2000), pp. 101-139 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779151 . Accessed: 28/01/2014 08:43
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FromClementinato KIisebier: Attainment of the "LadyAmateur" The Photographic
CAROL ARMSTRONG
of One is a question-by nowa classicin the history I beginwithtwocitations. feminist art history-and that is Linda Nochlin's famous 1971 query,"Whyhave The other is a statementmade by Roland there been no great women artists?"I sortof textfromalmosta decade later (1980), namely, Barthes,in a verydifferent
CameraLucida:
of the artist: Ordinarily,the amateur is defined as the immaturity cannot-or does not to elevate someone who who want him(her)selfto of a profession. But in the fieldof photographic the mastery practice,it is the amateur,by contrast, who is the attainment(assumption) of the professional: because it is he (she) who sticks closest to the noeme of Photography.2 (being/intelligence) By now it hardlyneeds to be said thatthe answerto Nochlin's question is an institutional one: up until at least the end of the nineteenthcentury, the institutions of the family-and hence of psychic and social development-of art advancement,and "mastery"-and of training-and hence of professionalization, forwomen to attain "greatness" artjudgement made it difficult in the fine arts. The answer would have to be different in the shorterhistoryof photography, whichcoincideshistorically withboth the modernconfinement ofwomenand the of their because the itself be different, would beginnings emancipation, question if not a bit nonsensical. One could certainly assertthat there havebeen "great" women photographers, rightfromthe start.At the same time,the verynotion of
1. Linda Nochlin,"Whyhave therebeen no greatwomen artists?" Artand Power (1971), in Women, and Other Essays(NewYork:Harper and Row,1988), pp. 145-78. 2. Roland Barthes,La chambre claire:Notesur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, Cahiers du citedin the textand referred to bythe translated Cinema, 1980), p. 154. (All translations mine;hereafter title Camera is an idiosyncratic Lucida.) Though in mostwaysBarthes'sviewof photography one, he is not alone in claimingthe "artless" photographas the apogee of the medium.Similarpoints have been OCTOBER 91, Winter Ltd.and Massachusetts Institute 2000,pp. 101-139. ? 2000 October Magazine, ofTechnology.
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in photography is a contestedand problematicalone, and has been so "greatness" since the inception of the medium: which also means that the photographic canon is by its nature and history less secure than that of painting.The institutions of training,professionalization, and advancement were different: newer, withoutthe force of longstanding rules, conventions,and exclusions, and not requiring-so manyhave claimed,at least-much skillor training. Theywere also more liminal-at the crossroadsof then-emerging modern distinctions between the professional and the amateur, not to mentionchanges in the definition of the to the concept of the amateur,froman older, aristocraticnotion of the lover, newer middle-class notion of the hobbyist,which in the case of photography the family-album means,among otherthings, Of course, therehave snapshooter.3 alwaysbeen male as well as femaleamateurs,but forobvious reasons it is not sur-
and to different made, in different ends, byJohn language, withdifferent ideological commitments erstwhile directorof the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art,and Szarkowski, 100 Pictures theCollection byJanet Malcolm. See John Szarkowski, Lookingat Photographs: from of the Museum Art(NewYork:Museum of ModernArt,1973), in particular the entry on Lartigueon ofModern of professional, and p. 66: "The wordamateurhas twomeanings.In its classicalsense it is the antonym refersto those who pursue a problemforlove ratherthan forthe rewardsthe worldmayoffer. In this sense the word oftenidentifies the mostsophisticated in a field;manyof photography's practitioners names have been amateursas pure as the crocusesof spring,and manyothers,thoughmercegreatest nariesduringthe week,have done theirbestworkon weekends.The otherand more popular meaning of the word identifies one who playsat his work:one not onlyless than fully competent,but less than serious.... This is almostneverenough." (He goes on to identify fully Lartigueas the exceptionaltalent whojoined both senses of the word amateurin the playful photographshe took as a privilegedbourSee also JanetMalcolm,"The geois child,using the new handheld camera of the turnof the century.) Family of Mann" (1994), Diana and Nikon:Essayson Photography (New York: Aperture, 1997), pp. 169-76, in particularp. 170: "Withinphotography, Szarkowski between the calculated, distinguished undialecticalphotographand the artlessbut vitally well-made, interesting snapshot,and he supported photographerswho attemptedthe tour de force of the art snapshot."Malcolm goes on to note the canon that Szarkowski erects upon the double paradox of the artless"artsnapshot,"and to tie Sally Mann's family/art photographs to the "Szarkowskischool," with its poetics of ambiguityand its "chancinessand . .. anxiety, uncanniness"(p. 171). In being an art canon, disjunction,invasiveness, this "school" parts and keeps companyall at once withthe Barthesianunderstandingof the photothe amateurphotographprecisely because of itslack ofpretensions to artstatus, graph,whichprivileges and its commitment, at once pure and banal, to whatBarthescalls the "ca a iti " of the photographic referent. In a different vein, Pierre Bourdieu also counts amateur photography(of the camera-club variety)as one of the medium's prime social and discursivearenas, on a spectrumrangingfromthe family RobertCastel, photographto camera art: see PierreBourdieu (withLuc Boltanski, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper), Photography: A Middle-brow Art (1965), trans. Shaun Whiteside(Stanford, CA: Stanford Press,1990). University 3. On amateurismand earlyphotography, see Grace Seiberling (withCarolynBloore), Amateurs, and theMid-Victorian of Chicago Press, 1986). Seiberling Photography, Imagination (Chicago: University sees amateurismas critical to the inventionand ethos of early photographyin Great Britain,and locatesa sea change in the relatedcultures of photography and amateurism as early as thelate 1850s.
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prisingto find thatwomen tended to occupy the categoryof the amateurmore in the period thatconcernsme, and it is reasonable than thatof the professional to expect thatmore women continue to occupyit now,indeed, thattheycontinue as wellas archivists of family to be the principalpractitioners photography.4 That is one way,then, in which the "ladyamateur" (first in the older and then in the newersense) is integralto the history, ifnot the verybeing of photogtwo raphy.In this essayI want to look at three exceptional examples. The first were British contemporaries, Clementina Lady Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron, the formerwith no more than a fewyears of photographicpractice under her belt beforeshe died in 1865, the latter with just over a decade of work, between the mid-1860sand mid-1870s.Clementina was almost forty when she took up photography, Cameron almost fifty.5 Both have now entered into the canon of earlyphotography, thoughCameron has been therelongerand is better knownto a widerpublic-hence a show like the recentone at the ArtInstitute of devoted to her.6 Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art,by no means the first Clementina'sfame even now remainsrathermore local. (She has recently been the subject of a monographic show at the Victoria and Albert, which was of her photographs.7) And both were "amateurs," in the bequeathed the majority
4. See Naomi Rosenblum,A History (New York:AbbevillePress,1994), pp. of Women Photographers 55 ff., on Kodak advertising aimed specifically at femaleconsumers,on the linkingof the new camera was somethingthatcould (inventedin 1888) and the "new woman,"on the notion thatphotography be done on the run between other domestic activities, and on the promotionof childrenas subjectmatter specificallysuited to women photographers. Brian Coe and Paul Gates, in The Snapshot TheRiseofPopularPhotography 1888-1939 (London: Ash and Grant, 1977), p. 18, illustrate Photograph: these (mostly and thewoman photographer witha turn-of-the-cenimplied) linksbetweenamateurism turyadvertisement showinga motherphotographingher children,accompanied by the slogan "You we do the rest," and the caption: 'Jack:Do you thinkbabywillbe quiet long enough press the button, to take her picture,Mama? Mama: The Kodak camera willcatch her whether she movesor not: it is as has collecteddata suggesting thatwomenare stillthe 'quick as a wink."'I understandthatKodak itself primary producersand consumersof family photography. 5. RosalindKrauss,in "Photography's Discursive Avant-Garde and Other Spaces," TheOriginality ofthe Modernist betweenthe "careers"of nineMyths (Cambridg:MIT Press,1985), pp. 131-50, distinguishes teenth-century photographersand those of "anothersort of artist"in termsof theirbrevity-a year for Auguste Salzmann, less than a decade for Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray,Henri Le Secq, and other "acknowledged'masters'of the art" (p. 143)-which together withother differences suggestsa discursiveregister for photography other than that of Fine Art,withits criteriaof unity, continuity, and developmentof an "oeuvre."Moreover, manyearlyphotographerstook up theirbriefpracticesin aftera variety of other vocational pursuits.But thiswas a particularpatternforfemale photography photographers,and remained so longer,even afterthe lifelongphotographiccareer became more normalized. 6. See Sylvia Cameron's Women Wolf, (New Haven: Yale University JuliaMargaret Press,1998). 7. See Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden: StudiesfromLife, 1857-1864 (New York: 1999). Aperture,
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older sense of the term-in fact,it is fromone of Cameron's models thatI derive the sobriquet"ladyamateur."8 The thirdof mycases is unlike the first two: GertrudeKIisebier, the turn-ofAmerican photographer, whose photographicculturedescends from the-century Cameron's,throughCameron's son HenryHerschel Hay Cameron,a professional secessionist photographerin the 1880s who was one of the foundersof the first movement in art photography,London's Linked Ring brotherhood, of which femalemembers.Only in her earliestmoments KIisebierwas one of the two first as a late-thirties, art studentand a photographerof her family post-motherhood could KIisebier be described as an amateur (of the newersort); otherwise she was an accomplishedprofessional witha flourishing studio and a long career, portrait who was also one of the foundingpictorialist members of the Photo-Secession, and one of the first photographersto be shown at Stieglitz'sgalleryat 291 Fifth Avenue. But KIisebier'smost interesting photographsretain an uncannyconnection to her amateurbeginnings.They articulatethe intimatedialecticalstructure of the relationshipbetween amateurismand art photographythat marked her than the workof any of her male cohortscould or did. period much more overtly And theymayhelp to shed some lighton whatBarthesmeant bydescribingamateurism as the attainment of photography.
Prologueon Camera Lucida: Ingredients ofAnother Photography
Barthes's remark is made in the context of a passage that begins with a comment about the photograph being an "imperious sign of myfuturedeath" (p. 151) and ends with a meditation on the modern structureof the relation between the public and the private,between interiority, and identity.9 intimacy, And it is inextricably tied to a largereffort to definethe "essence"of photography as a sign system different fromothers,recalcitrant towardcultural fundamentally and discursive such as that of Art,and indeed, irreducibleto the regimes spaces Law of the Father. That effort is worthrehearsingbefore I look at the waysin which the workof my three "ladyamateurs"matchesa Barthesianmodel of the photograph more closely than any other and with a particular,"pensive" selfthatwas conditionedbythe domesticframework of theirpractices. reflexivity Camera Lucida is written under the sign of the Mother-which is indexed,of absent"Winter course, in the famousbut conspicuously Garden"snap of Barthes's
8. to "MissAgnes,Lady Amateur," who posed forVivianthe sorceressin Cameron's 1874 set I refer of illustrationsto Tennyson's Idyllsof theKing: see "A Reminiscence of Mrs. Cameron by a Lady News30 (January1, 1886), cited byJoan Lukitsch,Cameron: Amateur,"ThePhotographic Her Work and Career (Rochester,N.Y.: InternationalMuseum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1984), pp. 16-17. 9. de la Photographie claire, a l'irruption Barthes,La chambre du prive p. 153: "L'dge correspond pricisement dans lepublic. ...."
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motheras a child,long beforeBarthes'sbirthand her own death. Barthesmourns over thatunshownsnapshotof his motherlike the Madonna lamentingthe future maternalforeknowledge death of her Son, an inverted about the death contained in embryoin everybirththathe applies to everyphotograph, and to Photography at large: it is the foundationon whichhe builds his theoryof the general melancholia and specific poignance of photography. The maternalpresides over all else as well, and particularly over the ninein Camera Lucida, including the single teenth-century photographs reproduced in the Charles Clifford's 1850s view of the Alhambrain book, place photograph with "It is there that would I like to live." Next to thatphotoGrenada, captioned Barthes writes, graph, That desire for habitation ... is fantasmatic, thrownup by a sort of whichseems to carryme forward to a utopian time,or to clairvoyance take me back, to I don't knowwherein myself....In front of theselandof having scapes of mypredilection, everything happens as ifI was sure been there [in the past] or of havingto go there [in the future].Thus Freud said of the maternalbody that 'there is no other place thatone can say with such certaintythat one has already been there.' Such, then, would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): in me theMother(notat all disquieting). heimlich, awaking (pp. 66-68) In fact,thatutopian place is also disquieting, if not in the Alhambraphotograph then in mostof the otherphotographsthataffect Barthes:for, the itself, willy-nilly, heimlich of the Mother bringswithit the unheimlich of her (and his) death, and that combinationof desire and morbidity, eros and the death drive,the homey and the uncanny is seen to underwriteand overarch Photography, as Barthes conceivesof it. The referenceto Freud is the clincher in that passage: in his 1919 essay, Freud first describesthe wayin whichdictionary definitions of heimlich "developin the directionof ambivalence [whathe also describesas "intellectual uncertainty"], until it finally coincides withits opposite, unheimlich . .. a [repressed]sub-species of heimlich."lo He then definesthe uncannyas a fantasmatic elision of the difference between imagination and reality,in which the subject simultaneously of earlychildhood and shudderswith regressesto the magical,animisticthinking the premonitionof death, so that the world-particularlythe familiarinterior worldof the home, whichreproducesthatof the mother'sbody--becomesa menand acing, spectralspace, the site of the returnof the dead, of eerie repetitions doubles; in short,the scene of a haunting.Finally, Freud distinguishes between
10. and theUnconscious: Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,"'in On Creativity Paperson the Psychology of ed. BenjaminNelson (NewYork:Harper& Row,1958),pp. 122-61; see p. 131. Literature, Love, Art, Religion,
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the unconscious"uncanny" of everyday consciously experience and the "uncanny" and otheraestheticwork.(Presumably tales,literature, photogproduced in fairy raphy incorporates aspects of both uncannies, though Barthes, not being interestedin art photography, emphasizes the former.)In any event, the "punctum" that Barthes theorizes as being essential to the disquiet resident in is nothingelse but the photographic buried in the homely, uncanny, photography, banal details of every-photograph. And as he makes clear,this too falls everyday, under the sign (and withinthe house) of the Mother.ll If Barthesdeems unexhibitablethe "Winter Garden" snap of his motheras a young girl (which is haunted, at least for me, by another wintergarden photograph-that of Kafka as a boy in Walter Benjamin's "A Short History of he does provide some stand-insfor it: the late photograph of Photography"12), Nadar's invalidwifethatBarthesprefersto see as a pictureof the photographer's and thathe decrees to be "one of the mostbeautifulphotographsin the mother, world" (p. 109);'3 and the snapshotof his own fatheras a child,whichhe labels "The Bloodline" ("La Souche"), and in whichhe findsevidence of the geneticconnection between his grandmotherand himself-a matrilinealline of descent, ratherthan the more obvious patrilineagerunningfromhis grandfather through his fatherto himself.14 These two surrogatesfor the image of his mother also speak to two other crucial components of Barthes's theoryof the photograph, whichboth have to do withthe reignof the Mother,her escape fromthe regimes of both the word and the image-Lacan's Symbolicand Imaginary--andher identification withthe lawlessness of the Real:15on the one hand, the photographas the trace of the beloved face, looking at us, frombeyond the grave,"directly in the eyes," whichis enhanced bythe frontal Lucida is fullof facesand pose (Camera frontal poses); on the otherhand, the photographas bearerof the "genetictrait," whichis one of its "umbilical"ties,as Barthesalso phrases it, to the Real.16Both
11. It is worthremarking that BarthesmentionsFreud once more later on, in connection witha contrastbetweentheJewish law of the Fatherwithits interdiction againstimages [of the Mother],and the maternalImaginary of Christianity: La chambre claire, p. 117. 12. See Walter Benjamin, "A Short Historyof Photography"(1931), in Alan Trachtenberg,ed., Classic onPhotography (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), pp. 199-216, in particular Essays p. 206: "There in a narrow, almosthumiliating child's suit,overburdenedwithbraid,stands the boy [Kafka], about sixyearsold, in a sortofwinter standfrozenin the background..." gardenlandscape. Palm fronds 13. "Nadar donnant de sa mere (ou de sa femme,on ne sait) l'une des plus belles photos au monde.. ." (La chambre claire, p. 109). 14. de mon Ibid., p. 161: "cette ... certains rattachent son visage d celuide ma photo ptre enfant lineaments etau mien." grand-mire 15. For a Lacanian readingof La chambre see MargaretIversen,"WhatIs a Photograph?" claire, Art 17, no. 3 (September1994), pp. 450-64. History 16. Barthes,La chambre a cepouvoir-qu'elle claire, pp. 171-72: "Car la Photographie perddeplus enplus,
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as harbingers of death, and in the "future also functionemblematically anterior" of photography, theytoo speak of the uncanny. 17 It is true that there are precious fewwomen in CameraLucida: other than and Nadar's wife,thereis reallyonlyone otherwoman Barthes'sinvisible mother, who stands out, and that is in Nadar's portraitof the invalid poet Marceline whose foolishbut kindly face is redolant,Barthessays,of the Desbordes-Valmore, of her poetry, and somehow touchingtoo. She is situatedbetween the insipidity poignant photographbyAlexander Gardner of Lewis Payne,one of the Lincoln taken on the eve or day of his execution,captioned "He is dead and conspirators, he is going to die" and the "Bloodline" snap of Barthes'sfatheras a child. With our hindsightknowledge of her impending death (which Nadar would photoin Camera Lucidawas taken),Desbordes-Valmore graph twoyearsafterthe portrait as much as Payne under partakesof the punctal"thathas been" of photography death sentence,forever critiawaitinga fatelong ago met.Whichis, of course, the cal definition of the "punctum": "there exists another punctum (another whichis no longera matter of 'stigmata') besides the 'detail.' That otherpunctum, is Time, the heart-rending form,but of intensity, emphasis of the noeme ('thatitspure representation" has-been') [of Photography], (p. 148). That is the "noeme" of photography on whichthe "ladyamateurs"whom I address here seem to have had special purchase. The maternalReal, the uncanny, the "genetictrait," the confrontation with the face, the poignant temporalparadox, the future-anterior "that-has-been" of the photograph:all these are featuresof photography as definedby Barthesthat are embraced and pronounced in the workof the threewomen photographers I wantto look at here. To those characteristics, I would add a fewothersbeforeclosing this section, as illustrated by the much degraded and faded The Set Tableby which Barthes calls the "first and the 1979 frontispiece Niepce, photograph," by Daniel Boudinet, which is also the lone color photographin the book, of a dim blue bedroom barelylettinglightin throughthe slightly fabricof its curfrayed tains.The Niepce photographis foundenframed bytextwhichtreats photography as an "image withouta code," "an emanation froma past reality," and a "magic" thatpierces the viewer, ratherthan an "art"(p. 141). And ratherthan a language, or a textthatis read. ("I cannot read a photograph"-"en dipitdesescodes, je nepuis lire unephoto"- saysBarthes,p. 141, testifying as well to a peculiar illegibility at the heartof photography.)
itant ordinairement droit dans les yeux"; pp. 161-62: "la la posefrontale jugie archaique-de meregarder ce qu'on nepercoit dans un miroir): un Photographie, fait apparaitre parfois, jamais d'un visageriel(ou reflichi " trait le morceau desoi-mime ou d'unparent d'un ascendant. genitique, qui vient 17. See Barthes,La chambre claire, of Lewis Payne: "Mais le p. 150, withregardto Gardner'sportrait cela sera et cela a &t6;j'observe avec horreur punctum, c'est:il va mourir. un futur temps: Je lis en mime antirieur dont estl'enjeu." la mort
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At the same time,the Niepce photographillustrates Barthes'sallegiance to the chemicalratherthan mechanicalaspectof photography: For the noeme 'That has been' was not possible until the day when ... the discovery of the lightsensitivity of silverhalogens made it possible to captureand directly luminous the raysemittedbya diversely imprint lit object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body,which was there,comes a radiation which touches of the disappearedbeing touches me, I who am here ... the photograph me like the diverseraysof a star.A sortof umbilical cord ties the bodyof the photographedobject to mygaze: light,thoughimpalpable,is here a carnal medium,askin thatI sharewithhim or her who was photruly tographed."(pp. 126-27, myemphasis). to add thatthe umbilicalimage in thispassage is con(Perhaps it is unneccessary sistent withthe largermaternalthematics of Camera Lucida.) the fundamental chemicalness of photography is tied to its Ultimately, fragility--its mortality-too: Not onlyis the photographcommonly on a kind of (perishable) paper, it is not less mortal: but,evenwhenit is fixedon more durablesupports, like a living organism, it is born straightout of silvergrains which germinate,it blooms in a moment,and then ages. Attackedby light and humidity, itpales,becomes exhausted, and disappears(pp. 145-46). Which is whyBarthesis drawnto photographsthatare "yellow[ed],fade[d] and effaced"(p. 147). the "carnal medium" of light, the perishabilityof the photoChemistry, in an umbilicalknotthe birthand death of the photograph graph: tying together itself withthe birthand death of its referent, these also are emphases of the work of at least two of my "lady amateurs."As is the theme of one last comment in Camera Lucida,made in the contextof a discussionof the difference betweenthe erotic and the pornographic, which seems to explain the book's enigmatic "the photographis not unary, as soon as I become interested in the frontispiece: of the fabric" (p. 71). Which is to say,in cloth, the irregulardetail of its grain weave,wrinkles, folds,and fissures, irrefutable creatinga "blind field"thatoffers evidence of the indexicality of the photograph,or in other words,of its physical 18 It is thatsame "blind causation by and dependence on thatwhichit represents.
18. See Barthes,La chambre claire, For Barthes, who conp. 91, on the concept of the "champ aveugle." tinueshis argument betweenthe eroticand the pornographic, the concept concerningthe distinction of a "blindfield"is intimately tied to thatof the "punctum," and refers to thatwhichis not actually visible in the photograph-either because it is off-frame, because it is not shown,or because it fissures the
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field"of cloth,whichfunctionsas well as a light-trapping and light-diffusing surface doubling back on the supportof the photographitself, thatis featuredover and over again in Lady Clementina'suntitled"photographicstudies," withwhich I begin. to its celebrationof the "blind field," From its emphasison the (un)heimlich Lucida proposes is a conception of photography what Camera thatrunscounterto the dominantattitudesof art photography, whichwould have it be an aesthetic withothersin the same discursive domain: yieldmedium fitto vie authoritatively ing a canon of "great" professionalartists;predicated on visual intention and of its optical apparatus,the camera; producingfine and original prints, mastery unified, tonallypristine, and archivallypreserved, epitomized in the formally state-of-the-art technophilia and ultra-sharpvisual field of the pre-visualized has its own teleologyand itsown "straight" photograph.That viewof photography modernistself-definition. The Barthesianunderstandingof photography is very much otherwise,subverting almost everyrule of the photographicedifice constructedby art history and the art museum. It is famous for its disregardof the But more important, for mypurposes,are "operator"in favorof the "spectator." the variousingredients of an "amateur"photography thatI have listedso far, all of which run dead against the verynotion of "greatness"that an aesthetic canon such as thatof the art history of photography depends upon. Withoutwishingto essentializeBarthes's "other"photography as somehow "feminine," I do want to to the woman suggestthat there are good reasons forconsideringits hospitality photographer.For the ingredientsof Barthes's photographicrecipe that I have addressed thusfarare much more evidentand "piercing" in the workof the three women who are the subject of this essay than in the oeuvres of their professional brethren; indeed, their photographs may be said to allegorize that "other"photography. Studies Lady Clementina's Photographic I turnto Clementinanow,who was Lady Hawarden,the daughterof a titled Scottishadmiral and a Spanish mother,by marriagea viscountess and baroness.
focusof the image: "La prisence . .. de ce champ cequi distingue de la c'est, la photo aveugle, je crois, erotique La pornographie ordinairement le sexe. .. . La photo au contraire photo pornographique. ... ne erotique, reprisente biennepas le montrer; central; hors desoncadre... faitpas du sexeun object elle elleentraine lespectateur peuttres Le punctumestalorsunesorte de hors-champ comme si l'image donne subtil, ci lancaitle disirau-delade cequ 'elle voir"Because of its ties to invisibility and absence-what maybe thought of as its"envagination" of the photograph'sfieldofvision-I wantto extend the conceptof the "blindfield"to cover (whatitalready covers by implication) the unrationalizable indeterminacy of the photograph's non-unaryfield of meaning,and the poignance of itsexcessiveties to itsexternalreferent.
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(Her husband was CornwallisMaude, fourthViscount Hawarden and Baron de Montalt of Hawarden.) She bore most of her ten children-eight girlsand two boys, two of whom died as infants-and had raised several of them,before she in the late 1850s,using as her studio a large emptyroom in took up photography the South Kensingtonhouse thatthe family lived in when theymoved to London in 1859, and posing her daughters in a series of uncaptioned "Photographic Studies" made over the course of a half-dozen years. She exhibited and won medals as an amateurin the PhotographicSocietyin 1863 and 1864, and won the approval of both Lewis Carroll-another prominentamateur (who did not like Cameron's work)-and one of the two reigningprofessionalpictorialists of the who wroteher obituary inJanuary1865 in TheBritish day,Oscar Rejlander, Journal "She has gone to the source of all light," he said, upon her sudden ofPhotography: death of pneumonia.19 Over six hundred of Clementina's photographswound up in the Victoria and Albert.Nowhereis theiramateurism evidenced more clearlythan in the torn corners that speak of private album contexts and a fine disregardfor archival both ofwhichenhance the innateperishability of the photographof preservation, which Barthes speaks. But theiramateurismis indexed as well in theirinsistent and their focus on Clementina's own family. Most of them feature interiority Clementina's elder daughters in a light-bathed corner,surrounded by yardsof swathedfabric,adopting vaguelymelancholic poses that hint at familiar but not narratives. SometimesClementinaposed her youngerchildren quite identifiable in the same windowedinteriorspace. Occasionallyshe photographedher daughtersoutside on the same balconyglimpsedthroughthe windowof the interiorized there are scenes of a man and a woman together, whichare photographs.Rarely, evocative of courtship,or of the separate spheres and alienation between the sexes. The overwhelming majorityof Clementina's "PhotographicStudies,"howare concerned with women alone or women together, ever, accompanied onlyby and mirrors, windows, walls,fabric, light. All the elementsof Clementina'sphotography can be found in one spatially constricted ClementinaMaude, seated alone photographof her second daughter, in a rococo ballgownconfectionby the window.With her head againstthe wall, one hand at her throatand anothersunk in the bunched and gathereddressfabric in her lap, she evokes both drapery-laden drawing-room portraitsof girlsin theircoming-out of melancholicfemalefigures. costumes,and a thickhistory In thisshe was not alone-neither her pose, nor her dressing-up, nor even the window situationwere peculiar to her mother'sphotographs:there are photographs But by Clementina'schampion Lewis Carrollthatcontain all of those ingredients. Carroll'sphotographsare evenly litbylightwhichthreatens neitherto engulfnor
19. Oscar Rejlander, TheBritishJournal 27, 1865),p. 38, citedin MarkHaworthof Photography (January Booth, TheGolden 1839-1900 (Millerton, AgeofBritish Photography, 1984), p. 120. N.Y.:Aperture,
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to vanish their contents as it does in Clementina's photographs; they lack Clementina's self-reflexive pensiveness--thisis Barthes's termas well20-about the that lets light, opening lightinto the room thatcontains it, and the subject thatit constitutes. Onto the blank wall next to her ClementinaMaude casts a shadow,which doubles her gestureand competeswiththe diagonal of lightlet in by the window, the foldsof her dress and suffuses while it also eats into her shoulderand throat, nearestthe wall in obscurity. On the otherside of her,the windowallowslightto fall upon her shoulder,arm, underskirt and dress train,simultaneously ruffles, of her its the construction diaphanous specifying gown,losing wayin the skirt's all out and but it at the right;at once engendering, penetratintricacy, bleaching ing, and dissipatingit. Submerged in herself,caught between the ends of the spectrumthatbringher into existenceand take her out of it as well,Clementina Maude becomes a self-reflexive figureof photographicchiaroscuroand a demonand overas backlighting strationof her mother'sdallying withsuch infractions
non lorsqu'elle estsubversive, See Barthes,La chambre claire, 20. effraie, p. 65: "Au fondla Photographie maislorsqu est revulse 'elle ou mime pensive." stigmatise,
Howarden. (Clementina Maude). Study Photographic

Victoria and Albert London.1861-62. Museum,
As the posed recipient of her mother'sgaze, she also renders and underexposure. the conflationof narcissism and tenderness,self-absorption and object-fixation that is characteristic of that gaze. Covered by a veritablefieldof cloth,she folds togetherempatheticand erotic engagementswiththe feel of fabricon flesh,in which the "carnal medium" of light stands in for the caressinghand, and the linked surfacesof dress,wall,and photographforthe body of the beloved child, who is invisible but forever just grownto womanhood like her mother, implicated outside the photograph. The "photographicstudy"is closed at rightby a dark piece of lacy curtain and spellsout the thathingesthe edge of the photographto the edge of window, relation between the photograph's surface and its contents.As a piece of that of windowdrapery whichcontinuesbeyondthe edge of the image,thatfragment
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not only the motherClementina,herskirtsand draperies implies the off-frame: and herdressing-up, but also the largerworld outside the corner and enclosure thatthe photographequates withitself. For the lace at rightbracketsand points back to the windowwhich causes the play of lightand shadow on the surfaceat left,and which mingles an evanescent,barelylegible reflectionof Clementina Maude's skirt inside the window, the balconyand facadesbeyondit thatlie outside the window, and the window'sconstruction itself-its sash and frame, itsgleaming latch and one of its dark handles,not to mentionits pane of glass.Those window elementsare detailed, as if to suggestthe possibility of its opening and yetstate the factof its closing.At the same time,the windowshowshow the photographas a whole offers a range fromthe visibleto the less visible,to the virtually invisible, with both the faintreflectionof the skirt just this side of the window and the at the glimpseof the balconybalustrade just the otherside of it collapsed together blind end of the spectrum.This "photographic thatis to say,speaks of its study," own "blindfield"constitution: itsvisibility is builtupon the invisible, thatwhichis within itsframeupon thatwhichis without it. All of Clementina's"photographic studies"speak thus,indexingthe exterior which is always eitherin just beyond the confinesof the photographedinterior, the lightthat streamsinto the room fromthe outside or in the balconied views
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glimpsed through windowpanes. These images speak to the division and the threshold-the connection and the cut-between interiorand exterior, private and public,the factof confinement and the fantasy of escape thatit enframes, in the verymeans of the photograph:light,and the opening thatlets lightinto the cameralucida.At the same time, theyspeak to the claustralcondition-at once and claustrophobia-that is theirenablingcircumstance. That conclaustrophilia dition is amplified in those photographs, reiterated overand overagain, in which mirrors simultaneously expand one figureinto two and contractand crowdthe cornered space of the room, as in a photograph of Clementina's eldest child, as if she were at her toilette, at a mirrorthat stands Isabella, seated en dishabillM beforea star-wallpapered surface.Isabella's camisole wall,redoublingitsconfining fallsoffher shoulder,inviting the light'scaress,as she contemplates herselfin a mirrorimage that includes the reflection of the balustradebeyond the window, and outsideworldonto insidesurface, and showing mappingwindowonto mirror, one to be as much a figment as the other.Hemmed in by the mirror's simultaneous expansion and flatteningof space, her reflection at once doubles and diminishesher,unfoldingher body to the gaze and reducingit to a featureless
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From toKiisebier Clementina
115
and dematerialization in whichher shadow,not unlike the playof materialization sister is caughtin the "photographic discussedabove. study" There are relativesof those repeated mirror-studies, in which one sister embraces the other,or standsin fullballgownregaliaby the windowgreetingher street-clothed who now appears as a personification of the outside world, sibling, born of the same lightthatentersthe room. ClementinaMaude, on the outside, doubles Isabella's gesture,on the inside, down to her gloved hand mimicking Isabella's bare one as they both hang on to the window's framework-to that which dividesand connects them,while also dividingand connectinginside and outside, and repeating the photograph'slargerarmature,so that it divides and connects us and them, then and now as well. Dark-clothedto her sister'swhite gauze stripedwithdark lace-together theyreverseand confusethe logic of outdoor brightnessand indoor dimness-Clementina Maude looks much like the mimesisof Isabella seen in the mirror shadowy study just discussed.Until one sees her hand touchingIsabella's arm, as if piercingthe mirrorsurfaceto grasp her, Narcissus'swishand turning fromreflection into companion and lover. fulfilling Within the larger series of Clementina's "photographicstudies,"these affectto the ego's specular double, eliding the bring the mirror image alive,externalizing difference between image and reality, as well as betweenmirror and window, and to the exteriorbymeans of thatelision,but imaginatively opening out the interior then closingit offagain bythe insistent narrowness of the depictedencounter. encounteredin Clementina'spracAmong the typesof "photographic study" tice-single women seated in room corners, women at mirrors,two women embracingeach other,one or two women in costume involvedin some unspecified relationship,and so on-there is a subset of recliningwomen. One of the latter,again featuringClementina Maude, summarizes the issues that I have addressed so far, whilealso introducing the problemof the legibility of the photonarrative alibi. With its balconied window,its stripesof light,its tilted graph's mirrorand mirrorimage, simultaneously expanding and contracting space, the room cornerso thatthatwhichis heimlich, familiar and so often crazily skewing it explicates its own making and layers repeated, begins to turn unheimlich, ClementinaMaude is in togetherseveralof Clementina'smost privilegedmotifs. costume, and sports the same self-reflexive, hand-to-cheekgesture found elsewhere,while the corner in which she lies is more than ever crowded,and thus Victorian furnishings places her in another subset of images, those with fussy the camera intruding upon the light-striped emptinessof the room and providing with detail to record. A striped sheet beneath Clementina Maude's head and in the mirror on one side of her,and warswitha paisley upper torso is reflected throwbeneath her lower body on the other side of her; where the two surfaces meet, theyforma "V" of fringed, light-filled emptyspace that somehow echoes the torncornersof the photograph.And then a light-catching vase, at once alone and crowded, both recorded incident and reflectivesurface, is poised almost
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on the brinkof a table squeezed behind the divan,and there is nothing absurdly to articulate the reason foritspresence. Uncaptioned, this photograph evokes a promiscuous number of stories, and stockfigures: from to Sleeping Beauty characters, vaguelyorientalist odalisques toJuliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia. Again,the pose and itsassociationslinkit to a hostof earlierand laternineteenth-century pictorialist images,fromHenryPeach Robinson's Sleep, withits seamlessly elements all evenlysharp,and its collaged-in text Arnold's "Tristram and to Lewis Carroll'scompulsively (Mathew prior Iseult"), rendered series of Victorian Lolitas, to a world of Prerepeated, transparently and in which the distinctionbetween one Raphaelite paintings photographs, medium and the other counts forverylittle.21 But unlike all these,Clementina's in its narrative to photographis insistent openness whileit ties thatindeterminacy its medium-specific meditationon itself, to the semiotic the lawlessness, speaking
21. On Henry Peach Robinson's work,see Ellen Handy (withBrian Lukacher and ShelleyRice), Pictorial Naturalist Vision:The Photographs and Theories and Peter Effect ofHenryPeach Robinson Henry Emerson Va.: Chrysler (Norfolk, Museum,1994).
Howarden. Photographic Study (ClementinaMaude). Victoria

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thatBarthesdescribesas definitive of photography, more immediately illegibility thananyotherphotographic workof her time. There are otherwindow-corner studiesin whichthe lack of explanatory caption seems to permit and even encourage a kind of hamming: exaggerated theatricalposes evokingstatesof abandonment,hysteria, whose rage,and despair, and to the lack veryexcess at the same timepointsto the images' captionlessness, of narrative and closurethatflows fromthe absence of captions. stability inevitably In another text,"The PhotographicMessage,"Bartheshas written of the photosuch thatthe caption "illustrates" the graph's reversalof the logic of illustration, photographratherthan the otherwayaround-which also means thatto be read the photographrequires a caption more than otherkindsof images.22 Clementina's that conception of the photograph-as-invertedphotographsseem to "illustrate"
See Roland Barthes,"The PhotographicMessage,"in TheResponsibility 22. Critical ofForms: Essayson trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof Music, Art,and Representation, CaliforniaPress,1991), pp. 3-20. On the question of the photographicillustration in the nineteenth see also myScenes in a Library: in theBook,1844-1875 (Cambridge: MIT centuy, Readingthe Photograph Press,1998).
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illustration, too, while also speaking to another of Barthes's observations, which is his sense of the special relationshipthat photographyhas to theater: is nothingbut an exaggerationof thatwhichPhotography "'Pictorialism' thinks of It is, however... not throughPaintingthatPhotography toucheson art,but itself. Theater"(p. 55).23 In theseexaggeratedly theatrical thatrelathrough photographs, tionship to theater is spelled out in the self-reflexive competitionbetween the histrionic female body-diagonalsof falling lightand shadow,and fabric-wrapped between light as the means of the photograph and gesture as the means of theater-that theyalso put on display.Indeed, it is a peculiarity of Clementina's studies"thatimpalpablelightbecomes not onlya "carnalmedium," "photographic as Barthes says,but a protagonist, if not the main playerin some obscureerotic drama-the shower ofgold thatfalls upon Danae, forinstance. Some of Clementina's"photographic studies"evoke more directly recognizable, less equivocal stories-as in a Cinderella series that she undertook,replete with a broom here, a liftedskirtthere, suggestingthe tryingon of a slipper; undress in some photographs contrasted to nebulously ragged, short-skirted costume in others. Still, her fairytales are eighteenth-century faux-shepherdess markedin theirdifference fromthose illustrated and her byboth her professional amateur associates, such as the LittleRed RidingHoods done by Robinson and wherethe textis priorto Carroll,whichstickclose to the old orderof illustration, the image. And even her Cinderellas contain her signatureemphases on light, windows,and mirrors-theyare variationson those themes,adding theirmore reduciblealibis to the set in such a wayas, paradoxically, to proliferate further the with or without the plurality of signifieds of the series as a whole. Anyway, Cinderellaset, Clementina'sworktended more generally in the directionopened of up by the theatricalizedstudies,withtheiraporetic attitudesto the legibility of the photograph'stextand the photographicincident-to both the readability of photographic detail (as in the sudden emergenceof darkly distinct, intelligibility arm-strained sleeve folds out of the largerbleached field of the photograph,or the confusionof reflection and transparency on the sharply sashed, lace-draped windowpane). And overall,theirpensiveshifting of thematicfocusawayfromthe narrative externaland anteriorto them,inwardtowardtheirown medium,was their pretext distinction.It was Clementina's lady-amateurism that made that photographic It was her inpensivenesspossible: her photographsall but say that themselves. camera eschewalof mastery, of the controlof lightenteringthe camera,and of the
23. These remarksare a continuation of Barthes'sdiscussion of what distinguishesphotography frompainting;theyfollowimmediately on his remarkthatwhereas the camera obscura came out of "the essential thing... was paintingand thuswas not the definingtechnicalfeatureof photography, the chemicaldiscovery" (La chambre claire, p. 55).
toKasebier From Clementina
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wide world outside the camera, and her album-page-cornering of her own offspring inside the camera, that allowed for the liberties she took with her It was, that is to say,the fourwalls of her confinement-the limits photography. of Clementinaand her daughterswithin the domestic presentedbythe cloistering and the home-that opened up her extraordinary domain of the family freeplay whichwere at the same time the in the shut rooms of self-reflexive photography, at once semiotically open and closed aperturedchambersof photographicfantasy, in on themselves. Cameron's Family Photographs began in 1864,just a year Julia MargaretCameron's "career"in photography before Clementina's ended. Unlike Clementina's, hers was marked by its dialogues withthe workof other photographers, includingthat of Rejlander,from whom she is said to have learned the rudiments of her "technique."And the amateur workof Lewis Carroll,too: Carrollmay not have cared much for Cameron's but aside fromthe factthathe photographedher withtwoof her six photographs, childrenin the late 1850s,beforeshe became a photographer, thereis also some evidence to suggesta two-way conversationbetween his and her photographs. That would include Cameron's twice-over depiction of Carroll's famous child muse,Alice Liddell, in 1872,fourteen yearsafterCarrollhad photographedher at the age of six, now grown to the age of twenty, in which Cameron repeated Carroll's profilecameo and frontalview,as if to chartwhat family photographs often record (and what Carroll wished to stave off): the aging of the child, the changes in her face and body as she grewto womanhood,the factof her notstayand ever the same, except in the that-has-been of the photographthat ing forever fixesher: in short,the paradox of the photographand the inexorablemovement of timein whichitssubjectsare caught. If Cameron conversed with Carroll's photographs, Carroll responded to Cameron's too. In 1864, during her first year of takingpictures,Cameron phothe actress Ellen on her honeymoontripwiththe tographed Shakespearean Terry Frederick Watts to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where painter George Cameron lived with her own elderly husband, the colonial jurist Charles Hay Cameron, and her ever-expandingfamilyof adopted children, grandchildren, servants,neighboringfriends,and village people. (Cameron's photograph was part of a marriagepair, the pendant to whichshowed the long-bearded, twentyWattsin a remarkably similarpose. Watts'spatriarchto Terry's odd-years-older maiden: togethertheyarticulatethe gender polarizations of Victorian culture, not to mention Cameron's double identification, withthe subjectand the object of the erotic-aesthetic gaze.) Carrollwould photographTerrythe nextyear,in a similarmelancholymood, but at a greaterdistance,againstan open windowand an exteriorbrickwall ratherthan a luminousinteriorsurface,in day dress rather than shift, and without the "self-strangling" gesture described by Nina
Cameron. Ellen Terry(Sadness). 1864. JuliaMargaret
Auerbach.24 In the end, Cameron's photograph has more in common with Clementina's than with Carroll's; indeed, it was likelyalready a response to Clementina's torn-edged, window-cornered, sun-streaming, wallpapered camera with their "blind their indeterminate narratives and overtly lucidas, fields," posed and their bare-shouldered maidens,caressedby poses, repeated bodice-loosened, the "carnalmedium"of light. It would seem that Cameron was verymuch aware of Clementina'swork;it even have been the determining forher own as she began to take up may catalyst the camera. That Clementinawas Cameron's photographicmother (much more than Rejlanderwas her pictorialist father)can be seen even towardthe end of her of one her illustrations to career; Tennyson'sIdylls of theKing,the 1874 photoof Enid at her to another of Clementina's wardrobe,responded directly graph of Clementina lit and worked Maude, similarly photographs posed at an intricately as be the most intense moment of cupboard. But, might expected, dialogue between Cameron's and Clementina'sphotographsoccurredwhen Cameron was
See Nina Auerbach,EllenTerry, 24. in HerTime(NewYork:W. W. Norton,1987), p. 99. See also Player Morton H. Cohen, Reflections in a Looking Glass:A Centennial Celebration ofLewisCarroll, Photographer (New York:Aperture, 1998).
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stilla novice, Clementina'sdeath at the turnof 1864 into just beforeand just after 1865. It was at thattime that Cameron was particularly interested in same-sexor had as Clementina been a few before. Cameron embraces, androgynous just years it in the form of two in children each other's as in arms, represented repeatedly severalmultivalent of the infant Gemini, "Water-Babies," representations Kingsley's bridalsofAubrey de Vereand Bernardin de St.-Pierre, and theinfants and John Jesus of possibletextualalibisis worthremarking the Baptist(the multiplicity again); or twowomen clasped to each other'sbreasts,as in her stagingof Sir HenryTaylor's fallenwomen"Flos and Iolande,"whichalso evokesscenes of theVisitation. Cameron's Flos and Iolandis as much concerned withthe eroticsof lightas her portrait of Ellen Terry or anyof Clementina's"photographic to which studies," it surelylooks. It may even be understood as allegorizing the "love"-"tender ardor,"Cameron called it in "Annalsof MyGlass House" of 1874, speakingof her
Flos and Ioland. Victoria Cameron. and Albert Museum. 1864-65.
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13th ofNovember 1869.1869.
Cameron. MyEwen'sBride of the
manner of handlingher camera lenses-that is at the etymological root of "amateur."25 And the image flauntsas well what is not only another featureof the Barthesianviewof the photograph-the stresson its productionthroughchemistryrather more than its mediation by the camera, its alchemical happening ratherthan the art and science of its optics-but testimony too to Cameron's disof of the lens in of favor the lover's love of the regard professional mastery medium's generativeprocess,which embraces the two embracingwomen within its halo-likeeffusion of liquid light.Like the aleatoryinconsistency of focus that Cameron also celebratesin "Annalsof MyGlass House," the tracesof the uneven flowof collodion acrossher glassnegative, along withthe strandsof haircaughtin the emulsionand the cracksin the plate found in others,are dramatizedin this of showingthe photograph,againstall the rules of proper technique,but in favor of the one magic photograph'smaking-its development, mightsay,of the child of lightin the wombof chemistry. That was an idiosyncracy of Cameron's amateur self-reflexivity, settingit from Clementina's of brand the same as as from the of other well work apart
See Julia MargaretCameron, "Annalsof My Glass House," Photographic 51 (July1927), 25. Journal 1815-1879 (Boston: Little,Brown, Cameron, pp. 296-301, reproduced in Mike Weaver, Julia Margaret inPrint: 1816 tothe Present 1984), pp. 154-57, and VickiGoldberg, Writings Photography from (Albuquerque: of New Mexico Press),1981,pp. 180-87, in particular University p. 181.
123
It was also somethingCameron indexed repeatedly, in pictorialists. contemporary her signaturefocus on the Christianmother-and-child, showingthe adored body of the child as the yieldof a specifically, self-reflexively photographicmode of genunder the sign of the Mother,much as Barthes eration,and placing photography would do a centurylater,when he spoke of its "umbilicalties" to the Real, and lamentedoverthe photographof his own motherlike the Madonna hovering over her child withthe knowledgeof his future fate:Cameron's Madonna photographs are allegorizations ofwhatBarthescalls the noeme of photography, from within the house of the "ladyamateur."26 Cameron made literary, and allegorical photographsaplenty; mythological, like Clementina she drew heavilyon photography's foundingconnection to theater, specifically to the amateur home theatricals privileged by her (and Clementina's) class.27(Once again it was preciselythe home-boundamateurism that was the woman photographer'slot at this moment that made it possible to thinkso intensively and photographically about photography's theatricalfoundaof as family tion.) But Cameronalso made whatsurely maybe thought photographs, ones, manyof themwithambitionsthatwentwell though theyare extraordinary and the family album, and thus are as fundabeyond the confinesof the family mentally differentfrom what we conceive of as familyalbum snapshots as Cameron's brand of aristocratic amateurismwas fromthe hobbyism withwhich we are now familiar. Those photographs, some of whichI wantto attend to here, draw a different kind of connection between amateurism,the mother,and the Barthesianconception of the photograph. For example,the album Cameron made forher sister Mia contained familiar diaristic images of babies (as in an 1865 photograph of Cameron's niece Mary had eleven children,holding her first son Herbertin her Fisher,who eventually arms) and weddings (as in the marriage of Annie Chineryto Cameron's third child and second son, Ewen,on November13, 1869).28One of the thingsthatone sees in such photographsis the "genetictraits" shared byfamily members,somethingof whichBarthesspeaks (and forwhichwe stilllook in family albums). But anotherthing, seen in family as we knowthem,is the emphasis, rarely photographs shared only by Clementina's family of cloth photographs,upon the partnership
See my "Cupid's Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of 26. October 76, (Spring 1996), pp. 115-41. Photography," 27. Cameron neePattle was one of ten children ofJames Pattle of the East India Company and Adeline de l'Etang. Born in Calcutta, she was raised by her aristocraticmaternal grandmotherin Versaillesfromthe age of three to eighteen,and at the age of twenty-three married the Council of India jurist Charles Hay Cameron, twenty-four yearsher senior,in 1838. The societyof Cameron and her sisters, in short, was thatof the social and culturalelite of colonial England. 28. See ForMyBest Beloved Sister Mia: An Album Cameron ofPhotographs by JuliaMargaret (Albuquerque: of New Mexico ArtMuseum,1994). Cameron bore six children,fiveboys (one ofwhomdied University in infancy) and one girl.In addition,she raised five and one foster child. orphaned relatives
Cameron. JuliaNorman.March1868.
for instanceand the "carnal medium" of light:the subject of MyEwen'sBride, whose doubly possessivetitle emphasizes the family relationshipsin which the photographis embedded-is as much the bride of lightas she is of Ewen,and the glowingyardage,gathered,buttoned,and hemmed, of her whitewedding dress and ghostly, enshroudingveil, is as much the image of her wooing,embracing, under the watchful and penetrationby the constitutive eye lightof photography, and ritual ofhermother-in-law, as itis ofhervirginal unveiling. nuptials And then there are portraits of Cameron's descendants, whose future thatpicturethem,that deathsare announced in the past tenseof the photographs of the cycleof familialtimewithall the piquancyof the speak of the (un)heimlich funereal and then some. Such is the case in the stunningly old family photograph, in 1868, five ofJulia Norman,Cameron's eldest child and onlydaughter, portrait years before she died in her seventh childbirth-whether as a sybil,a Mary Magdalene, a shade, a female Grim Reaper, or a very elegant death's head, was the same daughterwhose husCameron didn'tsay.(JuliaNorman,bythe way, "It mayamuse you,Mother, camera as a gift, band gave Cameron her first saying, The punctaof the eyelashes,the mole, the dimple,and to tryto photograph."29)
Cameron herselfrecountedthisanecdote in "Annalsof MyGlass House." It has been repeated 29. Work Cameron: Her Lifeand Photographic ever after, Julia Margaret beginningwithHelmut Gernsheim, 1975), p. 28. (NewYork:Aperture,
Cameron. 1867. Julia Jackson.
overallgeneralinto reliefby the portrait's the chapped lips, thrown particularly this that-has-been. of anterior" the "future ization,punctuate They photograph's of eyes that meet ours frombeyond the come in a close second to the punctum byCameron,thoughthe subtraction family portraits gravefound in otherfrontal from the effect of the uncanny when the eyes are downcast is evident in of her daughteras well. Cameron's portrait The two most photographedpeople in Cameron's household were her parlor maid Mary Hillier,whom Cameron used to act the part of the Mother more or anyof her nieces (she is seen, for oftenthanher own daughter, daughter-in-law, of and in Flos the example, photograph Iolande); and Julia Prinsep Jackson and the motherof VirginiaWoolf sister Mia's her Duckworth daughter, Stephen, conthe home-enframed and Vanessa Bell. As Cameron's domestic,Hillierfigured textof Cameron's work,not to mention the intimatelink between the space of the amateurand the realmof the maternalthatCameron's photographspropose. Hillier'sprofilealso stood more than any otherforPre-Raphaelite repetitionand to make the photographyield another nature besides the for Cameron's efforts of birthand social standcircumstances one givento the sitter by the superficial she was nie As for Duckworth too, photographedrepetitiously Jackson, ing. Julia than not more often but were sometimesshot in stylish and her features profile; she was shown facing the camera head-on, and she was almost always phoat eighteen, And she was photographed over time, first tographed as "herself."
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HerbertDuckworth, and prior to her marriageto the barrister round-faced and mature and deep-eyed, fouryears widowed and fouryears last at twenty-eight, before her remarriageto Sir Leslie Stephen. Thus her aunt's photographsof her chart not only the generalized stages of womanhood-maidenhood, marriage, and widowhood-but also her individual maturation;again, just as we thinkof thatCameron's portraits insist family photographsdoing, but withthe difference on an atavisticallyspectral conception of the photograph. (As Barthes said, is like the primitive like a Tableau Vivant,the figuration of theater, "Photography the immobile,powderedface beneath whichwe see the dead" [p. 56].) marJulia was most photographedby Cameron during the year of her first riage, when the name that Cameron gives her oscillates between her maiden name Jackson and her firstmarried name Duckworth.The 1867 portraitsare intensely repetitious,and almost all of them (with the exception of what is perfemale portrait,of "Mrs. Herbert Duckworth"as a haps Cameron's best-known Renaissance cameo, and another in whichthe sitter looks meditatively downward, which Cameron declared "My FavoritePicture of All My Works") face outward, in the eyes" (to use Barthes'swordsagain), head-on, looking the viewer"directly witheyes thatare at once uncannily dead. One set in particular alive,and glassily thematizesthe range of out-of-focus to in-focus thatwas both Cameron's signature and the means ofJuliaJackson'scoming into photographicbeing: so thatgradually,both fromone photographto the next, and withinindividualphotographs, her eyesand hair,and even the pores of her skincome into focusbeforeour eyes. In the more out-of-focus ones of this setJulia appears as a ghost. But even (or in the focus,it is as if especially) sharpestof them,wherethereis mostdifferential we are visitedby a fantasmaticapparition, a phantom that appears and disappears, fades in and out, addressing the fundamental photographic (and etymological) connection between "specter"and "spectrum," spirit,spook, and described by light. They also suggesta link between the psychologicalpunctum of the optometrist: the tiny Barthes,and the physiological "punctum" punctureof the tear duct thatwets the eye,keeps it vital,and in photographiccircumstances makes it glistenlike glass.Which perhaps helps to explain anotherassociation,of relevance to Barthes's Camera Lucida,puzzled over byFreud in the essayon "The between dead and of the unheimlich. And Uncanny": watching eyes and the effect on levels-in their beloved faces and their frontal so, in many outward-facingness, theirlooking us directly in the eyes,in theirpeculiar statusas revenants, in their emanationfromtheirreferent, and in theiruncanniness-they are perfect punctal of Barthes's of the figurations photograph.so0 conception
30. Bartheschooses Nadar-the facingportrait of his wife/mother. There is good reason forthis: Nadar's photographsalso illustrate Barthes'sconception of the "noeme" of photography, as do "primitive"daguerreotypes But none thematizethe Barthesian (especiallyanonymousones) of facingsitters. of the photograph,whilealso embodyingit, betterthan these art-ambitious understanding images by
FromClementina toKasebier
127
Cameron captioned the lastportrait In 1874, towardthe end of her "career," she made of Julia Jackson Duckworth with a line from Byron: "She walks in it is unlikely beauty."(No doubt the caption occurred to her as an afterthought; the this tallies with a she set out to illustrate logic of illusposteriori Byron.Again, the photographfromprevious trationthat,according to Barthes,differentiates in Beauty shows illustrative Julia three-quarter-length, Though She Walks imagery.) leaner of face and severerof aspect, hair up beneath a hat, and in dark clothing of widow'sweeds, and thoughit relegatesall detail to the background suggestive wall of ivyand the puckeringof her dressat the sleeve,it is as much a pictureof a We come fullcircle,forthe pullingof the hauntingas anyof the earlierportraits. of Cameron's earliestportraitof a maiden chain about her neck is reminiscent bride, the light-filled againsta wall dubbed "Sadness" after pictureof Ellen Terry
of the profesCameron, and none others engage his conception of the amateuras the "attainment" of the professional.) thenand now,werethe neplusultra sional. (Portraitists,
Cameron. She Walksin Beauty.1874.
128
OCTOBER
the fact,and the wall of ivyis similarto the foliatebackgroundof the twoAlice Liddell portraits of 1872,each dubbed witha caption otherthan the sitter's name, in whichCameron showedhowAlice was older thanshe had been in Wonderland. The portrait's face comes forward because of its out-of-focus whitely glowing, dark-enframed brightness,and makes of Julia the niece and widow a kind of an evanescentspiritwho (dis)appears gothicemanation froma mansion thicket, out of a dense photographic surfacethatspecifies its ties to the referent thatwas. She is clearly frompre-Kodak more than the averagefamily daysand just as clearly wasjust as homebound as the Kodak snapshootersnap. But her familial portrayer to-be.Julia's spectral countenance wasjust as much a record of the passing of household time-of the round of birth,growth, and death-as keptby marriage, the mother'sside of the family. And more keenlythan the family snap to come, she standsas witness and testimony to the unheimlich in the heimlich resident of the home, to which,because of her own inside knowledgeof the poignancyof family her aunt the motherand "ladyamateur"had a special relation. history,
Gertrude FirstPhotograph.Metropolitan Museum of Kisebier. Collection. Circa1885. Art,TheAlfred Stieglitz
Museum Oceanside. Metropolitan ofArt, Thanksgiving, Kiisebier 1910. TheAlfred Collection. Stieglitz Before
Kasebier's Punctal Pictorialism
She opened her first was a different matter. New GertrudeStantonKdisebier Yorkstudioin 1897, in an upper story of the Women'sExchange (an organization thatsold the handicrafts of "gentlewomen" who needed income) at Thirtieth and in her last in before her to and Greenwich 1920 Fifth, Village, eyesight began fail and her daughters took over her portraitbusiness and kept it going until the Second WorldWar. She became the first elected (that is, not on independently account of a husband) woman memberof the Linked Ring in 1900, and was the when it startedup in 1902. onlyfemalefoundingmemberof the Photo-Secession to her; she had ten The first issue of Stieglitz's Camera Work devoted was magazine in "Little at the first exhibition at the Galleries" Fifth Avenue (a 291 photographs exhibition block fromher studio) in 1905; and shareda two-person withClarence and celebrated portraitist, and White the following year.She was a well-known of the to teach the craft to another member both Linked Ring and early helped her as a the Photo-Secession, the youngAlvinLangdon Coburn, who portrayed in she to his dame when was 1903, grande fifty-one twenty-one.31 That was one thing uKsebier shared with her "lady amateur" forebears:a career begun mid-life, afterher childbirthing was and most of her child-raising she had marriedGerman-born Eduard K~sebier done. Comingof age in Brooklyn, she bore three when she was twenty-two. While his shellac business flourished,
ThePhotographer and HerPhotographs 31. See BarbaraL. Michaels,Gertrude (New York:Harry Kdsebier: N. Abrams,1992).
Motherand Child Left: Kisebier. Facing Page:Gertrude& Charles
andBaby).1903. Ward (Mrs.
R.I. 1903. O'Malley, Newport,
and Hermine,beforeenrollingin artschool at the children, Frederick, Gertrude, PrattInstitute in 1889 at the age of thirty-seven, when her childrenwerefourteen, It was in thatcontextthatshe began makingphoeleven, and nine, respectively. on the side, and then as her main preoccupation.But she first tographsseriously, had taken her first earlieron as a mothermakingprivaterecordsof photographs her family: her first photographwas one she took in 1885 or so of her husband Eduard and first-born Frederickstaringout at the camera,one gaze each in the foreof the detail-filled flattened and middle-grounds image. Though it is an oldfashionedalbumen printfroma collodion negative,this picturecorrespondsto the imminent arrivalof a new momentboth in photography and in amateurism, when dry-platephotographyfirstdispensed with the need for the darkroom of the previousdecades. The Kodak camera was in the offing, soon to chemistry become a leisure toythatStieglitzwould compare to the bicycle;and advertising would soon be specifically directedat women,as a wayto expand the marketfor the handheld camera,the industrial of film, and the hobbyist's culture processing of "youpressthe button, we do the rest."32 soon moved out of thatcontextand into the discurIisebier's photography sive spaces of art and professionalportraiture. But the anecdotal structure and intimateframework of that earlyphotographanimate much of her laterworkas
Both the bicycleand the camera were marketed as healthy 32. pastimesforthe "newwoman"at the turnof the century-see Rosenblum,A History ofWomen Photographers, p. 56. It was thislinkagebetween new modern leisure toysthat Stieglitzaddressed in "The Hand Camera-Its PresentImportance" in Print, (1897), in Goldberg,Photography pp. 214-17.
From Clementina toKiisebier
131
media of IKsebier's generawell, includingphotographsmade in the pictorialist and of which continuedto chroniclethe tion-platinum gum-bichromate--many life of the and to themselves around a collisionbetweena private family, organize and a vice Kdsebierremained (or versa). foreground subject backgroundpunctum committed to her particularbrand of punctal and nevershowed any pictorialism, in the formalist interest of the flattened of rigor sharply fragment the lastphase of the Photo-Secession(fromwhichKdsebierwithdrew in 1912), or in the doctrine of the "straight" it that well into her pictorialist Also, photograph inaugurated. career she produced full-on that differ from her "first family pictures photograph" in medium and such as the format, only Thanksgiving photographthatshe took sometimebefore 1910, where across the deep space of the photograph, withits familiar of relatives and children who died not (Eduard gathering long IKsebier, is the shadowyprofileto the left),one meets the gaze of Kisebier's grandafter, held in the lap of her mother, backed bythe glanzof gleamingglass. daughter, The otherfounding memberof the Photo-Secession withwhichKisebier was mostcloselyassociated,and who became the leading representative of the pictorialist defectionfromStieglitz'scamp once Stieglitzrenounced pictorialism, was Clarence White.Outside of her professional what was best work, portrait KIsebier knownforwas a pictorialist stylethatwas veryclose to White's,as in the platinum thatshe made at the turnof the century. But even in theseworks, there triptychs is a significant whichhas to do withthe diarismthatinserts itself difference, fairly into Kisebier's work,and the punctalqualityof the glance that interinsistently rupts the internalunityand breaks the surfaceof so manyof her photographs. Both are evidentin the seriesof photographsthatshe made duringa family summer in Rhode Island in 1903, some of whichwere included in Stieglitz'sCamera while otherswere kept withinthe purviewof the family. For example, the Work,
ppl
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........
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132
OCTOBER
she made of her older daughter Gertrude O'Malley looking platinum triptych a to severalthingsthatare gerthrough picturebookwithher son Charles testifies mane: Qisebier's in the family of continuinginterest photograph,her articulation the space of familialdomesticity as the foundingcondition of her production, and her unusual use of a visualvocabulary closelylinked to the Kodak snapshotcasual framing, ad cropping, instantaneity, hoc, and stop-actionanecdotalism, combined withplatinumprinting and the triptych If Cameron had made format. icons out of her family these are the icons reverse,pictorialist pictures,perhaps made back intofamily pictures. Like Cameron, Kaisebier made maternityscenes the trademark of her pictorialistwork early on; indeed, she was as much known for that "feminine" motifas her contemporary, painterMaryCassatt-and ifshe associated her work withCassatt'sformula, it's not at all unlikely thatit workedthe otherwayas well, and that Cassattdoffedher hat to Kiisebiertoo. But therewas one area in which KIisebierdeparted fromCassatt,and frommost other renderersof mothersand children:not only in her emphasis on the child's independence-its squirming and straining away from the mother, sometimes combined with, sometimes instead of the cuddlingand caressingthatgoes on in Cassatt'sand others' depictions-but also in her focuson the child as the punctum of the family, ratherthan its nucleus. This went all the wayback to Klisebier'searliestphotograph,of her husband and son, and it showsup again in her pictorialist scenes, as in maternity the outward of 1900,whichruptures the circle glance ofbabyWardin a photograph of motherand child while it also puncturesthe seamlessgum bichromatesurface of the image, to seize upon the viewer'sattention,here and now outside of its thatStieglitz made very similarphotographs space and time.It is worthremarking this in his a which wife 1899-1900 during period, depicted his first Journalof Baby, Emmeline and theirdaughterKitty. those However, photographsemphasize the unity of the mother-and-childduo, even when their bodies are apart, in the umbilical cord of their mutual exchange of gazes. That cord is cut by Kiisebier more oftenthan not, in such a wayas to emphasize thatcut's ties to the noeme of the photograph. There is no more forceful use of the punctum of the child's outwardgaze to the concord of the and the internal disrupt family pierce unityof the image than in a 1901 photographof the Brandegee family withits double, tongue-in-cheek and "Harmony." Susan Brandegee,professional title,"Family" cellist,is positioned between husband, cello, and child, and the arrayof glances between the three to the sidelong, to the outsubjects ranges graduallyfromthe inward-directed, who looks us "directly in the eyes," ward-gazing:the child in the leftforefront introducingan uncanny note into the space of the home. Here, as elsewhere, seems to have learned the lessonsabout differential IKisebier focusfirst taughtby Peter Henry Emerson in the 1880s, who based his theoryof subjective photographic vision on Helmholtz's physiologicaloptics,suggestingthat photographs should not be uniformly sharp, but rathershould have an area of focus corre-
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Harmony(Family).1901. Kiisebier
Kasebier ClarenceWhiteand Family. Metropolitan TheAlfred Collection. 1908. Museum Art, Stieglitz of
Where so manytook thatto mean spondingto the waythe human eye attends.33 was one who did not: for in the foregroundof this allover fuzziness,Kdisebier all at once image there is also a momentof sudden focus and abruptattention, concentratedout of the gatheringof alertnessin the backgroundgloom of the meetglance sharply photograph-and it is the momentof the child'sintransigent the been to see seem to have ours. would Kdisebier particularly well-positioned ing as well as that characterizes the home heimlich into the unheimlich of the shading the photograph.
in Print, See PeterHenryEmerson,"Naturalistic (1889), in Goldberg,Photography Photography" Vision. Naturalistic Effect pp. 190-97. See also Handy,Pictorial 33.
From toKasebier Clementina
135
is found elsewhereas well: in a 1908 portrait of Clarence White That effect in which the spatial compressionof the and his (relatively harmonious) family, photograph yields less differencein degree of focus, but which is nevertheless punctuated by a series of separatelyunyieldingglances out at us. Each one of those glances is islanded forall its closeness to the others; each one reads as an of somethingunseen by the others-the children'sgazes in particuinterjection of that "first lar,which are reminiscent photograph"of Kisebier's husband and son. Meanwhilethe lightglances offthe whitesofJane White'seyes,in a manner like the weirdly strangely reflecting pane of glass behind her,makingher outward glance another island of uncannyfocus.While her husband,as the male head of the householdand the objectof IQsebier'spictorialist is the centered identification, subject of the photograph, Jane White,looming above him, is its most piercing figure.Her shining, glassyeyesarticulatethe logic of the punctal glance thatorganizes the restof the image, thatdisorganizesthe family into an atomizedseriesof withlightitself, the flat,cold surfaces off cells,thatis identified separate,secretive of which it bounces, and the interiority, apertures,and optics of the home-its and mirrors. windows, (There is even a kind of contrastthatthe photodoorways, graph mountsbetweenthe framedand tamed pictureat leftand the ghostly glass house at rightas possible models for the homebound pictorialist photograph.) those spectraleyes,at once bright withpast lifeand as lifeless as the vacant Finally, whitepaper thattheymake presentto us, spell the homelyphotographicequivalence of the vital and the morbid,the alive and the dead. In hindsight, whichis none other than the "future anterior"of photography, the melancholicgazes of the White family conjure up the intrusionand germinationof death withinthe heart and hearth of the family, and the photograph'saccess to it because of its own temporal paradox. As do all the other punctalglances of Kisebier's photographs, which speak, as Barthes does, of that "other punctum (another 'stigmata') besides the 'detail.. . Time, the heart-rending emphasisof the noeme of photography. ('that-has-been')" Other photographs enunciate the ties that bind the punctumand the in a more generalizedand self-reflexive (un)heimlich way.That is the case of a 1910 photograph dubbed Lollipopsthat deploys the same spatial structureof foreher ground theme and backgroundincident(Hermine KIsebier Turnerwatching daughter and niece) as before, though now its composition is more self-consciouslybased on Dutch genre-painting.Here, the uncanny is a matterof the intrusion of something unseen into a quintessential momentof snapshotcuteness, with and cuddled kitten:the lightthat descends replete lollipops,giant hairbow, the staircasebehind IKisebier's like an invisible grandchildren presence,the eerie of focus at the the unreadable banister, gathering sidelong glance of Mina at her cousin Elizabeth,and the backgroundvigil,together conspireto conjure up somethingverylike a photographic"turnof the screw." Kisebier's photographputs in whatHenryJames's 1898 story was about: a hysself-reflexively photographicterms terical (woman's) reading of the household's uncannysecrets,and the children's
136
OCTOBER
collusionwiththe spectersof theirown adult selvesand ultimately of theirdeaths, while the female onlooker watcheshelplessly.34 For,with the projectivereading thatit solicits(thatall punctal photographssolicit,accordingto Barthes),Lollipops is in some sense a photographabout the means of the photographic uncanny:the
34. See HenryJames, TheTurnofthe Screw (1898) (NewYorkand London: W.W. Norton,1966). The dread thatlies at the heart of thismeta-gothic and the figures of Peter Quint governess's ghoststory, and MissJesselwho appear to her,are usuallytaken to hinge on sexual imaginings. But the factthat who speaks frombeyond the grave,and the boy Miles the storyis bracketedby death (the governess who dies at the end, among others), and thatMiles and his sisterFlora are each stalkedby an adult secretthatBlyhouses is thatof its inhabitants'"future ghostof his/hergender,suggeststhatthe awful anterior" death as much as it is thatofsex.
Lollipops. 1910. Kiisebier.
137
"carnal medium" and spectral qualityof light,the punctum of the glanz/glance, the coming-into-focus, the frozen momentariness, the that-has-been, the "blind field"of whatever is off-frame. all but out Barthes's alternative And, conspelling ception of the compelling photograph,it associates the photographicuncanny withthe maternalgaze and domestic domain of the woman photographer whose artproductionwas ineluctably associatedwiththe family chronicle.
I close withtwo comparisons:fourimages,of whichit suffices to show one. The first consists of two well-known Steichen one from comparison self-portraits: done in the painterly 1901, the yearbeforethe inception of the Photo-Secession, medium of gum bichromate, sporting a paintbrush and palette that serve to constructthe photographeras an artistby identifying him withthe painter;the other the yearof the Photo-Secession'sclosing (1917), thatshowshim as a sharpcameraman identified with his eyed, sharp-focused, straight-photographing camera.35Togethertheychartthe trajectory not onlyof the Photo-Secessionper The second comparisonconsists of twophotographs se, butalso ofartphotography. closer than both from withinthe time of KIisebier, Steichen's, by together dating involvement withthePhoto-Secession, whicharticulate a similar KIisebier's trajectory: froman equation between photography and the gentle,pastoralart of sketching of 1903, showingher artistfriendBeatrice Ruhl againsta land(as in TheSketch of modern scape, sketch-padin hand), to an assertionof the medium-specificity -its identification with the the camera, art-photography commandingview,the modern city--exemplified in a 1909 photograph of Hermine withher children Mason and Mina atop the roofofKgsebier's in whichHermineworked. studio, The terms in whichI~isebier'sphotographs articulatethe trajectory fromthe model of paintingto thatof the camera, however, are significantly different, specificto the photographiccultureof IKisebier'sgender,and as such tied into the shift fromone amateurismto the other thatmarkedthisperiod. Neitherare selfbut theirmain charactersmaybe understood as stand-ins forKisebier portraits, the art-photographer: the gentlewoman for whom sketching was a graceful in the old sense, versusthe modern woman (withor without a "accomplishment" was both an up-to-date vocation) for whom taking snaps of family-members leisure activity and a definingact of privaterecord-keeping. In the latterphotograph, Hermine's pinstriped, mutton-sleevedshirtwaistand wide-ribboned,
35. The second, less famousof these twoself-portraits, whichshowsSteichen'sface nextto the large was included in the glass eye of a viewcamera, the two linked by a hand holding the shutter-release, Gilman Paper Companyexhibition,The Waking Dream:Photography's First (New York:HarryN. Century Museum in 1993. Abrams,1993) held at the Metropolitan
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Hermine Turner MasonandMinaon photographing KIisebier Kiisebier. theRoof ofGertrude Kiisebier's Studio at 315Fifth Ave.Circa 1909. strawhat, not to mentionher associationwiththe public space of suffragette-era the modern skyscraperedcity,her reduced number of children (down from Clementina'sten and Julia'ssix-plusto Gertrude'sthreeand Hermine'stwo),and the portablemoderncamera thather daughterholds,supportedbythe NewYork of Gertrude's rooftop workplaceand linkedin shape to the crenellationof the top of the buildingto the left,all bespeak the modern-woman statusof KIisebier and her female descendants. At the same time, the urban line of sightthat crosses Gertrude'sown is a matrilinealone, runningthroughmotherand daughter to mediate the prospect of the metropolis and its business (so familiar from of the technocratic of New Stieglitz's repeated,career-long skyline representation witha personal line of York,as in his roughly contemporaneousCity ofAmbition) betweenpublic and private, and descent,to suggestthe intersection professional artand family-photography. amateur, Like the Linked Ring in London (which was a secession from the PhotographicSocietyin 1892, due in part to squabbles withinthatorganization's ranksbetween professionaland different kinds of amateur photographers),the
From Clementina toKdsebier
139
Photo-Secessionin NewYork (whichessentially seceded fromthe Camera Club of New York,and for verysimilarreasons) emerged out of the contested space of its dissolutionand redefining at the end of the nineteenthcentury amateurism, and beginning of the twentieth.36Whereas one wouldn't know that from Steichen's self-portraits, one surelymightfromIKisebier's,which in theirvery structure articulateart-photography's dialectical relationto the privaterealmsof amateurism. in the modKIisebier, short,genders her art-photography byframing ernist subject matter of the city against the foreground of family,family and the photographic "attainment" of the erstwhile picture-taking, "ladyamateur."37
36.
1892-1910 (London: Heinemann, 1979). 37. The spatial structureof this image is the photographic equivalent of what Griselda Pollock describes as characteristic of the workof the female Impressionists, in "Modernity and the Spaces of
Femininity," Vision and Difference:Femininity,Feminism, and Histories of Art (London
See Margaret F. Harker, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain,
Routledge,1988), pp. 50-90.
and New York:

Carol Armstrong 2C From Clementina To K C3 A4seboer-The Photographic Attainment of The 22lady Amateur 2C 22 October Winter 2000

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Carol Armstrong 2C From Clementina To K C3 A4seboer-The Photographic Attainment of The 22lady Amateur 2C 22 October Winter 2000

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From Clementina to Ksebier: The Photographic Attainment of the "Lady Amateur" Author(s): Carol Armstrong Source: October, Vol.

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Cameron. Ellen Terry(Sadness). 1864. JuliaMargaret

13th ofNovember 1869.1869.

Cameron. MyEwen'sBride of the

toKasebier From Clementina

Cameron. 1867. Julia Jackson.

Cameron. She Walksin Beauty.1874.

Gertrude FirstPhotograph.Metropolitan Museum of Kisebier. Collection. Circa1885. Art,TheAlfred Stieglitz

Kasebier's Punctal Pictorialism

Motherand Child Left: Kisebier. Facing Page:Gertrude& Charles

andBaby).1903. Ward (Mrs.

R.I. 1903. O'Malley, Newport,

From Clementina toKiisebier

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Lollipops. 1910. Kiisebier.

toKasebier From Clementina

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Routledge,1988), pp. 50-90.

and New York:

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