CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures

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Cabinet Card portrait of a woman, Walter E. Chickering Portrait and Photographic Parlors, Boston, ca. 1884–1887 (author's collection)

The photograph above is a posed and vignetted cabinet card portrait of a woman, created by the Boston "Portrait and Photographic Parlors" of Walter E. Chickering at 627 Washington Street sometime between 1884 and 1887, when the photographer worked out of this address.¹ This is a studio portrait, one of thousands like it taken during the last quarter of the nineteenth century when cabinet cards were most popular.² This lovely vernacular photograph is not noteworthy as a singular image but becomes more significant (somewhat paradoxically) when [End Page 133] treated as a representation of the ubiquity and banality of photographic portraiture during the fin de siècle. This is a cusp image, a professional portrait tied to earlier photographic and painting portraiture practices but also to the increasing popularity of everyday images emblematized by the snapshot, which revolutionized amateur photography beginning in the 1880s.³ This photograph and others like it promise what Roland Barthes identifies in all photography as "reality in a past state"; it promises a presence, singularity, and access to the real.⁴ But who is she, really? Unlike most others of its kind available for purchase in shops or online, this photograph is marked: the back reads (perhaps—it is difficult to interpret the script) "Auntie Dede Walter Gleason's wife." With this information, we may be able to learn more of the history of the woman in the portrait. Yet the specificity of the image and those few written hints amount to a tantalizing fantasy of presence and stand in tension with the absence also embedded in every photograph. There is an obvious gulf between the woman who once sat for Chickering and the cardstock image of her on my desk. This is a portrait of absence.

The tension between photographic absence and presence is not confined to the fin de siècle and it has been highlighted in the context of loss by photographic theorists such as Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Geoffrey Batchen,⁵ but we can see this tension emerge with particular urgency at the end of the nineteenth century amidst the additional and concurrent interplays between old and new, and reality and fabrication. This is a matter of technological development as well as cultural change: photography becomes ever more ubiquitous and photographic images proliferate at a dramatic rate in the later decades of the century as photography becomes cheaper and faster, precisely during an era remarkable for its challenges to older representational forms and specifically its challenges to realism. Paradoxically, it is precisely this time, when photography appears in greater abundance and a diversity of forms, that poignantly highlights the gulf between the image and photographed thing or person. This tension between absence and presence remains with us today as we find ourselves at our own cusp in the early decades of the digital age and at a moment when images are ever more pervasive and their connection to reality ever more vexed. Photographic manipulation and the sheer abundance of images seductively promise us the [End Page 134] thing itself (whatever that thing may be), but simultaneously and melancholically mark the fact that it is not that thing. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we have been living in a photographic culture, but rather than reassure us with presence, photographs remind us of the inherent absence they denote.

This tension between absence and presence reframes how we think about the fin de siècle as well as forms of representation that are, by contrast, often treated as more exceptional: literary texts.⁶ One such literary text is Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes short story after his novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four: "A Scandal in Bohemia," which was published in The Strand Magazine in 1891.⁷ This story centers on a cabinet card photograph and represents a rare instance of Holmes failing to solve a case. "A Scandal in Bohemia" introduces a nexus of topics relevant to the current interdisciplinary study of literature and photography at the fin de siècle: the story represents photography in both literal and figurative terms, it highlights the fact that the specific technological form of photography matters, and it draws our attention to the context and viewers of the photograph. All these elements—literal and figurative readings of photography in literature, the specificity of technology, and the role of the viewer—represent major areas of current work in this field, which is an interdiscipline within an interdiscipline: a fusing of literary analysis with the methodologically diverse history of photography. Absent presence gives us an additional framework for theorizing both the history of photography and the ways literature engaged with photographies in this era. Photography compels a negotiation with absence—with what is left out of the frame, with what is not seen, with contexts that are no longer intelligible—even as it provides us with the fantasy that a photograph gives us presence. "A Scandal in Bohemia"'s treatment of photography resonates today, as we reflect both on our own era and on the fin-de-siècle past.

First and most obviously, a photograph is the literal and central object of concern in "A Scandal in Bohemia": Holmes and Watson are hired to retrieve a compromising portrait of the King of Bohemia with an actress, Irene Adler. Adler is blackmailing the King with this image, a cabinet card that stands as visual proof of the scandalous relationship. However, Adler outsmarts the detective, disguises herself, and escapes. [End Page 135] She keeps the photograph in question as collateral but sends a written promise not to disclose the details of her relationship with the King, alongside another photograph of herself that the King "may care to possess."⁸ The King takes Adler's word as proof the affair is over as an "inviolate" promise;⁹ Holmes requests and is given the photograph—a sign of his failure and the closest he was able to come to containing Adler or the scandalous image. Notably, the story's original illustrations do not attempt to depict either of these photographs.

The photograph functions as more than a simple object, and we see this first of all in the way the image clearly matters to the King: its very existence is a scandal. The meaning of the image also shifts, from a literal record of objective fact privileged above all other forms of representation to a device ultimately undermined by the written word. Initially, the photograph represents visual certainty: proof. In his first discussion with the King, Holmes offers ways that the King might spin and dismiss even the most incriminating documents: "There is the writing," notes the King. "Pooh, pooh! Forgery," responds Holmes. "My private note-paper," the king continues. "Stolen," Holmes answers. "My own seal," says the King. "Imitated," offers Holmes. But when it comes to photographic evidence, Homes must admit that the King has "indeed committed an indiscretion."¹⁰ This is a noteworthy exchange, and speaks to Holmes's, as well as perhaps Conan Doyle's, faith in the fidelity of photography. Photographic forgeries, after all, were a matter of public scandal: for instance, William H. Mumler was famously brought to trial for his spirit photographs in 1869. Conan Doyle wrote about this case as fraud, but at the same time believed in spirit photography and other photographic forgeries, such as the Cottingley fairy photographs.¹¹ Photographic manipulations and forgeries continue to surprise us to this day, of course, despite the ubiquity of Photoshop. It seems we cannot help but believe in the fantasy of presence and reality that photography sells to us, even though we know we should approach images with a measure of skepticism. Photography's fantasy of presence was, and remains, powerful indeed.

In the story, photography is not only featured as an external object denoting absent presence, however: it is woven figuratively into the main character's role as detective. Near the start of this tale, Holmes [End Page 136] instructs Watson about the differences between sight and observation, chiding Watson for failing to go beyond sight alone and truly observe, or process the visual data he absorbs. Holmes's remarkable skills hinge on the power of observation: being able to take in visual data and process, record, and analyze that data. Indeed, the story begins with a description of the detective as a "perfect reasoning and observing machine" whose abilities are disrupted by Adler as though by "a crack in one of his high-power lenses."¹² This alignment of Holmes as camera is then destabilized as the story pivots from a valuation of photography as objective record to that of a representation replaced by the written word. It is in some ways quite fitting for a literary work to insist on the primacy of word over image—a subtle jab at a technology of visual culture that simultaneously props up the story's protagonist.

In treating photography in literal as well as figurative terms, the story resonates with two dominant critical approaches to literature and photography: those that read photographic objects in literary works and those that treat photography as a stylistic or metaphoric structure. Short fiction focusing on photographs and photographers abounds in the latter decades of the century and for the past several decades scholars have interrogated the ways photography functions as plot or thematic devices in these works.¹³ The critical field is rich with approaches exploring the way photography, as a new set of technologies enabling new ways of seeing and imagining, impacted literary works metaphorically throughout the century. For instance, Nancy Armstrong and Daniel Novak have each developed influential formal arguments, claiming in their respective studies that the project of literary realism is entwined with the development of photography.¹⁴ My own study of the role of the photographic negative treats the negative as a technology that is woven into the forms and motifs of literary fiction.¹⁵ Regardless of whether photography is read as literal or figurative, literary representation distances us from the photographic object itself, just as the photographic object is distanced from the subject it represents. Conan Doyle's story is particularly good at illustrating this multivalent distancing, and the net result is that we have a story that is about a photograph and that thematizes photography, but in which the photograph remains missing. [End Page 137]

To this point I have been discussing photography as though it is a monolithic whole, but the critical discussion within history of photography and literature and photography fields increasingly emphasizes the technological differences between photographies, to borrow a term from John Tagg.¹⁶ The recognition that photography was not a single representational form but rather a set of related but distinct technologies opens up space for us to see how photography's relationship to the real was also variable. From its inception, photography has been multiple: the daguerreotype and the talbotype emerged nearly simultaneously, and distinct technologies superseded and coincided throughout photography's history. During the fin de siècle, more formal family portraiture in the form of the tintype, carte de visite, and cabinet card overlapped with the emergence of the snapshot as well as a range of forms and uses understood under the broad categories of art photography, scientific photography, forensic photography, landscape photography, and more.

Conan Doyle's story depicts a current form of photography, a celebrity cabinet card and one of several concurrent photographic practices. The cabinet card was a larger format version of the earlier carte de visite, a form of portrait photography in which the photographic image was printed on paper then mounted on card stock. As with cartes de visite, cabinet cards were produced using a glass negative, which the photographic studio owned and kept, and individuals could then order a number of copies to keep or share.¹⁷ As I have argued in my book, the fact that the photograph in "A Scandal in Bohemia" is a cabinet card runs at curious cross-purposes to the function it performs: the plot pivots around the question of whether this image will be located and contained, but cabinet cards were produced to be replicated and therefore not contained.¹⁸ The specificity of the photographic technology is mentioned and then ignored in the story's plot, as though to both introduce the idea that the image might not be contained but then to present a satisfying resolution of containment.

The story's central photograph is definitively not the democratic snapshot Geoffrey Batchen and others describe as the fin de siècle's major technological contribution to the history of photography, but bears a relationship to that new photographic form—borrowing, as [End Page 138] Batchen puts it, a formality "from a professional studio tradition."¹⁹ As a cabinet card, this was a portrait created by a professional photographer. Cabinet cards of this type were reproduced for individuals to include in their photo albums, alongside family portraits and—increasingly after the development of faster dry gelatin plates in 1870 and the handheld camera in 1880—snapshots taken by family members.²⁰ The target viewer of this image, in other words, would be similar to the viewer of the snapshot, but on a broad scale: not just an individual or family, but many individuals and families. This image shares with the snapshot a banality, despite its scandalous potential.²¹ The ubiquity of this type of photograph itself creates a kind of void, the sheer number of such images effacing the specificity of any one example, making an absence out of abundance. Indeed, such abundant absence remains with us today, in the form of images saturating our social media accounts and photo files clogging our cell phones. The photograph of the King and Adler is this type of mundane photograph, but because of the subjects in the frame the photograph is marked as exceptional, an image worthy of scandal and worthy as the subject of literature.

The matter of exceptionalism highlights an understated tension in the field of literature and photography, particularly as that field is increasingly influenced by the pivot to vernacular photography: namely, what does it mean to trace a representation of the everyday—a representation claimed as democratic in its ubiquity and accessibility—alongside a representation categorized by the term "literature," with all the canonical and hierarchical implications embedded in that term? Geoffrey Belknap writes in From a Photograph that the opposition between art and non-art is not useful or productive, though those divisions are at least nominally maintained in an interdiscipline frequently referred to as the study of "literature and photography."²² Literary studies has, of course, long engaged in a democratizing process of its own, informed by cultural studies and media studies and illustrated in vibrant scholarly engagement with the periodical press and other genres of writing not conventionally regarded as "literary." Yet the name and its hierarchical implications remain. Insofar as it prioritizes the written word, the conclusion of "A Scandal in Bohemia" affirms the order typically given to the interdiscipline of "literature and photography." The [End Page 139] order of these terms mobilizes an implicit prioritization of the first term, and indeed the study of literature and photography is often framed as the way in which photography appears in literature—rather than (and with a few notable exceptions, including the work of Julia Margaret Cameron) the reverse.

The photograph fails to produce a scandal in the story—it disappears from view, as good as destroyed, kept only as a "safeguard" to be weaponized if Adler feels threatened.²³ As a reproducible cabinet card of two celebrity figures—king and actress—the photograph is thus redirected from its intended audience: the public. But the story also discusses a second photograph—a portrait of Adler alone. The story's second photograph, an image Adler offers to replace the first, is also an image redirected from its intended purpose and audience: given to Holmes rather than kept by the king, the image stands as a warning to Holmes not to underestimate a "woman's wit."²⁴ Importantly, the story's conclusion hinges on Holmes's personal response to the photograph—a move that demands what Jennifer Green-Lewis identifies as the dominant critical approach today: a "turn away from the linear, biographical narrations of art history and the study of individual works, towards a material history that attends more closely to the lives and habits of its consumers or readers."²⁵ The current reader-response call to emphasize the viewer of the fin-de-siècle photograph is demonstrated in Doyle's story, highlighting as it does the complexities of viewership. The intended audience of this image (the public) is the wrong audience, and the image must be diverted. It is instead kept by Adler, seen by no one. And the replacement image is given, by its recipient, to the detective who views it in quite another light.

We should consider how the meaning of an image changes when it is seen by someone other than its intended viewer, as well as how we are to view such images and their representations in literature from our own perspectives in the twenty-first century. For all the historical specificity we have accumulated about photographies and their viewers, scholars such as Green-Lewis still note a particular "vagueness" to their representation in literary works²⁶ and, concurrently, a flattening out or "consolidation" of forms of photography available to people at exactly the time when more people were becoming included as subjects and [End Page 140] photographers.²⁷ Another way to state this is to say that photography is present in many literary works, but there is often a curious lack of specificity, a type of absence, surrounding its representation. Working on literature and photography now, in the twenty first century, demands attention to the specific ways photographs appear in literary texts and the ways those literary texts are shaped by photographies. It demands an awareness of the specificity of photographic technologies and metaphoric systems, as well as an awareness of photography's viewers, past and present. We are not the intended viewers of these photographs or texts about photographs. Our experiences of them are refractions.

The photograph reproduced at the start of this essay is, we might imagine, similar to the image Adler sends to the king at the end of "A Scandal in Bohemia": the cabinet card of a woman, viewed in a way other than intended. We may amass details about this woman and read her photograph literally, we may understand the image more figuratively as a representation of type, we may focus on the specific photographic technology of the cabinet card, and consider the intended context and viewers of the card. From our own perspective today, however, the image is decontextualized, an image that belies photography's fantasy of presence, showing us instead a portrait of absence. The period is full of images such as the portrait of the woman above, or the portrait of Adler given to Holmes: images whose context is not immediately apparent or is, in fact, a matter of who is viewing the image and when and why. The rise of vernacular photography at the end of the nineteenth century shifts the meaning of photography as well as the meaning of photography in the context of literature. This is a shift we are still negotiating today, for the ways that photography continues to influence other forms of representation, including literary works, has only accelerated in the digital age.

The questions photography compels around singularity and proliferation, proximity and decontextualization, reality and manipulation, and presence and absence remain with us and motivate current work in the fields of the history of photography as well as literature and photography, as scholars seek to understand photography in its multitudinous forms and through its various representations and usages—then as well as now. The fin de siècle shows us how our technologies may be different, [End Page 141] but our concerns are similar. Despite so many years of being duped and misdirected, we remain remarkably ill equipped to negotiate photography's fantasy of presence and its underlying absence. Far from simple representations of objectivity or realism, photographs introduce questions, gaps, absences, and the potential for incomplete interpretations of our literatures and our world. The "crack in the lens" is, for us, photography itself.