Good Subjects, Bad Objects
Posing devices and the nineteenth-century commercial studio
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12919358 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annie Rudd (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 195-218 |
| Publication date | 2019-12-11 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Photographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-0763 • E-ISSN: 1754-0771 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17540763.2019.1566167 |
| OpenAlex | W2995844575 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 16 |
This article discusses the material culture of the commercial photography studio in nineteenth-century America, examining a succession of objects that made portrait photographs work: technologically, by controlling and shaping bodily movement in order to meet the shifting demands of photographic apparatuses, but also socially, by helping to construct and display bodies in culturally appropriate and putatively revealing ways. It focuses on three varieties of photographic objects, which appeared in studios in roughly chronological order: first, the ubiquitous and much-discussed head rest; second, purpose-built photographic furniture; and third, supplementary accessories intended to produce photogenic states of absorption. Taken together, these materials — and contemporaries’ responses to them — demonstrate how early commercial portrait photographers and their subjects understood photography’s capacity to represent the body and to mediate social identity. They also demonstrate how, through bodily expression aided by industrially produced objects and calibrated to anticipated spectators, contemporaries negotiated and normalized rapid changes in imaging technologies in modernity, and exploited the possibilities that modern visual media offered for the presentation of the self
Aesthetics · Art · Construct (python library · Expression (computer science · Identity (music · Modernity · Photography · Political science · Portrait · Presentation (obstetrics · Sociology · Studio · Visual arts · Computer Science · Law · Photographic and Visual Arts · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory
Rudeness & civility
The Burden of Representation
Photographs Objects Histories
Rudeness and Civility
What Is Media Archaeology
Resetting the camera’s clock
Doctored
The Middling Sorts
The Photographic Experience, 1839-1914
Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England
Kodakers Lying in Wait
The Fall of Public Man
Techniques of the body∗
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |