Nineteenth Century Photography

By Erin

One of the earliest cameras was the camera obscura, and it was also used as an aid for drawing due to the fact that it could not be printed, and was merely a reflection and absorption of light. The mousetrap camera was created to solve the frustration of not being able to place the photograph on paper. With the mousetrap camera, paper is soaked with sodium chloride solution, then dries, and bathed in silver nitrate solution; this was the first camera negative.  Photographers continued to experiment with various metals, until we reached the daguerreotype, which allowed a photograph to develop in under thirty minutes.

Photography was important in shaping orientalist ideology just as much as a novel, newspaper, or political doctrine. During the announcement of the daguerreotype, François Arago, French scientist and political figure, said, “How archeology is going to benefit from this new process! It would require twenty years and legions of draftsmen to copy the millions and millions of hieroglyphics covering just the outside of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, etc. A single man can accomplish this same enormous task with the daguerreotype.” At this time, people were making discoveries in the scientific and sociological world, and photography was the biggest tool for documenting their discoveries. For many people who weren’t traveling, this was their view into the world unexplored.

Postcard, Young Moorish Woman and Kabyle Woman, late nineteenth century.

In orientalist photography, photos were taken similarly to how novels were written. Photographs were made to look like a frozen moment in time that captured everyday life as it was. However, photographs were very much crafted as a novel or painting would be. Subjects in the photographs were posed, and backgrounds were chosen. Women were often posed performing domestic tasks, and men were posed doing their labor such as the photo labeled “cotton merchant”. Women were racialized, feminized, and sexualized in these photographs through nudity and posture of the woman; they are posed as exotic. Many of these photographs were used as postcards, which were made for a specific group of people. They were for Europeans who wanted souvenirs of exotic culture, and were distributed as authentic documents of other nations, even though they were staged photographs that were often commissioned. Photographs operate as reinforcing evidence of orientalist ideology.

Francis Galton, The Jewish Type, photographic print, 1883.

Another example of how photographs can shape ideology pertains to Francis Galton’s “The Jewish Type”. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin is very much known for his work with eugenics. The Jewish Type shows different profiles of woman and man and captions it, “components”. This is an excellent example of Galton setting up “the other” and stereotyping an entire group of people to oppress them. This is similar to the soap industry comparing the Orient with monkeys because of the discovery of the evolution of man. They are stating that people from the Orient are less human and more primitive.