TURN THE CAM AROUND

“No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependency is an imaginary one … I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image – my image – will be generated.”

- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Perhaps unsurprisingly, portraiture was the primary work of photographers in the early years: typically of the intrigued upper classes, dignitaries, or famous artists. A few enterprising practitioners of the nascent art form made their subject matter themselves – most notable of these self-portraiture pioneers were Hippolyte Bayard in France, Robert Cornelius in the United States, and the team of David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson in Scotland. In submitting their selves as image to the camera, these men would lay the groundwork for much modern photographic practice.

Robert Cornelius poses for what may be the first photographic self-portrait ever captured (1839)

Cornelius was possibly the first person to intentionally capture himself photographically. As a young metallurgist in Philadelphia, Cornelius became interested in photography after hearing of the Daguerreotype process in 1839 and set out to mimic the chemical composition for his own use. Sometime thereafter, in October of the same year, he set up a camera outside the family business, struck a defiant pose, and shot. Despite opening a successful photo-studio, Cornelius would lose interest and discontinue the practice in the 1840s.

Hippolye Bayard is the author and subject of the most famous of these early self-portraits. Having been a part of the small group of French scientists and artists that had encountered Daguerre and Niépce’s experiments, Bayard set out to develop his own method: the ‘direct positive process.’ During July 1839 he would present it in what would be the first-ever public exhibition of photographs. However, failing to catch on in the same way as the Daguerreotype and Talbot’s kalotype, he was left discouraged and poverty-stricken. It was in this context that, in 1840, Bayard took what is generally considered to be the first theatrically staged photographic self-portrait: his Self Portrait as a Drowned Man.

Hippolyte Bayard playing dead in his Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840)

Into the back of the photograph Bayard inscribed: “The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him.”

This playful self-staging for the camera would also be explored by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in their 1845 The Morning After “He Greatly Daring Dined”. While it is only Hill that appears in the photo (along with Professor James Miller of St. Andrews University), the two men were rapacious portraitists and only worked as a team – as such the image should rightly be considered a self-portrait.

D.O. Hill & Robert Adamson's The Morning After He 'Greatly Daring Dined' (1845)

Hill seems to have been known to frequently indulge in drink and social gatherings, and the photo depicts his hangover from one such occasion, marking one of the first times a photographic self-portrait would be used to indicate particular qualities of the subject.

Bayard, Cornelius, and Hill’s interactions with the camera would prefigure the modern practice of photographing the self. However, the almost confrontational informality of Cornelius would not become common until 1900, and although the theatricality of the pose for contemporary photographers is typically more tacit than Hill and Bayard’s, it remains a significant and persistent part of the contemporary structure and cultural norms of photographic performativity.

By the 1850s, photography had already become cemented as a social activity for the middle and upper classes in the West. In fact, many photographic techniques we associate with the modern practice of the medium where developed when the technology was still nascent. For example, stereoscopic imagery - now essential for 3D projection and VR. The technique, where two cameras spaced at a ratio approximating that of the human eyes, were used to capture images that would be viewed through mirrors to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, proved popular with the British population after Queen Victoria expressed her amusement with the invention at the 1851 Great Exhibition of London, beginning a deluge of travel, educational, and pornographic stereoscopy that has only recently been rediscovered.

A.A.E. Disderi posing in his studio

In 1854, French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (another self-portraitist) patented a multi-lens camera system capable of making several small images on a single photographic plate. Prior to this point, cameras would generally have to be reloaded after each shot, and duplicates were expensive. The invention would mark the beginning of trend in England, France, and the United States where families and individuals would visit the newly established photography studios to present – or project – themselves to the camera in a visual illustration of social class, interests, and affluence. The resulting collection of photographs – printed onto thick paper cards known at the time as cartes de vistite (literally, 'visiting cards') – would be taken home and traded amongst friends and relatives. Within the span of ten years, this practice would spread across the middle classes and affluent of Western culture. Hundreds of millions would be made and exchanged by the end of the decade. In her abbreviated history of major changes in photography, Mary Warner Marien notes:

“In parlour collections, celebrity photos mixed with images of next-door neighbours, and political figures were shuffled together with distant relatives. People in the public eye, nobles ... military figures, actors, all submitted themselves to carte photography and bought many pictures to give away … Cartes defined photography as a democratic source of virtual access to especially powerful people. Seen as such, they became a formidable symbol of social and political rights.”

-M. Marien, 100 Ideas That Changed Photography

From very early on, photography presented itself as a form of “virtual access” to – or telepresence in – a visual culture that was otherwise out of reach. Through the quickly advancing technology of capture and developing methods of display and reproduction, normative values and rituals began to form around the apparatus and institutions of the camera. These dispersed, technologized rituals that quickly domesticated photography would influence its development through the next century.