Kathleen Collins

The scourged back

Abstract The negro ‘Gordon’ escaped his master in Mississippi by rubbing himself with onions to throw the bloodhounds off his scent. After an arduous journey he sought refuge with the Union Army at Baton Rouge. On 4th July 1863, Harpers Weekly published three portraits of Gordon, based on photographs by McPherson and Oliver of New Orleans, who were taking pictures of the Union encampments at Baton Rouge in the early months of 1863.1 In a before-and-after layout, one engraving showed ‘Gordon as he entered our lines … with clothes torn and covered with mud and dirt from his long race through the swamp and bayous’. Another presented a tidy and dapper ‘Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. Soldier … bearing the musket- and prepared for duty’ (Figure 1). The third portrait, of ‘Gordon under Medical Inspection’ (Figure 2) showed the man ‘as he underwent the surgical examination previous to being mustered into the service-his back furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas Day last’....

Shadow and substance: Sojourner truth

Abstract Princes and poets, actors and advocates, all became familiar to the general public through the small carte-de-visite portraits, which began to appear in 1859 and reached an extraordinary popularity in the 1860s. Portrait photographers grew rich on the sale of famous faces, but no studio would have expected to make a fortune on the face of an illiterate former slave, who was described by one influential newspaper as ‘quaint in language, grotesque in appearance and homely in illustration’1.

Portraits of slave children

Abstract In the winter of 1863-64, a group of emancipated slave children from New Orleans was taken to Philadelphia and New York to be photographed, as part of a fund-raising campaign to support the first programme of free public education for blacks in the Department of the Gulf, which was under the control of the Union at the time. These ‘emancipated slaves’, whose apparently white skins seem to belie the captions on their carte-de-visite portraits, have been something of a puzzle to photographic collectors and historians. Their story begins in 1862, more than a year before their tour of Northern photographic studios.

Living skeletons; Carte-de-visite propaganda in the American civil war

Abstract During the last two years of the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Union North and Confederate South wrangled over the arrangements for the exchange of their prisoners of war. 1 In this final period of struggle, the exchanges dwindled to a few hundred returned, of the 80,000 held by the North and South during the conflict. Among those released to the North were some so emaciated that they were called ‘living skeletons’. The Union charged that while they were releasing healthy, well-fed soldiers to the South, the Confederates were sending back Union soldiers who had been intentionally starved to near death, so that they would be unfit for further military service. Carte-de-visite photographs of these victims played a major role in deflecting attention away from the equally miserable Union prison camps.

Photographic fundraising: Civil war philanthropy

Abstract With the development of the carte de visite in the 1850s, an inexpensive, reproducible, and highly portable image could be used for propaganda campaigns aimed at the heart and purse strings of a susceptible public. One measure of the popularity and versatility of the carte de visite may be found in its use as a vehicle for fund-raising during and after the American Civil War. Wounded soldiers, orphaned children, widows, and needy victims had their causes promoted by means of these small (2 1/2 × 4 1/4 in.) card-mounted, albumen photographs. The card mount provided space for a verbal appeal, to increase the impact of tlie photograph itself.

Photography and politics in Rome: The edict of 1861 and the scandalous montages of 1861-1862

Abstract Shaky governments everywhere were quick to grasp that the new invention of photography could be a dangerous weapon, equal to the power of the printed word in its ability to expose, embarrass, and disrupt a vulnerable regime. The decade leading up to the unification of Italy in 1870 saw both a surge of political intrigue and uprisings and the growing popularity of the carte de visite, which brought with it an increase in the number of photography studios in Rome. Immediately these new photographers were faced with old sanctions imposed by an insecure Papal government, intent upon maintaining its authority in the face of strong nationalist opposition. One early regulation required that a photographer who wished to publish his images at all, whether individually or in the form of illustrated books or albums, should register a copy of his work with the Padre Maestro of I Sacri Palazzi. Some photographs in the Museo di Roma carry the signature of ‘F. D. Buttaoni, S.P.A.M.’ (Frater Dominicus Buttaoni, ...

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: The Adams memorial

Abstract A haunting statue in Washingtons Rock Creek Cemetery sits at the still centre of a photographic web. Designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and completed in 1891, it was commissioned by Henry Adams as a memorial to his wife.

Cameo: The baneful ‘photograph habit’

Abstract No doubt the photograph habit, when once formed, is one of the most baneful and productive of the most intense suffering in after years of any with which we are familiar. Some times it seems to me that my whole life has been one long abject apology for photographs that I have shed abroad throughout a distracted county.

Third republic; Fourth estate

Abstract This study of the use of photographs during the Paris Commune, and continuing through the periods of Bonapartism, Boulangism, Royalism, and the Dreyfus Affair, is excellent in every way but two, and neither shortcoming is the fault of the author. First, the price is unaccountably high considering that, secondly, the reproduction quality is so poor. Nevertheless, in this scholarly and lively text, students of photo history will find a thorough, well-documented, and very thoughtful examination of the use of photographs, and especially captioned photos, primarily by the various opponents to the Third Republic. This is not so much a discussion of important French photographers as an attempt to identify and interpret those often anonymous images that enjoyed national circulation from 1871–1914, and to analyse their use as propaganda. To do this, the author carefully traces their political and sociological context, examines prevailing notions about the nature of photographs, and comments about the effe...

The Massachusetts Hyena

Abstract When General Butler entered New Orleans on 1st May 1862 to set up a military government for the Union Army, he found a city of unemployed, starving people, ravished by illnesses resulting from the desperate physical conditions under which residents of that port city were living. He began his high-handed administration with attempts to procure food for the hungry citizens (by taxing the cotton exporters), and by restoring some economic stability to that city, despite the destruction by Confederate sympathizers of warehouses of food, steamboats, and 15,000 bales of cotton, immediately before the arrival of the Federal forces1. He issued and enforced orders right and left to demonstrate to a hostile population that he meant business. Shortly after Admiral Farragut had raised the Stars and Stripes over the US Mint, a professional gambler named William Mumford tore it down, dragged it in the mud, ripped it apart, and displayed one of the shredded fragments in his lapel. Butler had him hanged on the ve...