Vernacular portrait photographs, like the circa 1850 daguerreotype of two women holding a book in the Columbia University Art Properties collection (Fig. 1), resist simple classification within the traditional art historical canon.1
 Unlike later art photography, these early objects were produced in vast quantities by commercial enterprises designed to meet the material needs of the rising middle class.2
As twenty-first-century viewers, what are we to make of these two-dimensional images that simultaneously possess volume, tactility, and physical presence?3
Art historian Geoffrey Batchen suggests that the task for critical historians should not simply be to uncover the lost identities of these sitters and makers; instead, we must seek to articulate the intelligibility of these objects for contemporary viewing audiences.4
 Close visual analysis of Henry Pollock’s Portrait of Two Women Holding a Book offers a commentary on the daguerreotype portrait as a means for claiming social status within a rapidly changing, mid-nineteenth-century American society, revealing in particular two individual and divergent responses to the fashioning of female self-identity through new technologies of portraiture. These reactions will be contextually interpreted through the contemporaneous publication Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated monthly magazine of the pre-Civil War era, which provides a framework for understanding popular discourse on the daguerreotype and gender.5
Ultimately, this essay attempts to make an undocumented nineteenth-century object intelligible to our own time.

The French photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced the invention of the daguerreotype in Paris on January 7, 1839, to immediate worldwide acclaim.6
That August, he revealed his complete photographic process to the public. “Truly a victory-greater than any bloody one had been won, a victory of science,” remarked one eyewitness, “the crowd was like an electric battery sending out a stream of sparks […] in the kingdom of unending progress another frontier had fallen.”7
 Daguerre’s method began with a plate of copper thinly coated with silver and then cleaned and finely polished. The photographer suspended this plate over iodine, which resulted in the formation of a light-sensitive, silver-iodide solution on the surface, and then placed it within a lens-equipped camera. After exposure to light, the photographer held the plate over a heated dish of mercury, during which time the image slowly revealed itself. Finally, the photographer fixed the image in a solution of salt or soda hyposulfite before washing the plate in water and placing it within a protective glass case or frame. The fragile, mirror-like surface of the daguerreotype demanded immediate protection behind glass. In Europe, photographers framed daguerreotypes like drawings behind large cut-out mats. American practitioners such as Pollock, however, chose to present their plates within shallow hinged cases initially designed for miniature painted portraits. The resulting image initially was a mirror reflection—a lateral reversal—of the subject seen through the camera lens. Later daguerreotype cameras incorporated mirrors to correct this image reversal. Each daguerreotype is simultaneously a negative and positive, meaning that each photograph is a unique object (Andie Fialkoff also discusses the daguerreotype process in her essay linked here).

Visual analysis of the photograph as image and material object allows us to uncover significant information related to Pollock’s rarely cited photographic practice. The embossed velvet case pad (Fig. 2) opposite the plate reads: “POLLOCK / [illegible] BALTIMORE.” That city celebrated its first successful experiments with the daguerreotype process on October 31, 1839, following on the heels of initial achievements in New York and Philadelphia after its introduction in Paris.8
 A decade later, Pollock took out a paid notice in the November 10, 1849 edition of Baltimore’s The Sun to announce the opening of his first photographic gallery at 147 Lexington Street, where patrons “in want of a first-rate picture … [should] call at the well-known and popular Daguerreian Rooms.”9
 In January 1850, Pollock relocated his business to a more desirable site at 155 Baltimore Street, where he claimed to maintain “one of the best, full sized cameras in the world—the most conveniently arranged and elegantly furnished rooms, with a private dressing apartment for ladies, in charge of one of their own sex.”10
 Only a year after he opened his studio, Pollock received a silver medal for his daguerreotypes at the 1850 Maryland Institute Fair.11
 He won an even more prestigious prize the following year, when he received second-place recognition statewide.

Based on this early critical success, it should not be surprising that Pollock’s newly opened studio quickly became popular among Baltimore’s high society.12
 Yet, his immodestly written paid advertisements in The Sun, the city’s most read newspaper, and his profit-driven relocation suggest his interest in a different, and more lucrative, target market: the burgeoning middle and working classes. His choice of materials and means of production support this claim. Unlike other more esteemed daguerreotype studios in the United States, Pollock purchased his materials from suppliers rather than producing them in-house.13
  For instance, whereas the venerated New York-based photographer Mathew Brady designed his own photographic cases, Pollock almost certainly ordered his in bulk from manufacturers like William Shew in Boston. Shew’s wooden cases resemble Pollock’s example (Fig. 3), wrapped in imitation leather—a cheap alternative made of paper pressed in dies to resemble tooling—and embossed with a delicate design of roses.14
 Additionally, the truncated stamp “EIX” at the lower right of the daguerreotype plate corresponds to the documented, yet not widely used, hallmark “PHOENIX” (Fig. 4) of a French platemaker active between 1848 and 1856.15
 Throughout the 1840s, American plates like the Scovill brand were the most popular among daguerreotype studios in the United States.16
In 1848, however, French plates began to flood the American market due to their low cost of production resulting from reduced silver thickness. Daguerreotype historians Floyd and Marion Rinhart assert that “most of the imported plates were well rolled and made well but generally not the equal in weight and craftsmanship to […] American plates.”17
 Although less costly than other more desirable options, the embossed case and hallmarked plate indicate Pollock’s ambition to achieve a refined aesthetic presentation through mass-produced, high-quality products. His choice in materials demonstrates that he, like his target clientele, aimed to rise toward greater social and economic importance through now affordable modes of portraiture.

Around 1850, two young women entered Pollock’s popular new studio to have their picture taken together. This decision alone suggests something of their social position. Though respectable and aspirational, Pollock’s Baltimore practice was not an equivalent of Brady’s in New York or Southworth & Hawes in Boston.18
 Perhaps these two customers read about his “private dressing apartment for ladies,” which may have supplied their props and costume jewelry. Alternatively, they may have arrived wearing their own earrings, brooches, bracelets, and rings. In either case, these sitters intended to inscribe social identity and claim presence through the (literal) highlighting of their jewels (Emily Wehby further discusses the role of props and accessories in the presentation of social status in her essay linked here). Indeed, John Tagg writes that “to ‘have one’s portrait done’ was one of the symbolic acts by which individuals from the rising social classes made their ascent visible to themselves and others [...].”19
 The plate of this portrait bears at least seven distinct applications of gold and red dry-powdered pigment painted directly on the metal surface holding the imprint of each jewel (Fig. 5). These hand-colored highlights would have been requested by the clients and applied with a finely-pointed camel-hair brush by a studio assistant. According to Beaumont Newhall, the best daguerreotype photographers preferred to leave their products uncolored.20
 He cites an article from the April 1854 edition of the Photographic Art-Journal to substantiate this assertion: “Although some of our finest artists use this style of coloring, they must in their own minds condemn it, as they know that they are working to please the bad tastes of the community and not their own.”21
 The highlights reveal Pollock’s willingness to sacrifice artistic purity for profit, as well as his sitters’ lack of interest in or awareness of highbrow conventions in portraiture. Meanwhile, the simple oval window mat, which lacks the patterning available on more expensive options, suggests that the sitters’ bejeweled posturing—further emphasized by the hand-colored highlights—may not match their true social or economic status.

While the object encodes information about social class through materiality, the image offers insights into the fashioning of mid-nineteenth-century female self-identity through pose and attire as prescribed by contemporary sources like Godey’s Lady’s Book. In the January 1850 edition of his eponymous journal, Louis A. Godey described his publication as a “magazine of elegant literature” designed to “serve the best interests of Woman.”22
 As documented by literary scholar Joseph Michael Sommers, Godey held that the “family circle was the domain of the woman, her ‘empire of the home’,” and that “the beneficial influence of a woman’s cultivated intellect could only better the American society.”23
 His publication covered topics he considered germane to the “empire of the home,” such as fashion, dress, household management, and child rearing.24
 In a frequently-cited article from the May 1849 edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the contributor T. S. Arthur outlines a prescriptive mandate for proper female presentation before the lens of a daguerreotype camera:

In order to obtain a good picture, […] it is also necessary to dress in colors that do not reflect too much light. For a lady, a good dress is of some dark or figured material. White, pink, or light blue must be avoided. Lace work, or a scarf or shawl sometimes adds much to the beauty of the picture…Light dresses are in all cases to be avoided.25

These recommendations, though imperious, are responsive to the demands of daguerreotype technology. Elsewhere in his writing, Arthur warns “many good ladies” about the “magnetic attraction” they may feel before the lens:26

A sense of suffocation is a common feeling among persons of delicate nerves and lively fancies, who find it next to impossible to sit still […]. No wonder so many Daguerreotypes have a strange, surprised look […]. Of course, these various impressions are all the result of an excited imagination and an effort to sit perfectly still and look composed. Forced ease is actual constraint, and must appear so. In Daguerreotype portraits this is particularly apparent.27

 

Arthur’s patronizing instructional text presupposes a female reader lacking personal agency and marked by “delicate nerves and lively fancies” that prevent self-assured composure during the long exposure time required by the daguerreotype. This association between femininity and overexcitability follows a long tradition of discourse in philosophy, medicine, art, and literature, which historically suggested that women possessed more active imaginations than men, making them more easily aroused and susceptible to dangerous passions.28
 In her book Moved by Love: Inspired by Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-century France, art historian Mary Sheriff explains that the entry for “Femme” in the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–65), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, proposed that the “delicacy of their organs” rendered women less capable of sustained concentration.29
 This accepted physiological model was supported by other Enlightenment texts, such as Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme (1775), which argued that overactive sensory organs left women constantly distracted.30
 The feminist American studies scholar Amy Kaplan observes that this deep-rooted understanding of femininity and patriarchal language of domesticity—demonstrated here through gendered instructions pertaining to mid-nineteenth-century photographic technologies—infused Godey’s Lady’s Book throughout its forty-eight years of publication. Kaplan reminds us that Sarah Josepha Hale, the magazine’s influential editor, vehemently opposed the women’s rights movement, which she deemed “the attempt to take woman away from her empire of home.”31

            Likely produced in late 1849 or early 1850, Pollock’s Portrait of Two Women Holding a Book offers two diverging individual responses to Arthur’s widely read May 1849 article. The sitter at right rigidly adheres to Godey’s instructions. She wears a “good dress […] of some dark or figured material” with “lace work” at the collar. Her gaze, directed away from the camera, does not fall prey to the “magnetic attraction” of the lens. Her slightly furrowed brow and downturned lips imply the “forced ease” needed for constraint. The three-quarter pose, dark attire, and non-emotive expression may have also been encouraged by Pollock’s studio: a contemporaneous half-plate daguerreotype portrait of a male sitter mirrors the appearance of the woman at right and similarly includes a subtle gilt highlight below the collar (Fig. 6). A study in contrasts, the female sitter at left in Portrait of Two Women Holding a Book confidently and defiantly rejects all of Arthur’s—and perhaps the photographer’s—prescriptive orders. She wears what appears to be a light-colored dress without a lace collar and confronts the lens with a self-assured gaze. She smiles playfully and places her left hand protectively on her neighbor’s shoulder. In her right hand, she holds a book—definitively not a popular magazine. She boldly displays her individual style through a profusion of jewelry, which includes two gold earrings, a brooch, a bracelet, and a ring on her right index finger. These objects, either brought from home or borrowed from the studio, suggest a spirited and sportive approach to the process of sitting for a studio portrait. Her expression shows no sign of a “strange, surprised look” and suggests zero “effort to sit perfectly still and look composed.” She not only eschews the gender expectations supplied by literary magazines, but also combats the technological limitations of the daguerreotype through her smile, an atypical approach to posing during long exposure that simultaneously contests traditional notions of feminine concentration and bodily control. With her arm around her portrait companion, she appears to say: Godey’s influence will not last long. Both sitters evince different attitudes and individual approaches to the fashioning of female self-identity through new technologies of portraiture in the mid-nineteenth century.

            As a material object and representational image, Henry Pollock’s Portrait of Two Women Holding a Book subsists as an inscription of social identity and a physical description of individual presence. Photography historian Graham Clarke asks: "[In] what sense can a literal image express an inner world and being of an individual before the camera?”32
 In this case, the literal image reveals two individual responses to mid-nineteenth century conventions of female self-identity. Though the connection to Godey’s Lady’s Book remains speculative, the popular journal provides a context for interpreting this portrait and a framework for illuminating the contemporaneous discourse surrounding daguerreotype technology and gender. Simultaneously, the material object, which houses this image, discloses the social and economic aspirations of its maker, who was, at the closure of his studio in 1889, the most enduring of Baltimore’s early portrait-photography practitioners.33

• 1Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” History of Photography 24:3 (2000), 262.
• 2Batchen, “Vernacular,” 262; John Tagg, “A Democracy of the Image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production,” in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 37.
• 3Batchen, “Vernacular,” 263.
• 4Batchen, “Vernacular,” 269.
• 5“Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830-1898,” Cleveland Museum of Art, accessed September 10, 2021, https://www.clevelandart.org/research/in-the-library/collection-in-focus/godeys-ladys-book-1830-1898.
• 6Geoffrey Batchen, “Light and Dark: The Daguerreotype and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 86:4 (December 2004), 764. The following description of the daguerreotype process comes from this source. For visual demonstrations of the daguerreotype process, readers should consult “The Daguerreotype – Photographic Processes Series – Chapter 2 of 12” produced by the George Eastman Museum.
• 7Ludwig Pfau, writing in 1877, quoted in Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre (1787-1851), The World’s First Photographer (Cleveland: World, 1956), 98.
• 8Ross J. Kelbaugh, “Dawn of the Daguerreian Era in Baltimore, 1839-1849,” The Daguerreian Annual (1998), 2.
• 9The Sun (Baltimore), November 10, 1849.
• 10The Sun (Baltimore), January 11, 1850.
• 11Kelbaugh, “Dawn,” 15. Pollock won a silver medal for “Daguerreotype Groups.” It remains unclear whether this category refers to group portraiture or to groups of daguerreotypes with different subjects.
• 12Kelbaugh, “Dawn,” 15.
• 13Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1961), 128.
• 14Newhall, The Daguerreotype, 128; Richard Stenman (The Better Image®), interview with conservator, April 5, 2021.
• 15Floyd Rinhart and Marion Rinhart, “Notes on the Daguerreotype Plate,” The New Daguerreian Journal 3:2 (January 1975), 14.
• 16Rinhart and Rinhart, “Notes,” 5. The following information on French plates comes from this source.
• 17Rinhart and Rinhart, “Notes,” 5.
• 18Newhall, The Daguerreotype, 128.
• 19Tagg, “A Democracy,” 37.
• 20Newhall, The Daguerreotype, 96.
• 21Photographic Art-Journal (April 1854), as quoted in Newhall, The Daguerreotype, 96.
• 22Louis A. Godey, Godey’s Lady’s Book (January 1850), as quoted in Joseph Michael Sommers, “Sarah Hale and the Construction of Sentimental Nationalism,” College Literature 37:3 (Summer 2010), 43.
• 23Godey, as quoted in Sommers,” Sarah Hale,” 43.
• 24Godey, as quoted in Sommers,” Sarah Hale,” 43-44.
• 25T.S. Arthur, “American Characteristics.; No. V.—The Daguerreotypist,” Godey's Lady's Book 38 (May 1849), 355.
• 26Arthur, “American Characteristics,” 353.
• 27Arthur, “American Characteristics,” 353.
• 28Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9.
• 29Sheriff, Moved by Love, 46.
• 30Sheriff, Moved by Love, 46.
• 31Sarah Josepha Hale, as quoted in Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70:3 (September 1998), 585.
• 32Graham Clarke, “The Portrait in Photography” in The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 101.
• 33Kelbaugh, “Dawn,” 14.