“The fraternity throughout the world”: American and German Photography, Interactions from 1840 to 1890

imageShana Lopes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History of Rutgers University. In 2015-16, she was a Research Fellow of the Consortium. Read more about her research during her fellowship here. Histories of early photography have routinely focused on technological developments in France, England, and the United States, seldom mentioning the geographic area we call “Germany” today. This is a surprising omission given the influential achievements of German opticians, chemists, scientists, and photographers. Moreover, these accounts often discuss each country’s affairs in isolation from others despite the fact that historians have long regarded immigration as one of the most significant social phenomena of the nineteenth century. Embracing a transatlantic approach to the history of the medium, my dissertation understands photographic technology as a vehicle of cross-cultural dialogue that operated through patent sales, published writings, exhibitions, photographers, and the photographs they produced. It explores the specific intersection of the United States and Germany, uncovering their exchange of photographic technology, photographs, and ideas about the medium between the 1840s and 1880s, a period when roughly six million Germans immigrated to America’s shores. My dissertation, “‘The Intimate Connection’: German Influence on American Photography, 1840 to 1890” brings to light this intercultural dialogue that took place between German and American photographers and thus points to a transnational history of the medium that more fully acknowledges the impact of immigration on photographic technology. In the late nineteenth century, the US came to dominate the world in photo technology, leading to such developments as the Kodak camera, Percival Lowell’s photos of Mars’ surface, and the massive industrialization of dry-plate manufacture. This dissertation ultimately suggests that access to German technological developments through a culture of exchange fostered by immigration set the stage for American photo-technical dominance in the late nineteenth century onward. Through the generous support of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, I spent considerable time delving into the archives at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania houses the Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride Collection, composed of hundreds of stereographic views, carte-de-visites, and magic lantern slides. Throughout the mid- to late nineteenth-century, Dr. Kirkbride, who was the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, commissioned and purchased photographic objects for his patients, as he believed they offered mental health benefits, that is, a means “to divert the attention of some from habitual trains of thought.” German immigrants William and Frederick Langenheim made many of the early photographs in this collection, which employ the new technology of photographic magic lantern slides, a process they invented, and glass stereographic views. The Kirkbride / Langenheim collaboration represents the first time that photography was used for psychiatric purposes on American soil. These photographs provide critical insight into the Langenheims’ pioneering use of the medium. While University of Pennsylvania’s collection of Langenheim photographs gives an in-depth glimpse into their work for a specific patron, The Library Company of Philadelphia’s holdings of Langenheim photographs is extraordinary for its breadth of photographic processes and subject matter that span the course of their career. Indeed, it underscores at once the scope of their studio’s offerings and their attention to the latest technological equipment. The Library Company, for example, possesses one of the first daguerreotypes of a riot from 1844 taken by the Langenheims. Daguerreotypes are normally laterally reversed, but in their photograph the business signage and demonstrators’ in their photograph are orientated correctly. To do so, the brothers employed either a reversing mirror or prism to counter the reversing effect, thus representing a very early use of this technology. In addition, the Library Company of Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century trade journal collection that I was able to access profoundly influenced the direction of my chapter on the German photo-chemist Dr. Vogel, who was a regular contributor to The Philadelphia Photographer. The Beinecke Library at Yale University houses the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. In its expansive holdings, I found not only correspondence between Stieglitz and German artists and photographers that points to his relationship with German and German-American photographic culture, but also photographs that connects these two circles. The archive, for instance, contains several early portraits of Stieglitz by the German-born, New York photographer William Kurtz, a photographer whom his teacher Dr. Vogel also greatly admired for his vanguard aesthetic vision and his use of the newest photographic technology. My time as a short-term Consortium fellow has been incredibly productive in the research for my dissertation on the intersection of German and American photographic circles in the nineteenth century. The primary source materials I studied added a nuanced understanding of German influence on American photography that has prompted me to rethink how I make my argument. Overall, this fellowship has provided me with amazing resources to move forward with my doctoral work, and by the end of next year I hope to have a complete draft of my dissertation in hand.