My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America, 1840–1860

Review of: "My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America," by Joan L. Severa

My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America, 1840–1860

Review of: "My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America," by Joan L. Severa

Images of a Vanished Era, 1898–1924: The Photographs of Walter C. Schneider

Review of: "Images of a Vanished Era, 1898–1924: The Photographs of Walter C. Schneider," edited by Lucian Niemeyer

Para a cozinha: fazendo, modelando e musealizando a culinária americana

The word kitchen has done as much work in the English language as the people who have toiled in the space the word names. The Bard himself, William Shakespeare, “verbed” the term in 1623, using kitchen to mean serving the food in the space in which it was prepared: “There is a fat friend at your master’s house, That kitchin’d me for you to day at dinner.” A century later, Scots used the term as a synonym for both pleasurable eating and frugality—for seasoning food and for budgeting and provisioning food beyond harvest. By the end of the nineteenth century, kitchening was interchangeable with cooking, food service, and the related work undertaken in this domestic production space. Existing examinations of the American kitchen emphasize the architectural design of the space, often pointing to technological and energy innovations as factors for the space’s changing design over the centuries. Historians of women and labor also stress mechanization, arguing that the technologies touted as labor saving were, in reality, not—in many cases, new technology raised standards and increased women’s work. Understanding this, scholars have focused on women’s decisions about kitchen design and cookery, seeking evidence in diaries, letters, and recipes. Rising research interest in food studies has renewed scholarly attention to the kitchen and its contents and occupants, linking in interesting ways food, material culture, labor, and consumption. In this presentation I discuss how attention to the material and visual evidence of American women’s kitchening, from making food to (re)modeling the workspace of the kitchen itself, improves our understanding of the history of the kitchen derived from prescriptive literature such as household manuals and home economics texts. I consider the related changes in domestic kitchens and American foodways in the United States since the 1840s, when the processes of industrialization shifted the ways Americans worked and ate. Last, I devote attention to the ways in which American museums have and continue to collect and display kitchen objects. Museums depicting preindustrial kitchens often feature cooking demonstrations utilizing the era’s tools and foodways or emphasize the dining experience, while museums with industrial and postindustrial collections display the kitchen and its mass-produced material culture as aesthetically delightful products of design divorced from the foods these objects help to prepare. I hope this presentation may elicit a discussion about what museums should be collecting to represent kitchening in the 21st century

Social currency : A domestic history of the portrait photograph in the United States, 1839-1889

The portrait photograph is such a commonplace in modern American life that it is difficult to imagine a time and a place in which the professionally produced portrait photograph was a novelty, the social and cultural meanings of which were contested by Americans seeking social identity in the years after the Industrial Revolution. This work analyzes the use of the portrait photograph as a consumer good in a status marketplace between 1839, the year the daguerreotype was introduced, and 1889, when George Eastman produced his Kodak system. The daguerreotype, by virtue of its mirrorlike surface and the camera\u27s seeming clairvoyancy, was considered the best method of seeking one\u27s character, and became a strategy to seek out likeminded individuals of character. Unlike portrait makers a generation earlier, professional daguerreotypists advertised themselves as cultural stewards of this test, equating successful likenesses with the person\u27s sincere character, and discouraging unworthy others from sitting before the camera. The increasing demand of the daguerreotype, and the introduction of the cheaper ambrotype and tintype by the Civil War, however, threatened the bourgeois meaning of the portrait photograph, and a strategy of exclusion, in the form of the commercial and domestic parlor, was adopted, discouraging the many from securing their portraits. The introduction of the even cheaper carte de visite (1857) and cabinet card (1866) types of paper photographs permitted widespread exchange of photographs and their collection in albums and their display in the artistic parlor. With improved technology that allowed for proofs to be proffered to the consumer for approval or rejection, retouching the photographic image, coloring the portrait, and an emphasis on the artistic act of posing, the camera\u27s ability to reveal and photograph\u27s ability to witness was questioned. Thus the bourgeois, imitating the genteel of the eighteenth century, secured his or her place in the world. Through a consideration of photography manuals and professional and domestic periodicals, private letters, diaries and journals, and relevant visual and material culture, and the application of recent theory in material culture and consumption, this work analyzes cultural meaning making and the concomitant class formation by mid-nineteenth-century Americans through the creative nexus between photographer and patron

Social currency : A domestic history of the portrait photograph in the United States, 1839-1889

The portrait photograph is such a commonplace in modern American life that it is difficult to imagine a time and a place in which the professionally produced portrait photograph was a novelty, the social and cultural meanings of which were contested by Americans seeking social identity in the years after the Industrial Revolution. This work analyzes the use of the portrait photograph as a consumer good in a status marketplace between 1839, the year the daguerreotype was introduced, and 1889, when George Eastman produced his Kodak system. The daguerreotype, by virtue of its mirrorlike surface and the camera\u27s seeming clairvoyancy, was considered the best method of seeking one\u27s character, and became a strategy to seek out likeminded individuals of character. Unlike portrait makers a generation earlier, professional daguerreotypists advertised themselves as cultural stewards of this test, equating successful likenesses with the person\u27s sincere character, and discouraging unworthy others from sitting before the camera. The increasing demand of the daguerreotype, and the introduction of the cheaper ambrotype and tintype by the Civil War, however, threatened the bourgeois meaning of the portrait photograph, and a strategy of exclusion, in the form of the commercial and domestic parlor, was adopted, discouraging the many from securing their portraits. The introduction of the even cheaper carte de visite (1857) and cabinet card (1866) types of paper photographs permitted widespread exchange of photographs and their collection in albums and their display in the artistic parlor. With improved technology that allowed for proofs to be proffered to the consumer for approval or rejection, retouching the photographic image, coloring the portrait, and an emphasis on the artistic act of posing, the camera\u27s ability to reveal and photograph\u27s ability to witness was questioned. Thus the bourgeois, imitating the genteel of the eighteenth century, secured his or her place in the world. Through a consideration of photography manuals and professional and domestic periodicals, private letters, diaries and journals, and relevant visual and material culture, and the application of recent theory in material culture and consumption, this work analyzes cultural meaning making and the concomitant class formation by mid-nineteenth-century Americans through the creative nexus between photographer and patron