The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype by Marcy J. Dinius (review)

The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype examines the daguerreotype in the antebellum United States: how print descriptions shaped the public perception of the new medium and how material and figurative daguerreotypes serve different political and aesthetic ends in print and visual culture. The bulk of the book focuses on the ways that daguerreotypes mediated understandings of race and slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the Liberian Colonization Movement, and the daguerreian discourse of Frederick Douglass. Working with the fact that before most Americans encountered daguerreotypes visually, they experienced the new technology through others’ published first impressions, Marcy J. Dinius traces how these portrayals mediated the public’s relationship to daguerreotypes even as they characterized the medium as unmediated and mechanically objective. This project helps to break down disciplinary divisions as it reads between print and visual texts to appreciate the presence of the daguerreotype within literature and narrative and other literary qualities within daguerreotypes. Presenting the daguerreotype as a constructed “way of seeing . . . rather than as a natural process or a technological effect” (2), The Camera and the Press uses close reading and case study to appreciate the complex relationship between humans and new technology as it plays out in nineteenth-century cultural texts.

Chapter One introduces the history of the daguerreotype in popular antebellum print, focusing on two contradictory ways that American culture understood the new technology: as a mechanically objective product that captures its subject accurately and as a creation of “seemingly supernatural visual effects” (8) made possible by skillful use of the new medium. Dinius offers these opposing characterizations of the daguerreotype in subsequent chapters, examining how they are deployed for political and aesthetic ends.

Chapter Two analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) alongside Gabriel Harrison’s portraits, asserting the importance of the daguerreotype in the novel and the presence of romantic conventions in the daguerreian portraits themselves. Looking closely at “Governor Pyncheon,” an experimental chapter in The House of the Seven Gables that Dinius argues is a kind of daguerreotype, she joins other critics of the novel to conclude that Hawthorne imagines the daguerreotype as a synthesis of the objective and realistic and the subjective and romantic. With the presence of the romantic in this chapter-long daguerreotype, Hawthorne defends the value of the aesthetic and imaginative against the scientific objectivism of the period. Turning then to portraits contemporary with the novel, The Camera and the Press offers Harrison’s daguerreotypes as “highly subjective, composed with an eye toward not only beauty but also narrative,” which “[counter] the idea of daguerreian objectivity” (71). Chapter Three argues that Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), as well as daguerreotypes of and advertisements for the early photographic firm of Southworth and Hawes, favors the aesthetic and artistic over the mechanical and objective.

In Chapters Four through Six, Dinius studies the political use of the discourse of daguerreotypes to mediate race and slavery. Chapter Four, for instance, asserts that Harriet Beecher Stowe uses daguerreotype as a verb to prime readers for a rhetorical mode of representation that is less mediated, more evocative of the “real presence” of human suffering (133), than other modes of representation. Relying on discourse that promotes the medium’s objectivity and verifiability, Stowe daguerreotypes Tom in written form in order to counter the reification of slaves to which typographical icons of fugitive slaves contributed significantly. In Chapter Five, reading popular black daguerreotypist Augustus Washington’s colonialist position alongside the problematic narrative resolution of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dinius aims to offer “a more nuanced, if complicated, picture of the range of political positions on slavery, race relations, and citizenship that were available to both blacks and whites in real life, fiction, and portraiture” (189). This chapter examines how daguerreotypes figure...