The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839–1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (review)

The task of writing a survey of the history of photography presents numerous challenges. What images to include, what themes to foreground, and which persons and subjects to highlight are only a few of the many questions that require consideration. In The Origins of American Photography, Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspenwall present one of the most thorough overviews yet of American photography’s first fifty years. Like several other photographic surveys from the past two decades—including Maria Morris Hambourg’s The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century (1993) and Merry A. Foresta’s At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (2003)—their study is centered on a specific body of images from an institutional collection, in this case the Hallmark Photographic Collection, built by Davis over the past three decades and recently presented to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

In many respects this book serves as a celebration of this extraordinary collection and the generosity of Hallmark’s gift. At 358 pages with 606 tritone and color reproductions, it highlights quite handsomely the breadth and quality of the collection. From early daguerreotypes to an assortment of paper photographs created before George Eastman’s Kodak camera— whose introduction in 1888 would revolutionize photography—the Hallmark Photographic Collection contains both iconic and lesser-known images that when seen together permit one to showcase the main outlines of the medium’s early history in America. Of note, the book also serves as a companion to Davis’s earlier survey of twentieth-century American photography, An American Century of Photography, first published in 1995 and updated in 1999. This volume was also centered on images drawn from the Hallmark collection.

Both the book’s strengths and its limitations as a comprehensive survey grow out of its focus on images from one collection. Davis is a senior scholar in the field of photographic history and has built a collection rich in beauty and diverse in scope. One of its highlights is American daguerreotypes, and Davis and Aspenwall devote four of their eight chapters to the history of the daguerreotype in America. These chapters bring together much scholarship—some new and some old—concerning the history of the process and its leading practitioners. In a clear and engaging manner the authors demonstrate how popular this new visual technology became and begin to investigate the role that daguerreotypes played in antebellum America. Examples illustrate well the work of key figures from different regions of the fast-growing nation. Though famous practitioners like Mathew Brady and Southworth & Hawes are well-represented, the collection’s greater strength is the large number of plates—many by unknown makers—that reveal the variety of subjects that daguerreotypists chose to depict and the complex interaction that evolved between photographers and their subjects.

In the book’s second half Davis and Aspenwall investigate various photographic processes and traditions that became popular principally after the daguerreotype’s demise in the late 1850s. Not only do many more individuals take up photography during this period, but the interest in experimentation with different processes, formats, and usages also continues to grow. Whereas the study goes into great detail regarding the history of the daguerreotype, Davis and Aspenwall pay less attention to the new technologies that photographers were developing during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Instead, their focus is on the roots of documentary expression during the Civil War and the role that commercial photographers played in mediating America’s understanding of its lands and its peoples. Again, the Hallmark Photographic Collection is well-suited to explore these subjects, but the emphasis here on compiling a record of significant practitioners tends to overshadow the analysis of photography’s larger cultural and technological legacy.

This...