Pencil of Nature: Thoreau's Photographic Register

He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoreau"

It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography . . . I say: no, it was the chemists. For the noème "That-has-been" was only possible on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here . . . like the delayed rays of a star.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Remembering Henry Thoreau in his 1862 eulogy, Ralph Waldo Emerson recalls the pertinacious memory of the man he names "our naturalist," the persistence of his vision: "a photographic register of all he saw and heard." Even casual readers of Thoreau will sense what Emerson means. The commitment Thoreau brought to recording the particular nature of the world he would spend his life observing and his working hours registering in his writing reaches us with the descriptive force of the photographic. In other words, Thoreau sought to record his world as thoroughly and faithfully as photography would claim to do—a claim, in fact, that begins at about the same time that Thoreau would begin his own writing. This photographic register of Thoreau's work has been amplified and illustrated by a thoroughgoing history of reproductions and editions—portraits of the author and his environs—that visually complement the verbal texts, providing us a map for what one Sierra Club edition names "Thoreau Country." Remarkably, however, there has been little critical investigation regarding the register of photography in Thoreau's work, in his writing.¹ This essay sets out to address that neglect in exploring the juxtaposition of photography and writing in Thoreau's work. In demonstrating the overlooked significance of the photographic in Thoreau, I argue that Thoreau engages the new visual technology of representation not merely as a figure in his writing, but as a crucial figure for that writing; photography, in this sense, offers Thoreau a complex image for what, and how, the writer registers the nature of his world.

Emerson's metaphor implies a provocative coincidence of photography and the method of Thoreau's observation, the basis for his writing. The editors of the 1906 Houghton edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau render this coincidence more formal and significant. In the "Publishers' Advertisement" that precedes Emerson's eulogy, we are introduced to two crucial features of this new "complete view" of Thoreau's work: the inclusion of the "Journal" (fourteen volumes in this edition), and the inclusion of photographic reproductions, beginning with the frontispiece portrait prefacing the initial volume (that now iconic image of a partially bearded Thoreau reproduced from an 1856 daguerreotype, one of only two photographic images taken of Thoreau [see figure 1]), and extending throughout the edition in the elegant photographic illustrations (photogravures) of Thoreau's Concord made by the naturalist photographer Herbert Gleason (see figure 2). The publishers emphasize that neither reproduction—the journal recordings nor the photographic prints—should be viewed as merely a supplement to the previously published work. Both, as illustrations and observations, are a piece of that work as such. "Mr. Gleason has made a careful study of all Thoreau's writings, including the manuscript Journal," we are told, "and has explored with equal thoroughness the woods and fields of Concord, visiting the localities mentioned in the Journal and getting photographs, not only of the places themselves, but also of many of the fleeting phenomena of the natural year in the very spots where Thoreau observed them . . . It will be apparent that Mr. Gleason's pictures are in the fullest sense illustrations of the text which they accompany."² This, too, is apparent: the editors suggest for Thoreau's writings and manuscripts an analogy between photographic depiction and natural description; Thoreau has invited the careful...