Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography

Description

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Notes Chapter 1 The drowned inventor: Bayard, Daguerre, and the curious attractions of early photography The corpse of the drowned inventor The morgue Modes of display and disclosure Recognition Publicity, revelation, and theatricality Notes Chapter 2 The artist as brand: The many faces and signatures of Nadar Signatures, specialties, self-portraits From caricature to photography: réclame and the charged photograph Montage techniques and contexts Notes Chapter 3 Poses of a living statue: Countess de Castiglione and the photographic tableau Fournier: the album as self-portrait Stealthy touch/female diplomacy Sovereign images Reframing Countess Castiglione Authorship Cast from nature Dialectical images Masquerade as non-disguise Non/exhibitionism The legs revisited Notes Chapter 4 Affect as evidence: Dr. Duchenne and the scientific self-portrait Portrait/specimen Animated cadaver Anatomical illustration Authors, instruments, primal scenes Affect as evidence/attention Notes Bibliography Index