III: Making, Not Taking: Portrait Photography in the 19th Century

The “types” accorded with western expectations of “authentic” Japanese clothing and customs that were often at odds with the contemporary government’s policy of rapid and wholesale modernization.

By the time this photograph of a samurai was staged, it would have been illegal to don a topknot or the warrior’s double swords, which were considered stigmas of the country’s feudal past.

The Meiji-era photographs in the Davis Museum collection were purchased by Mary Alice Knox, a professor of history at Wellesley College, during her travels to India, China, and Japan in the 1880s.

In this way, photographs that were produced expressly to appeal to the tastes of foreign tourists were seen as reliable documents to be used as educational materials in the first course on the history of Asian civilizations offered at Wellesley College.

Here, a judero stands in front of a painted backdrop depicting the cathedral in Mexico City—a fitting setting, for he is purveyor of Judas effigies.

The representations of Judas, made with hay and rag, were traditionally purchased and burned by church-goers on the eve of Easter Sunday to exorcise evil from the community.

The tradition originated in Orthodox and Catholic communities across Europe and was introduced to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the early nineteenth century, making it a familiar, if dwindling, sight for owners of this carte de visite in Europe.

Here, a fabricated rural setting frames a young flower vendor. The woman stands in profile to reveal a child who hangs from her shoulders while she works.

The specificity of the pose and setting are typical of the depiction of street vendors—appearing archaic yet essential to sustaining the lifestyle of the newly urbanized Mexican bourgeoisie.

Otto Schoefft operated one of the most prominent portrait studios in Cairo in the second half of the nineteenth century. One popular travel handbook recommends as a souvenir Schoefft’s “fine collection of groups of natives,” also known as the 25 Remarkable Types.

While many of his souvenir photographs appear to have been made outdoors, in reality, Schoefft manufactured elaborate, picturesque settings inside his studio to create images that catered to his clientele’s desire for “authentic” (i.e. exotic) scenes from Egyptian life.

However, these screens would have never appeared at ground level as they do in the photographs.

A means for Egyptian women to observe urban life without being seen, mashrabiyah were always located at least ten feet above the street level.

Despite these cultural discrepancies, Schoefft’s souvenir photographs were reproduced as “documents” in a wide variety of contexts, from illustrations in popular guidebooks, to anthropological and ethnographic studies.

Studies such as this portfolio on world ethnography take the pictorial information in Schoefft’s photographs at face value, decontextualizing the manufactured origins of imagery that was created for tourists, and perpetuating Orientalist stereotypes within so-called scientific studies.

Photographers who descended from settler-colonial families, such as Walter S. Bowman, created picture postcards of Native Americans that were mass-produced as souvenirs for visitors to reservations or traveling Wild West shows.

The carefully arranged outfits and the straightforward pose of these three men indicates that this postcard was made as a collector’s item for travelers to Oregon.

All photographs of individuals in indigenous dress were not necessarily created to perpetuate exoiticist ideas of a singular Native American identity.

The fact that this woman appears in a portrait studio with a simple painted backdrop and contemporary rug, as opposed to a more contrived, theatrical setting, suggests that she was responsible for commissioning and constructing this portrait of herself.

Indeed, in the early 1900s it became common to have one’s portrait printed as a postcard for personal use.

A message written in Ho-Chunk on the back of this postcard demonstrates that these two men visited the portrait studio of their choice to create a record of their lives.

Local photography studios, drugstores, and stationers created images of Native Americans in both Euro-American and indigenous dress among diverse settings that attest to a variety of lived experiences and histories.

Still, a general lack of context and the buildup of stock images often led to mislabeled reprints that risked becoming propaganda for reservation policies or missionary activities.