Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 & Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art & Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France

CAROL ARMSTRONG

Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. 572 pp.; 143 ills. $54.95

ANN BERMINGHAM

Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

320 pp.; 120 color ills., 180 b/w. $75.00

STEPHEN BANN

Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 264 pp.; 8 color ills., 104 b/w. $50.00

As the recent books of Carol Armstrong, Ann Bermingham, and Stephen Bann make clear, reproductive images--and the broader commercialization of art and its practices that they imply--have emerged from the wings to take art history's center stage. Enthusiasm for the subject, however, was not always so apparent. Consider the memorable assault on photography launched by Charles Baudelaire, who held mechanical reproduction in contempt because of its alliance with science, progress, and verisimilitude. The tale told by the poet in his Salon of 1859 is at once deliciously caustic and genuinely wistful. Photography is something like culture's parvenu, a rapacious upstart mounting a campaign (supported by fame-seeking amateurs, greedy capitalists, and artistes manques) to lay waste to painting. With brush and canvas rendered mute, the daguerreotype goes on to play Ovidian tricks on duped audiences by inducing the Parisian public's metamorphosis into a modern-day Narcissus rushing "to contemplate his trivial image on m etal." (1) Of course, Baudelaire (his friend Nadar's glorious portraits of him notwithstanding) was hardly the only skeptic where the new technology was concerned. Gustave Flaubert, in an 1853 letter to Louise Colet, weighed a love of "originals" and "skillfully drawn" engravings against a hatred of "that mechanical process." (2) A few years later, the Goncourt brothers saw in the colorlessness of black-and-white photography a metaphor for the dreariness of their age. (3)

The various 19th-century skirmishes over the reproductive image help to trace out the lines separating original from copy, artists from amateurs, creative labors from easy recipes, and the exigencies of high art from the commercial endorsement of "good taste." If such oppositions seem familiar, it is in great part because Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) has continued to ensure the vitality of discussion on these matters. Always a key point of reference, his epoch-defining portrayal of the mass-produced image places the increasing degradation of the work of art's aura alongside the revolutionary portent of photographic anti filmic visuality. Yet as The odor Adorno once remarked, "whenever something new becomes visible, immediate, striking, authentic, a long process of formation has preceded it and it has now merely thrown off its shell." (4) This interest in historical formation, in the collision and coalescence of tradition, invention, and contingency, surface s throughout the studies by Armstrong, Bermingham, and Bann. All reveal in different ways that the threat to high art posed by mass culture was neither as inexorable nor as exclusively modern (or modernist) in nature as Benjamin's essay might seem to suggest. Why not, along with our three authors, revisit the rise of reproductive practices and ask how the shell evoked by Adorno was discarded? Were drawing, engraving, or painting destined to be displaced by photography, or does a "long process of formation" bring to light the productive and formally distinct aspects of practices operating in a volatile cultural environment? To what extent are such questions inflected by the social advent of the amateur artist? How might we describe the migration of form taking place between material object, drawn copy, engraved translation, painted representation, and photographic serialization? Is there such a thing as an aesthetics of the reproductive image? Or an aesthetics of amateurism?

What such questions provoke is a move away from the mythology of beginnings and toward the rather messier historical terrain of commercialized consumption, competing modes of image making, and experimental dead ends. Our three authors contribute significantly to that terrain, and this is not simply because of their focus on particular media: in Armstrong's case, the photographically illustrated book in Victorian England; in Bermingham's, the social culture of amateur drawing in the early modern and modern periods; and in Bann's, the dynamic exchange between photographers, reproductive engravers, and academic painters in 19th-century France. Such focus benefits from a willingness to foreground the formal singularities, variegated uses, and shifting contexts of images that historicize for us the functions of visual representation in an increasingly industrialized society. So while all the authors anchor their chosen subject to venerable interpretative models (Roland Barthes, Jurgen Habermas, and Michael Baxanda ll, respectively, intervene at the appropriate junctures as the voices of authority), these same models serve to emphasize rather than systematize the complexity of the images under scrutiny. The result is a fresh look at some of the more notable episodes marking the history of reproductive practices and the gradual commercialization of art: amateur traditions like the picturesque landscape sketch in England; gifted practitioners like Anna Atkins, Francis Frith, or Julia Margaret Cameron; elaborate reproductive engravings of works ranging from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Voeu de Louis XIII(1824) to Paul Delaroche's Himicycle des beaux-arts (1841); and illustrated books like William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) and Charles Darwin's 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).