By Lyle Rexer, June 10, 2025
At the Met I saw the crumpled-up world as it was crumpling. I was thinking of a famous line from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ essay on photography from 1859, in which he said that once we have the pictures, we can dispense with the original reality. “Pull it down or burn it up, if you please,” he wrote. Artificial Intelligence has made this strange dream come true, multiplying the tsunami of images that continue to be made by humans and ushering in an age of recycled reality.
The irony was seeing a revolution begin in such tasteful circumstances. William Schaeffer’s collection of early American photography, which constituted the majority of the exhibition curated by Jeff Rosenheim and now the property of the Metropolitan Museum, resembled the contents of a jewel box – fine and even eye-popping examples of nearly all the genres of early photography, from unsettling post-mortem images to a vast array of portraits to at least one example of the most self-conscious of all subjects – the photographer’s studio. Empty of people and exquisitely registering the window light of a particular moment (Unknown, “Interior of Portrait Studio”1860) this tintype (an image made on blackened iron plate, no tin involved) was one of the most evocative objects in the exhibition. I saw the piece decades ago and it has haunted me ever since as an eerie emblem of modernity’s birthing room.
For out of such studios came pictures of people, places, and things to satisfy a mushrooming desire for whatever might be visible. Very little of this desire had anything to do with art. Instead: self-promotion – fine examples here of trade daguerreotypes, highlighting the subject’s work, and an array of cartes de visite, literally visual visiting cards; industrial constructions – from a playground in Boston to a giant Ferris wheel in Chicago; events, from the evanescent intricacy of a snowfall to an eclipse of the sun and the aftermath of Atlanta’s destruction in the Civil War. (Whether absent from the collection itself or by curatorial decision, there were no pornographic images, an impetus to photography whose importance can no longer be swept under the rug.) The large number of unattributed images in the exhibition further implied the growth of visual fascination. This isn’t a question of inadequate research but the fact that so many people were making photographs, even before the Brownie, that historians will never ID them all. For all its vernacular energy, the exhibition scarcely hinted at the level of popular passion for “the new art” in America, never mind the rest of the world. To take one example, it has been estimated that millions of daguerreotypes--- images on silverplated copper that were cumbersome and expensive to make--- were produced in the US and globally before the medium became obsolete in the 1860s. Photography had not yet turned thirty!
An “optical age,” Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed this emerging regime of the eye. An emerging regime also of celebrity, promotion, exploration, capital expansion, and industrial production, all of it registered – and sometimes engendered – by the camera. Because of its many uses and various audiences, it is impossible to present a coherent single historical narrative about photography. The handiest strategy has always been technological, as one photographic process succeeded another in the advance toward cheaper, faster, more convenient and accurate – as well as more commercially distributable – iterations. So the exhibition offered a dinosaurs’ graveyard of antiquarian objects with odd names, like Woodburytypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes (a homegrown U S medium) as well as stereoscopes and some cumbersome camera hardware. Happily, the exhibition did not present the loss of such species diversity as a march of progress toward the digital wonders of today, but less happily it seemed to miss the opportunity to portray the explosion of methods as an index of the early curiosity about the new medium, as well as its commercial potential. At one point, for example, the U S Patent Office simply stopped accepting applications for photographic processes, with one official dubbing them “humbugotypes.” It was a wonderful jungle of invention, with images suddenly turning up everywhere, even – legend has it – on the chest of an opera singer, who wore the applied image of her affianced under her gown as she performed. Likewise, it might have been intriguing to learn more about the adventures and dangers of the darkroom itself, especially in a time of so many self-taught practitioners. The toxic elements of the alchemical art – mercury and cyanide among others – led to fires, explosions, injuries, and suicides. Whether in text or image, a bit more drama and outré anecdote might have relieved the preciousness.
But these objects felt precious, even in their multiplicity, especially compared to today’s digital mist, “images that never come to ground,” in Sally Mann’s lapidary phrase. Their sheer materiality forced me to rethink the position of art in the phrase “new art.” Again, most of the pictures had no obvious artistic intention, and yet an aesthetic impulse was obvious everywhere. The elaborate framing and casing of even small daguerreotype portraits – here displayed as well as I have ever seen them with a medium so difficult to view – signified the desire to invest personal remembrance with the dignity and status of painted likenesses. Portrait photographers themselves had no models for posing and arranging their subjects except the beaux arts. Other photographs in the collection intentionally or not echoed works of art, including a lovely insinuation of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte by Alice Austen (“Group on Petra, Lake Mahopac”, August 8, 1988.
More profoundly, the very act of framing a scene, object, person or event implies at least a rudimentary formalizing of elements, especially given the strictures of the single lens, so different from human seeing. It seems to say, “Pay attention to what’s inside the box; it’s somehow all related,” even when the photograph’s ontological generosity threatens a true chaos of details. But to so many of the photographers, regardless of their ultimate goals, what they saw within the frame was related, and they seized on the intimation of order. The stark, geometric forms of buildings angling toward an empty playground in Boston (Unknown Maker, “City Proper. Columbus Avenue Playground. Fence on American Steam Gauge Company’s Lot from near Camden Street, December 2, 1904)” captured in a cyanotype (the hued medium of the blueprint), cannot have been purely circumstantial. They anticipated by almost two decades the standard formal language of such modern photographic artists as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. If, as critics tell us, photography was all about objectifying the world, instrumentalizing and colonizing it, the medium was also about poeticizing it, finding in the mundane world occasions for an epiphany – after the fact, of course, revealed by the strange, confined space of the picture.
So it remains. After everything had changed and even memory passed away, after the world was crumpled up, pulled down, burnt up, it was the pictures that were wanted; are wanted still. Pictures with the power to move or attract beyond any nostalgia, any shadow of mortality, perhaps beyond any need to believe that there is a world at all. As they may do for the systems we are creating now, that promise, ultimately, to replace us.
LYLE REXER is a writer, critic and educator who lives in Brooklyn. His novel, “The Book of Crow”, has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil.
UNKNOWN MAKER "Roller Skate and Boot" 1850.
UNKNOWN MAKER "Specimens of New York Bill Posting" 1863.
UNKNOWN MAKER, "Woman Wearing a Tignon" 1850.