Tom Crewe writes about 19th-century photography in the London Review of Books - Camille Silvy was an early and fashionable practitioner of the art:
The apparent sombreness of most Victorian sitters has fostered many modern myths, the most common being that their expression is a product of long exposure times, which required people to remain tense and still. In fact, exposure times were already short by the 1860s, especially if the light was good, and later in the century almost instantaneous.
Victorians kept their mouths shut largely because the conventions of portrait photography were those of the painted portrait: you didn’t smile for Reynolds, so you didn’t smile for Silvy. (Sometimes people did. We even have a photo of Queen Victoria grinning, though she didn’t know she was being snapped.)
And later he quotes some top Victorian snark:
William Moens, a gentleman photographer travelling in southern Italy in 1865, was kidnapped by brigands along with his clergyman companion. One man was to be set free to raise the alarm and the ransom, and the two friends drew straws. Moens lingered in captivity for 102 days before paying £5100 for his freedom.
When he shortly thereafter produced his two-volume English Travellers and Italian Brigands: A Narrative of Capture and Captivity, the Pall Mall Gazette hoped the brigands’ next victim would be "a gentleman of greater literary ability".
As ever, the Victorians prove to be less Victorian than we imagine.
Whatever Moens's literary ability, his account of his captivity did run to a second edition, and was translated into several languages. He used the earnings from it to build a school near his home in Boldre.
ReplyDeleteI bet that's more than the sneering metropolitan liberal from the Pall Mall Gazette ever did.
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