This essay was first written for a Yale University graduate seminar with Alan Trachtenberg, whose guidance and support have been invaluable. Thanks also to John Wood, Susanna Blumenthal, Eric Papenfuse, Kevin Parks, Wendell Gibson, John Flukes, and Deborah Hornblow for their careful readings, insightful comments, and encouragement.

1. Approximately 95% of all daguerreotypes were portraits, and the daguerreotype became far more widespread in America than in any other country. On the exuberance with which Americans reacted to daguerreotype portraits, see Sobieszek, Robert A. and Appel, Odette M., The Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes, 1843–1862 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), xiGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, “Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype, 1839–1851,” in The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, ed. Wood, John (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 60–73Google Scholar; Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 88–89Google Scholar; and Newhall, Beaumont, The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 27–39Google Scholar. The quotations are from Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Prophetic Pictures,” in Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Kazin, Alfred (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1966), 54–62Google Scholar. See also Miller, Edwin Haviland, Salem is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 109–110Google Scholar. “The Prophetic Pictures” was published in Hawthorne's collection, Twice-told Tales, and the story, Hawthorne says in a footnote, “was suggested by an anecdote of [Gilbert] Stuart, related in Dunlap's History of the Arts of Design.”

2. Hawthorne, , “Prophetic Pictures,” 61–66Google Scholar.

3. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Bode, Carl (New York: Penguin, 1981), 106Google Scholar; see also Meyer, Donald H., “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” American Quarterly 27 (12 1975): 585–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the tropes of head and heart in antebellum culture, see Chapman, John Jay, “Doctor Howe,” Learning and Other Essays (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910), 89–148Google Scholar; Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic and Modern (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1961), 36–114Google Scholar; and Rosell, Garth M., “Charles G. Finney: His Place in the Stream of American Evangelicalism,” in The Evangelical Tradition in America, ed. Sweet, Leonard (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 131–37Google Scholar.

4. Hawthorne, , “Prophetic Pictures,” 61–66Google Scholar. In 1842, five years after Hawthorne's story, Edgar Allan Poe published a similar story, “The Oval Portrait,” which resembles “The Prophetic Pictures” in the tension between the portrait and the self. See Poe, , “The Oval Portrait,” in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Davidson, Edward H. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 171–74, 501Google Scholar.

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6. Trachtenberg, Alan, “The Daguerreotype: American Icon,” in American Daguerreotypes From the Matthew R. Isenburg Collection (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1989), 16Google Scholar; Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11, 47Google Scholar; Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1–7, 55–62Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), xiii—xvii, 1–32Google Scholar; and Fogel, Robert William, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 354–62Google Scholar.

7. Sekula, Allan, “The Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Artforum (01 1975): 28Google Scholar; and Meyer, “American Intellectuals,” 585–603.

8. Trachtenberg, “Mirror,” 60–73; Samuel F. B. Morse, quoted in Sobieszek, and Appel, , Spirit of Fact, ixGoogle Scholar; and Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Trachtenberg, Alan (New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Island, 1980), 71–82Google Scholar.

9. Root, M. A., The Camera and the Pencil; or the Heliographic Art … (Philadelphia: M. A. Root, 1864), 143Google Scholar; Emerson, quoted in Newhall, Beaumont, The Daguerreotype in America (New York: Dover, 1976), 77Google Scholar; and Tocqueville, quoted in Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 43Google Scholar; also 21–70. Trachtenberg notes that an “idea current among painters … was that art served an important moral function. By its lofty themes and harmonious composition it refined the senses, cultivated sensibility, elevated the mind and the emotions — and thus served the spiritual life of the Republic” (35).

10. Southworth, Albert Sands, “The Early History of Photography in the United States,” in Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Newhall, Beaumont (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 41Google Scholar.

11. Josiah Hawes, quoted in Isenburg, Matthew R., “Southworth and Hawes: The Artists,” in Wood, , Daguerreotype, 75Google Scholar; see also, in the same catalogue, Ken Appollo, “Southworth and Hawes: The Studio Collection,” 79–90; Sobieszek, and Appel, , Spirit of Fact, xi, 157Google Scholar; Southworth and Hawes, 1846 advertisement, reproduced in Floyd, and Rinhart, Marion, The American Daguerreotype (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 78Google Scholar; Melville, Herman, Pierre or the Ambiguities (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 254Google Scholar; and American Daguerreotypes From the Matthew R. Isenburg Collection, 107–8. For a full account of Southworth and Hawes's partnership, see also Moore, Charles, “Two Partners in Boston: The Careers and Daguerreian Artistry of Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1975)Google Scholar.

12. Southworth and Hawes's 1853 advertisement, quoted in Isenburg, “South-worth and Hawes,” 74; Southworth and Hawes's 1846 advertisement, in Rinhart and Rinhart, American Daguerreotype, 78; and Southworth, , “The Early History of Photography in the United States,” in Newhall, , Photography, 43Google Scholar; see also Root, , Camera, 146Google Scholar.

13. Plate sizes are as follows: whole plate, 6½ × 8½ inches; half-plate, 4¼ × 5½ inches; quarter-plate, 3¼ × 4¼ inches; sixth-plate, the most common size, 2¾ × 3¾ inches; and ninth-plate, 2 × 2½ inches. See Wood, , Daguerreotype, 117Google Scholar; and Foresta, Merry A. and Wood, John, Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 36Google Scholar.

14. Hawes, quoted in Wood, , Daguerreotype, 118Google Scholar; Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 57, 72, 85–88Google Scholar; and Hawthorne, , The House of Seven Gables (New York: Signet, 1961), 45Google Scholar.

15. Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 88Google Scholar; and Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, 26Google Scholar.

16. Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 79Google Scholar.

17. Singal, Daniel Joseph, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly (1987): 15Google Scholar; Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 19–20Google Scholar; Keniston, Kenneth, “Stranded in the Present,” Varieties of Psychohistory, ed. Kren, George M. and Rappoport, Leon H. (New York: Springer, 1976), 251–55Google Scholar; Keniston, , The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960), 209–40Google Scholar; and Keniston, , Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 237–56Google Scholar. Although Keniston is concerned with the 20th century, his argument also applies to 19th-century conditions.

18. Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 188–89Google Scholar; and Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 9Google Scholar. On the modernist impulse of authenticity, see also Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981)Google Scholar; Lears, , “Sherwood Anderson: Looking for the White Spot,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Lears, Jackson and Fox, Richard Wightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 12–38Google Scholar; and Higham, John, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in The Origins of Modern Consciousness, ed. Weiss, John (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 25–48Google Scholar. The internal “instinct for freedom” comes from Nietzsche; see The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufman, Walter (New York: Vintage, 1967)Google Scholar.

19. Singal, “American Modernism,” 8–17; William Carlos Williams, quoted in Singal, “American Modernism,” 13; and William James, quoted in Meyer, “American Intellectuals,” 585.

20. Davidson, Cathy N., “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Fall 1990), 676Google Scholar; Trachtenberg, “Mirror,” 65; Trachtenberg, “Daguerreotype, 15; and Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (New York: Dover, 1939), 101–22, 138–52Google Scholar.

21. Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 189Google Scholar. On the calotype, see Newhall, , History of Photography, 43–56Google Scholar; and Trachtenberg, “Daguerreotype,” 15. Henry Fox Talbot took out a series of patents for his calotype process, but his mildly restrictive patents had little to do with America's preference for the daguerreotype over the calotype (the forerunner to the modern negative-to-positive process) for the following reasons: Talbot's American patent was not issued until June 1847; and the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia obtained the American rights and aggressively but unsuccessfully marketed the calotype, which was actually cheaper to use than the daguerreotype process. Until the mid-1850s, Americans overwhelmingly preferred the unique “productions on silver” of the daguerreotype over the easily reproducible “impressions on paper” of the negative-to-positive calotype process. According to Dolores Kilgo, the “national bias” for the daguerreotype also stemmed from its perceived “photographic veracity” and accuracy. See Taft, , Photography, 102–22Google Scholar; and Kilgo's excellent article on the efforts of the Langenheim Brothers to market the calotype, “The Alternative Aesthetic: The Langenheim Brothers and the Introduction of the Calotype in America,” in Wood, , Daguerreotype, 27–57, quote on 36Google Scholar.

22. Because so few of Southworth and Hawes's daguerreotypes are dated, it is impossible to trace the incremental change in emphasis from sincerity to theatricality based on the images themselves. But all the images shown and discussed here, and the large bulk of Southworth and Hawes's daguerreotype production, occurred between 1843 and 1860. I have selected images for discussion based on representativeness and “richness” in the hidden or implied text in the image. As with all texts, there are perhaps infinite interpretations. My reading reflects the historical context and ways of representing identity in antebellum culture.

23. Southworth, “Early History,” 43; Twain, Mark, Roughing It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 197Google Scholar; and Sobieszek, and Appel, , Spirit of Fact, xvi—xviiGoogle Scholar.

24. Higham, John, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–1860 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: William L. Clements Library, 1969), 1–28Google Scholar; Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 196–97Google Scholar; and Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 7–50Google Scholar.

25. Southworth and Hawes, 1846 advertisement, in Rinhart and Rinhart, , American Daguerreotype, 78Google Scholar; and Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 196–97Google Scholar.

26. Snelling, Henry H., The History and Practice of the Art of Photography; or, the Production of Pictures Through the Agency of Light … (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849), 41Google Scholar; and Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, 46Google Scholar.

27. Godey's Lady's Book, quoted in Halttunen, , Confidence Men, 72Google Scholar.

28. Cover, Robert M., Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 4–7, 249–52Google Scholar; and Levy, Leonard, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 59–108Google Scholar.

29. Sobieszek, and Appel, , Spirit of Fact, 12–13Google Scholar.

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31. Sobieszek, and Appel, , Spirit of Fact, 12–13Google Scholar.

32. Higham, , From Boundlessness, 6–7Google Scholar; Whitman, Walt, “Song of the Open Road,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Bradley, Sculley and Blodgett, Harold W. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 151Google Scholar; Orvell, , Real Thing, 6–20Google Scholar; and Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, 60–70Google Scholar. Trachtenberg and Orvell provide excellent discussions of Whitman and the daguerreotype.

33. Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, 70Google Scholar; Whitman, Walt, “Pictures,” in Bradley, and Blodgett, , Leaves of Grass, 642Google Scholar. On Whitman's modernism, see also Trachtenberg, Alan, “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Greenspan, Ezra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 194–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Hawthorne, , House of Seven Gables, 79–80, 85, 156–57, 160–63, 187, 191–92, 267Google Scholar; and Ronald Bush, quoted in Singal, “American Modernism,” 15 Holgrave's plea to Phoebe, “Shall we never, never get rid of this past?” is far different from Ernest Renan's observation in 1882 that nations require “forgetting” or the monumentalization of “historical error” in order to support their illusion of being one people. Holgrave was not advocating “forgetting”: rather, he sought change and reform. For a wonderful discussion of nationality as it relates to “forgetting” and “becoming” over “being,” see Trachtenberg, Alan, “Conceivable Aliens,” Yale Review 82 (10 1994): 48–56Google Scholar (Renan's quote is on page 51).

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36. In terms of the exchange of eyes, Karl Mannheim notes that eye contact provides a form of egalitarian “ecstasy” — the ecstasy of identifying with the physical point of view of another, “seeing through the other's eyes into one's own, as a basis of a “truly democratic culture.” See Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, 68Google Scholar; and Mannheim, , “The Problem of Ecstasy,” in Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 239–46Google Scholar.

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38. Thomas Mann, quoted in Van O'Connor, William, The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 5Google Scholar. One might argue that Southworth and Hawes's images of the grotesque can be considered sublime in the narrow and strictly aesthetic sense of combining formal pleasure and beauty with a negative, jarring, or shocking motif. Even in this definition of the sublime, though, their images of the grotesque lacked the lofty and exalted status (in the eyes of antebellum viewers) that is always a central aspect of the sublime. See, for example, Klein, Richard, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), xi, 62–63, 120–22, 188–89Google Scholar.

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40. M. Susan Barger and William B. White speculate that Easterly depicts an image of a man afflicted with leprosy, but they provide no evidence to support their contention, nor do they discuss the distortion caused by the lens or plate, the close vantage point, or by vignetting devices. See Barger, and White, , The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 82–83Google Scholar.

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