On November 11, 1851, Frederick Langenheim took out U. S. Patent 7784 for producing photographic images on glass, initially for the magic lantern. The brothers Langenheim found an unlikely partner: Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, director of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane (PHI). This 1849-1865 collaboration brought cutting edge photographic innovation to the PHI—including putting photographic technology in the patients’ hands.[1] Kirkbride used magic lantern shows as a form of therapy. Inpatients, staff, and invited guests attended. One aim of the shows was to reduce the visible boundaries between the sane/insane and to increase the possibility of encounter/exchange. This experiment contrasts with other contemporary examples; patients were often passive, unwitting subjects—pinned like unusual insects by physician/photographers. Notably, Kirkbride forbade photographs of patients; photography was for patients. Instead of a surveillance/colonizing tool, the technology was to deliberately blur social lines. The Langenheims gave free photographic advice to Kirkbride’s amateur photographer son, but the most remarkable amateurs were the patients themselves, beginning in 1854. While this fascinating exchange of power has limited data, there is enough evidence in the archive to raise questions and some preliminary conclusions. In no way did this multi-layered involvement with photography make the insane and sane equal; however, the PHI’s history does offer a unique, early point of encounter and exchange, especially with the idea of patients as photographers.

Emily Godbey received her Ph.D. from U. Chicago and M.F.A. from R.I.S.D. She is interested in difficult content as visual entertainment during the nineteenth century.

This project explores William Henry Jackson’s international photographs for the World’s Transportation Commission (1894-1896) and the ways in which he sought to construct through these images a global frontier of industrialization. Organized under the authority of the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, the World’s Transportation Commission consisted of five members, including Jackson, who traveled the world for eighteen months in search of information and artifacts relating to the history of transportation, and the railroad specifically, for display and educational use in the museum. The expedition was also subsidized by a coterie of U.S. railroad industrialists, including George Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, Levi Leiter, George Westinghouse, and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who possessed vested interested in expanding their corporate empires. Employing visual idioms and Orientalist tropes cultivated in the U.S frontier, Jackson characterized his international subjects as spaces and peoples on the fringe of industrial development and as the foci of Euro-American infrastructural investment and touristic pleasure. In addition to featuring his photographs in a series of forty-eight Harper’s Weekly articles published between February 1895 and September 1897, Jackson presented them throughout a short-lived lecture series in Colorado during summer 1897. Called “100 Minutes in Strange Lands”, Jackson used a bifocal stereopticon to project 125 hand-colored glass lantern slides depicting scenes of ethnographic portraiture, colonial railway systems, “exotic” landscapes, tourist attractions, and industrial labor in India, China, Indonesia, Russia, and other countries. Utilized to create dissolving transitions between images, the stereopticon provided an immersive visual experience to audiences unaccustomed to color pictures imbued with a sense of motion. Free from the controlling hands of patrons at the Field Museum, in the railroad industry, and at Harper’s Weekly, the lectures reveal a shift in Jackson’s photographic eye, offering him the opportunity to present to the public his most unmediated artistic vision for this international body of images. Relative to his earlier work in the western United States, these lantern slides divulge an approach that was more intimate, candid, and more closely attuned to the stylistic conventions of the amateur “snap-shots” of the 1890s. Even so, Jackson tailored his presentation to an audience seeking entertainment and escape during a period of widespread economic difficulty and political corruption by presenting a vision of an enticingly exotic and romantic global frontier—a new, worldwide mission of Manifest Destiny that offers the sense of national purpose that evaporated with the “closing” of the western frontier in 1893. This presentation examines Jackson’s meticulously hand-colored slides as a means to further elucidate the role of experiential media and proto-cinematic technology in bolstering popular notions of U.S. exceptionalism and the global shift of Manifest Destiny around the turn of the twentieth century.

Casey Monroe is a PhD candidate at Boston University whose work focuses on U.S. imperialism in photography and print culture throughout the Gilded Age.

By many accounts, photography's entanglement with imperialism and racial capitalism is as old as the technology itself. By some accounts, it is older. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues following Sylvia Wynter, the violent structures and temporalities of photography's history are perhaps better traced to the global disruptions of 1492. This entanglement continues within the global digital netwoks of the present, where the total commodification of the public sphere seems to foreclose questions of photography's social potential. On the other hand, the democratic dimensions of photographic experience constitute another major rhetorical through line in photography's history. And we might even allow, as does Walter Benjamin, that a pivotal phase of photographic development coincided with the emergence of socialist thought. Photography's socialist dimensions arguably came into sharpest relief between the World Wars, buoyed by two acute crises of Western captialism: the Soviet revolution and the Great Depression. Within the context of this era's global communist movement, photography's apologists drew a sharp line of distinction between the dominant mode of production and technology's social potential. Although currently in the service of capitalist interests and the division of labor, they argued, photography was not inherently capitalistic. Rather, it could also be used to organize workers against capitalist-imperialism, reorienting entrenched working-class enmities toward new forms of allegiance. I consider this episode in photography's history, focusing on print media circulated by the American communist party around 1930. Specifically, I look at a number of images produced and/or distributed by party organizations to foster solidarity among Black and white working-class viewers. Reading these images alongside the Comintern's policy of Black self-determination (i.e. self-government) in the American South, I argue that they sought to provide a site of identification for Black viewers while conveying that the struggle for Black rights had to be waged by all workers alongside the struggle for socialism--a formulation that would appear to dissolve political oppositions of race vs. class. In practice, however, this entailed the careful management of the visible relationship between Black and white workers: instances of antagonism and white working-class chauvinism were symbolically displaced onto the capitalist-imperialist state, while interracial solidarity took the form of literal co-presence and embodied affection. I am concerned with how these visual tactics intersect with the broader discursive field of "Comintern aesthetics" (Glaser and Lee 2020) and what they tell us about photography's capacity for community-building across difference. At times, this visual program evokes what Jodi Dean calls the "negativity of the comrade" (Dean 2019), or communism's ideal political relation of sameness without identity. Yet these images also reify and reduce socio-political concepts of labor and solidarity to advance their organizational ends. As W.E.B. Du Bois argued, party rhetoric misconstrued racism as an ideological rather than historical and material force. Considering these dynamics in tandem, I argue that photography's social potential is neither wholly determined by the racial capitalist mode of production nor wholly removed from the material organizational structures it serves.

Maggie Innes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University.

How are stories of migration told through photography? In North America, mainstream media outlets have reported on migrant caravans, child separation, poor conditions in detention centres, and unjust court proceedings. Other stories have focused on border security, human rights, and policy issues. While this coverage is important, it emphasizes the act of border crossing and the victimization of migrants. In response to the limited scope of news coverage, some photojournalists have devoted themselves to independent projects that introduce new perspectives on migration to the United States. This paper focuses on one such project by New York-based photographer Griselda San Martin. In her series, The Wall (2015-16), she explored the experiences of people at Friendship Park in Tijuana, Mexico, who were attempting to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met there were separated from family members because they had been deported from the United States. Jose Marquez, for instance, was deported after living and working in San Diego for eighteen years, and he was only able to see his daughter Susana through the metal border wall. Through an analysis of San Martin’s methodology and her photographic series, I consider how she tells a story that recognizes the complex nature of migration and the transnational relationships it engenders. I suggest that she uses care and intimacy as a method of engaging with her subjects and as a means of acknowledging the forms of misrecognition they experience.

Sarah Bassnett is a Professor of art history at Western University in Canada. Her current research looks at photography and undocumented migration to the US.