The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century PhotographyThe Beautiful and the Damned looks for the first time at the broad social and cultural context for the development of portrait photography in the nineteenth century, showing how social and celebrity portraiture on the one hand, and scientific photography on the other, were different facets of the nineteenth-century fascination with classification and ordering.Between 1860 and 1900, editions of celebrity portraits, as well as the vogue for the carte de visite, fuelled the fashion for collecting and classifying photographs of the face. In an age of rapid industrialization and the growth of the middle classes, the carte de visite became a means of conferring social status, and family albums - which often incorporated photographs of royalty and public figures - were used to position family members within society at large.Photographic portraiture's rapid rise to popularity encouraged its diffusion to other spheres, and the portrait photograph was adopted by the new sciences and technologies to provide empirical evidence for theories of evolution, phrenology, racial types, insanity and criminality. A system of scrutiny or 'surveillance' of the face emerged represented here by extraordinary images from the files of the Parisian police of the nineteenth century, including some of the earliest scene-of-crime forensic photography.The Beautiful and the Damned is a significant addition to an important new area of photographic history. Illustrated with over 100 black-and-white images, this book also provides a comprehensive visual insight into the genre and features work by key figures such as Oscar Rejlander, Bassano, Eugène Atget and Julia Margaret Cameron. |
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album Albumen carte Albumen print Alexander Bassano Alphonse Bertillon anthropological Arthur Batut artist Asylum became Bethlem biographies Britain calotype camera carte de visite celebrity Charles Dickens classification Collections Historiques composite contemporary created criminal daguerreotype Darwin degeneration depiction developed Duchenne de Boulogne Duchenne's early emergent emotions engravings evidence exposure fascination Fox Talbot France Frederick Scott Archer full-face and profile Gallery Album Galton Georges Bertillon Henry Hering ideas images increasingly individual insane invention John Julia Margaret Cameron Late London Mécanisme mental method modern muscles Musée des Collections Museum Nadar National Portrait Gallery natural negative nineteenth century painting Paris patients photographic portraits phrenology physiognomic plate popular portrait photography Préfecture de Police print National Portrait Prison published race racial record Rejlander Royal Ryan scientific Silver print sitters social portraiture studio theory types Unknown photographer Victoria visite National Portrait visual visualisation