Circulating Photographs: A Special Issue of History of Photography

Among the most astonishing documents of photography’s formative period is a short letter written by Laura Mundy on 12 December 1834. In just a few words, she thanked her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot ‘for sending me such beautiful shadows’. As the letter continues, it becomes apparent that Talbot had been sending her the first samples of his ‘Photogenic Drawings’ for several months; however, these ‘shadowy’ pictures were so sensitive to light that it was time to replace them with fresh specimens: ‘I had grieved’, remarks Laura Mundy, ‘over the gradual disappearance of those you gave me in the summer & am delighted to have these to supply their place in my book’. This letter represents not only an early testimony of Talbot’s experiments with photographic technologies; quite incidentally, it also states that he made the results of this research the subject of a postal mailing. Yet it was not Talbot who was the first to go public with the results of his photographic research. This step was taken by the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre when he presented the daguerreotype process. No textbook on the medium’s history would miss telling the events from Paris in 1839. However, it is less well known that Daguerre prepared small packages for a remarkably exclusive circle of addressees in the summer of that year. The Tsar of Russia, the Emperor in Vienna and the Kings of Bavaria and Belgium counted among them – but not, incidentally, the Queen of England, who refused such a gift. But it is more important to note that Daguerre, like Talbot, also made arrangements to use selected samples of his photographic process as objects of postal consignment. In this way, they were very quickly present in important cities of the European continent; and soon after they were on display, for instance in Vienna and Munich. These two anecdotes from photography’s early days may help to illustrate that photographic images were always conceived as mobile media – regardless of their specific material qualities. With photographic imagery, visual communication gained another important instrument that was especially suitable for use over great distances. And again, the often-quoted comparison with painting is also misleading, especially when we consider modes of circulation. If anything, the distribution of photographic images initially borrows from the established graphic arts. Soon, however, the pictorial practices associated with photographs will form specific forms of transmission, circulation and handling. Thus, circulation and mobility are modalities as old as photography. Yet we are still missing a history that discusses these acts of transmission as the critical framework for creating photographic meaning. Jennifer L. Roberts, in her brilliant study of early American art, has suggested a new methodological direction that places agency on the artworks rather than on their makers. In her pursuit of a new kind of spatial and cultural trajectory of art she studies ‘what happens when the works themselves serve as emissaries or 1 – Laura Mundy to William Henry Fox Talbot, 12 December 1834, document number 3017, available at http://foxtalbot. dmu.ac.uk/letters/; and see First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography, ed. Steffen Siegel, Los Angeles: Getty 2017, 22.