Writing prompts From Catherine’s magic box – Juliette Peers

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Once upon a time there was no facility for the everyday person, that is those people who could not commission the type of portrait whose eyes followed you wherever you were in the room, so beloved of tour guides, lashed with gold and cherubs or even an exotic person from a far off land or two, to objectively see what their fashion choices looked like, except fleetingly in a mirror or in the subjective commentary of those whom they asked how they may be looking. The advent of photography gave a wider schicht of the community the opportunity to record themselves and their self-presentation. With each new development in the technology of photography from daguerreotype to ambrotype to tintype to albumen paper photographs – down to the small carte de visite, that first appeared by the late 1850s in Paris, both the cost and the processes became less arcane and complex. Thus this opportunity to objectively record the fashion and styling choices, the chosen self-projection of a persona to the wider world, and even often the sitters’ own expertise of sewing and accessory making, millinery, embroidery, knitting and crochet, was extended progressively to further less well-off levels of the community.

Not only was the self celebrated in a manner that was both plural and trivial, and indeed even somewhat incontinent, a mid 19th century version of the selfie through the agency of the photographer, the advent of cheap photography gave birth to the craze for exchanging photographs with friends and relatives. Photographs could be ordered in bulk quantities of wholesale proportion from local photography studios for exchanging with others and people began to build up collections of friends and associates. Thus too the cheap nineteenth century carte de visite further precursed the twenty first century explosion of phone and digital image production and exchange. At the same time photographers began making mass copies of images of political, cultural and social celebrities and the prominent which were then sold to the public. Queen Victoria gave John Jabez Edwin Mayall a license to mass produce and publish photographs of herself and her family members in 1860, ratifying what had been an ad hoc consumer driven process, and also contributing to the development of the modern professions of publicity and image control. With the range of imagery offered for sale, collectors could then slip into their family photograph albums, royalty, stage stars, generals, leaders, poets, composers and etc as if these celebrities were also intimates alongside those close members of the family circle.

As well as a fascination with collecting images of the beautiful, glamorous and enviable, there was, despite the Victorians’ stereotyped reputation amongst later generations for being staid and formal, also a mania for the emphatically physical reminders of other ability and other body types than the vanilla norm. Hence the proliferation of strange images of circus and sideshow stars from the mid-19th century onwards. Dwarfs, giants, beaded ladies, armless wonders, people with multiple limbs, conjoined twins and many other people with disabilities and non-standard boy types captured public attention by means of photographs printed and distributed sometimes into the hundreds and thousands. Images of acrobats and contortionists, who also presented a striking and unconventional appearance via their training and bodily manipulation, and images of people from non-western cultures, particularly arrayed with indigenous dress and weaponry also found buyers amongst those who searched out unusual photographic imagery. In an era before adequate public health insurance and public health systems, families with children or members who were different or required special needs would often send them to a circus or a menagerie. Sales of photographs of sideshow freaks often brought back a small income to the person portrayed – most often substantially creamed off by their managers. Some families who were poor sold children with visible and spectacular signs of metabolistic difference to circuses and sideshow promoters.

One day this practice would be seen as unethical and unacceptable – just like making racial humour or racial caricatures as the basis of theatrical performances. In the 19th century the extraordinary and extravagant lifestyles of General Tom Thumb, Commander Nutt, Minnie and Lavinia Warren who were little people of global renown made the fraekshow classy and elegant rather than gritty and shocking. They met royalty and world leaders, and towards the ends of their working lives came out to Australia. There were some interpersonal tensions, despite the group being packaged as symmetrical commodity with both Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt warren falling in love with Lavinia Warren in the early 1860s. Together the quartet earned huge salaries which they spent on the most remarkable range of luxury and bespoke goods including fashions, carriages, yachts, racehorses and palatial mansions with the most sumptuous of Victorian furnishings specially commissioned in proportion to their size not that of normal adults. An early newspaper advertisement rom April 1864 captures the sensational and cult appeal of the quartet of performers[i]

GEN. TOM THUMB
AND HIS
BEAUTIFUL LITTLE WIFE
The late Miss LAVINIA WARREN, the Fascinating Queen of Beauty!
COMMODORE NUTT
The Famous “$30,000 Nutt”
So called for having received that sum from Mr. P.T. Barnum for three years service.
ELFIN MINNIE WARREN
The Smallest Lady of her age ever seen.
Here are a Married Couple, a Bachelor and a Belle.
ALL FOUR WEIGHING BUT 100 LBS.
Perfect in Form and features.
The World never saw anything half so Wonderful!
NO LARGER THAN SO MANY BABIES!
Educated, intelligent, Social, Affable and Polite-
Who can wonder that crowds throng their Levees every day and are eager to feast their eyes

Because of the public’s fascination with people of extraordinary appearance, a nineteenth century photographer shot and posed this remarkable photograph now in Catherine Devenny’s magic box of inspiration of a giant and a small woman. Often photographers increased the pictorial interest of one sitter by putting together strange and visually striking combinations of unusual people. Like many small people in the 19th century following on from the standards set by Tom Thumb, she is dressed as a highly fashionable and elegant woman. Having seen many similar images but not this one exactly, the young girl may be Millie Edwards, 1877-1919. The girl photographed certainly looks like her manner of personal styling and her general looks. Minnie toured globally as did Tom Thumb and his entourage and also met many significant people as they travelled. After her American-born husband Francis Flynn 1864-1898, died and was buried in Broken Hill after catching pneumonia on an Australian tour, where previously the couple had enjoyed vice regal receptions in Adelaide and constant press attention, Millie retired to live with her English family. who had migrated to the Coromonadel Peninsula in New Zealand, and she died in Christchurch in 1919. The man in this image wears far less glamorous dress and he does not appear to be identified in any of the considerable amount of online discussion of the most famous Victorian sideshow and circus personalities.

Not all of these photographs of the Other were exploitative. Sojourner Truth the black feminist and abolitionist made an income by selling her own images, often at her lectures to her respectful fans. She shows a neat postmodernist awareness of the inherent strangeness of the image, and its separation from the construction of “reality”. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” stated the inscription on the back of her publicity photographs. Wounded American Civil War veterans visited photographic studios and had printed photographs of their wounds and with long descriptions on the back listing the amount of children they had to support, the loss of their ability to earn and the fact that they had acquired these injuries in defending the community and its political and social values, arguing that it is surely time that the public give them something in return. What is most shocking is not the visible disability, but the economic exigencies that forced people to both image and narrate their injuries in such a dramatic and abject manner to try and earn enough money to keep them and their families

There has been a considerable interest of revival around the surrealistic impetus of these freakshow photographs and because of that in the twenty first century. They are traded enthusiastically on ebay and through speciality antique book, print and photography dealers. They have inspired everything from the Australian novel Little People by Jane Sullivan, to the cult TV series Carnivale to Lloyd Webbers hyperbolic turkey of a musical theatre piece Love Never Dies, which had a strong sideshow aesthetic. There are also photographic and creative and subgroup practices that reference these remarkable antique photographs, such as the work of Joel Peter Witkin and also many steam punk and neo-romantic image makers, who seek to capture the proto-surrealistic elements of the Victorian fascination with exceptional people.

Artists, writers, stylists, collectors and dealers parallel 19th century audiences in having a seemingly endless obsession with these images. Until finally we look at these 19th century pictures and wonder who is the exploited and who is the exploiter. The gravitas and seriousness and formality of 19th century photostyling and poising gives away few secrets about the woman and man pictured on the image from Catherine Devenny’s box of procative and haunting images – are we devouring the strangeness with our eyes, or are the subjects dignified agents capitalising on our curiosity?

[i] http://www.yatespast.org/articles/tomthumb.html

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