THE BACK COUNTRY

Back stamps and design on cartes de visite and cabinet cards.

 “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”

Walt Disney

For some people, the pleasure in collecting cartes de visite and cabinet cards lies entirely on the reverse, in the stamps that identify the studio and sometimes advertise the range of services. This is understandable. The images on the other side are often commonplace and uninteresting while the back carries an intricate design that can also be a code. This stamp on the back of a cabinet card from the Phebus studio in Constantinople is dominated by Apollo, the god of the sun and of light – AKA Phoebus Apollo - an obvious choice for a photographic studio. Apollo could also be a god of truth, which again makes sense for a photographic studio, since that was what they purported to offer. Note the idealized Ottoman script at the top and the French Photographie. Without knowing who runs the studio we can tell from the French that he was Armenian, because French was the lingua franca of the Armenia business community in Constantinople. Sure enough, Phebus was run by Boğos Tarkulyan, one of the better known photographers in town around the turn of last century. The Art Nouveau pattern was a deliberate nod to contemporary ideas in Western Europe, identifying Tarkulyan as someone less, or even not, interested in Ottoman traditions. The choice of flower in the frames at the top would have been conscious too. It may be amaryllis, which has some connection with Apollo, but that’s only a guess.

 

 The study of the backs of CDVs and cabinet cards is a branch of iconography, specifically one that can trace its origins back to the frontispieces found in books from the sixteenth century through to the beginning of the nineteenth. The frontispiece could be a declaration of intent or an acknowledgement of a patron’s greatness but were never just random images. It was intended to be read in minute detail and required knowledge of biblical imagery as well as more demotic symbols. By the 1860s, when this carte was produced, the art and meaning of frontispieces had fallen out of use but Theophile Gastonguay evoked them with the image of a beaver. Although the beaver did not become the official emblem of Canada until 1975, it had been commonly used as a symbol of Canada since the seventeenth century.

 

 Archibald McDonald ran a photography studio in Melbourne throughout the gold rush. Like every other studio photographer in Melbourne at this time he came from another country, from Nova Scotia in fact, just a spit away (in Canadian distances) from Theophile Gastonguay. You might wonder why St George and not a kangaroo but there we see the difference a century and a half of colonization can make. Although by the 1860s people around the world recognized the kangaroo as Australian, it wasn’t a national symbol. Australia (AKA “The Colonies”) didn’t have such a thing, or if it did it was likely to be St George’s dragon, which, like Australia, was proudly British. Archibald McDonald: logic tells us he was of Scottish background and he might have been the type to give a Glasgow kiss to anyone who called him British, but St George here doesn’t stand for England so much as a landmark in Melbourne. Long gone now, once upon a time everyone in Melbourne knew where St George’s Hall was.

 

 A similar thinking may have been behind Louis of Paris’s depiction of the Porte St Martin, which then as today was close by the central shopping district. Firstly it told customers the studio was located in one of the more salubrious areas, and then it told them how to get there. Notice it was opposite the Theatre de l’Ambigu, a place made famous by Louis Daguerre’s set designs.

Migevant’s studio may not have been at such a desirable address as Louis’ but no Parisian had to ask where the Place de la Bastille was. When this CDV was produced in the early 1870s there couldn’t have been too many people around who remembered the Revolution and the storming of the Bastille in 1789 but enough would have recalled the glorious revolution of 1830, which the July Monument seen here honoured. Essentially the French replaced one monarch with another, which is a little like stumbling from one failed relationship with a drunken philanderer straight into another. Today the Boulevarde Beaumarchais is lined with shops selling antique cameras.

The back stamp can be evidence. In 1876 Alfred Mayman took over the Temple Photographic Gallery at 170 Fleet St in London. Two years later the City of London dismantled the Temple Bar on account of Fleet Street needing widening and the structure was dilapidated. The sections were carefully stored and in 1880 Henry Meux bought it and reassembled it on his estate in Hertfordshire. In 1984 it was bought back from Meux’s descendants and re-erected in Paternoster Square. All this to say that there was only a two year period between 1876 and 1878 when there was any practical purpose for Mayman to have an illustration of the structure on the back of his CDVs. We don’t need any other information to date the image.  

 

 Images of cherubs with cameras are common, as is the inclusion of an artist’s palette, but what does it mean? Strictly speaking, these round and flabby infant creatures are Putti: cherubs have several heads and bits of eagle and lion attached to them. The precise symbolic meaning of the Putti is not understood but since the late Renaissance they have had an association with the arts, and music in particular. Originally the true artist had his muse, a goddess, who inspired him and for whom he created. The little toddlers might have been intended to suggest the playfulness every serious artist needs but also, babies were the inevitable result of creative coupling. In the way that a red and blue barber’s poles once indicated a place to have a bit of bloodletting and these days means a haircut, Monge, and every other photographer who used the imagery saw it as an icon not a symbol.

 

 Just to reinforce the point (somewhat), we find exactly the same image on the reverse of a CDV by a studio located on Rue de la Sabliere. The companies that printed the blanks for CDVs usually have their name in small letters down the bottom. We don’t get any such on either Monge or the Sabliere studio card and while we could assume the same company produced the blanks, it is also possible that several bought their designs from another source. Somebody could have produced this image of the putto, sold it on to the printers who then customized it for the various studios who used them.  

 

This palette is also very common, with a fairly obvious interpretation although it ought to be pointed out that few commercial photographers thought of themselves as artists in the way that people used that word even in the relatively staid 1860s. ‘Artist’ was a kind of password for quality of technique rather than ideas. Apart from being a photographer, Camille Benoit was an art dealer, so he may have seen the image as a pun. 

 Harrison Nathaniel Rudd ran his studio in Costa Rica around the turn of last century, as board mounted photographs were giving way to postcards. Costa Rica was relatively prosperous and peaceful at this time, meaning an American could operate a studio with some confidence it would not be closed down or he would have to get out at short notice. This rather elegant design may have also come from a template customized to his requirements. Or not. There is a pun here as well, in the idea of the woman’s hand holding out a carte or cabinet card. A camera is depicted at the top of the crest.  Maybe Rudd also had cartes with the same back design that the hand holds out.

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THE BACK COUNTRY

SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS

 Cartes de visite from gold rush era Melbourne

“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”

Edward Steichen

 

Here’s a coincidence of absolutely no historical importance. In 1835 William Fox Talbot made his first successful paper negatives, marking for some the birth of the invention of photography (purists prefer to look back a couple of decades earlier). The same year but on the other side of the world, John Batman, a grazier from Sydney via Van Diemen’s Land, had raised interest among investors for a settlement at Port Philip Bay on Australia’s south coast, making the case that it was excellent country for sheep. He wasn’t the only one with an eye on the land. Purists also argue that the real credit for the foundation of the settlement that became Melbourne should go to John Fawker. All Batman wanted was enough land and a good port to make a sheep industry viable. Fawker was the one who imagined a city. Without him Melbourne might have remained a big farm, called Batville, which is of course an excellent name for a state capital. Not a lot happened, certainly not much worth photographing, until 1850, when gold was discovered in the nearby foothills. Within a year the population had quadrupled, from approximately 10 000 to 50 000 and it kept growing. By 1854 the local newspapers were calling Melbourne the cultural capital of the British Empire. Quite a few in London were inclined to agree. As a new city fuelled by new money it sparkled next to London, which was old, polluted and generally thought to be hopelessly riddled with crime.  

Naturally, the gold rush city needed a few photographic studios. The best known of the portrait photographers was Perez Batchelder, subject of a post a couple of years back, but his story is worth recapping. Operating out of San Francisco during the Californian gold rush, when news of the Victorian gold discoveries broke he packed up, sold off and boarded a ship. The ‘flying studio’ that Eadweard Muybridge made famous in the 1860s may have been bought off Batchelder. Perez’s brothers followed him and Batchelder’s, at 41Collins St, became what today we’d call a name brand.

One of the (few) interesting details about the studios in gold rush Melbourne has to do with the connections that emerge. Actually, this is true of studios around the world. People start working for one, break away to start their own, employ someone else, who sets up their business a couple of years later and before long there is a web of relationships spread across town based on commercial photography. Originally employed by Batchelder’s as a miniature painter, John Botterill was one of the driving forces in creating an official Melbourne arts society. By the late 1850s he had a solid reputation as a commercial photographer and a society painter. This is a statement that requires some elucidation. To be a society artist in Melbourne in the gold rush era meant acknowledging that no matter how many claimed it was the most exciting place to be right now, the real centres of the art world, London and Paris, were on the other side of the planet. One heard of new ideas in art months after Parisians had forgotten them. Cartes de visite from the Botterill studio are fairly common. Unfortunately, the work he probably wanted to be remembered for, his landscapes and society portraits, are not. The stamp on the reverse of the first image, from the Batchelder Studio, lists Botterill as one of the proprietors.

 

Most Australians have not heard of Charles Nettleton, though they probably know his portrait of Ned Kelly, taken the day before the outlaw/national hero was hanged. Nettleton began his photographic career working for Townsend Duryea, who like Batchelder arrived from America at the height of the rush, realized what a drag digging for gold was and promptly made his fortune in photography. Duryea is one of those people whose personal contribution to culture is not as impressive as the debt a long line of artists owe to him. He could plausibly claim that one of the leading art schools in the world, the Art Institute of Chicago, would not exist today had not one of its founders, Henry Spread, had his start in Duryea's Melbourne studio. Nettleton then belongs in a long line of grateful acolytes, but that is not to belittle him. Unlike Botterill, who it seems had standards when it came to what he would photograph, Nettleton covered the whole waterfront, meaning he was often the only photographer available to record important events, such as the prelude to Kelly’s execution.  

Photo-historians spend their lives chasing down information on obscure commercial photographers, all the while knowing that what attracted them in the first place wasn’t the person behind the camera but the people in front of it.  This woman is identified on the back of the carte as “Christina Elizabeth Smith, wife of William Smith and daughter of J. McPherson”. Searching genealogical records for the surname Smith is too tedious to bear thinking about, made harder because, during the gold rush, Melbourne was a city of immigrants. Her family could have arrived from Tasmania, Scotland, the USA, Canada, South Africa or even India. Suffice to say, a search for her records requires a professional commitment, but the really interesting thing about Christina Elizabeth is that she looks so typical. The ringlets in her hair and lace collar tell us at once she is a woman of the 1860s. We’d know the look at once if the photo had been taken in Chicago or Edinburgh. 

But there was something special about Melbourne. Up until the 19^th century most cities in the world had long histories; if they possessed something as dubious as a personality it had been created over centuries. Like San Francisco, Melbourne’s birth as a city came about through exceptional events. By 1860s it had the appearance of having arrived fully formed. When people called it the cultural capital of the Empire, they were also saying it was more British than any actual British city. That idea persists. People used to compare Sydney and Melbourne by saying the first was hedonistic and the second reserved, or prudish (or Victorian). Maybe that had nothing to do with any supposedly definable character but that it looked like a British city ought to with a new coat of paint; like London without the mistakes.

Yet if Melbourne was politically part of the British Empire, culturally it was one of the new international cities, so full of Irish, Chinese, Russians, French. Italians, Swedes, Dutch and Americans that it was normal to assume your neighbour did not speak your language. Just like San Francisco, as soon as people disembarked from their ship they reinvented themselves and assumed new names and life histories. These portraits might look like they could have been taken anywhere, but being Melbourne C1860 we have to assume that nothing is what it seems.

 Anybody searching through boxes and albums of Australian cartes de visite will quickly realize that most of the early one come from Melbourne. It is a sign of the city's prosperity and of its population boom. Reports from Sydney at the time describe how the city suddenly emptied of people. Most of the cartes come from the Batchelder, the Botterill and Nettleton studios. Someone mad enough could attempt to track down all the surviving examples. There are probably tens of thousands out there; enough to give us a comprehensive visual record of the city's population. It sounds like an admirable project and ought to be encouraged.

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SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS