Lucero

The study of nineteenth century photography has focused for the most part on paper photography, acknowledging the years of the daguerreotype as a period of curiosity and experimentation while disregarding the impact of this era today. Available scholarship has sought to study these early images through archival and material approaches, navigating recurring historiographic voids and image losses, often in the form of national histories of the medium. This essay builds on the overlap of some of these histories to reconsider the production of photography in the Americas, namely through daguerreotype portraits and their fashioning as commodities by print cultures aimed at creating and seeking new customers. To do so, the article follows John Armstrong Bennet, a multifaceted tradesman and occasionally a daguerreotypist, on his continental journeys between 1840 and 1877. Bennet’s written traces allow for an archaeological study of the relations between early photography and print, evidencing the complexities behind mechanical but not exactly multiple reproduction. Through Lisa Gitelman’s concept of paper knowledge (2014), the article considers the manifold manifestations of a hybrid form of authorship put forward by Bennet in the written form, be it in his advertisements, bureaucratic paperwork, or in his own oeuvre. Through the analysis of the written sources, it may be possible to grasp a fleeting likeness of the author behind these marketable ‘works of art’, and more importantly, link through his presence the expansion of a photographic frontier to that of liberalism, manifest in the ever-growing presence of multiple reproduction in the printed form.