James Lundberg, writing at The Atlantic, describes how the new technology of photography changed people’s perceptions of themselves and their faces.
When Abraham Lincoln was running for President in 1860, a little girl wrote him a letter advising him to grow a beard to improve his appearance. And so he did.
“If you will let your whiskers grow,” she wrote, “you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.”
I think this story is familiar to most Americans, taught in schools. What I did not realize until reading this article is that Lincoln’s looks were an issue because photography was new — it first came to the US 21 years earlier. Photo studios quickly swept the country and set off a fad for portraiture.
Those having their likeness taken for the first time did so with some combination of wonder and trepidation. Posing before the camera, early sitters said they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling in their cheeks. The process was orchestrated by a camera operator under a blanket–whom [Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in The Atlantic in 1859] described as a chemical-wielding “skeleton shape, of about a man’s height, its head covered with a black veil.” The experience seemed to partake of the occult. And the results, often ghostly because of the long exposure times required, only strengthened such feelings.
These early sitters weren’t entirely wrong. There was no sorcery involved, but something was happening to them in front of the camera. Becoming an image, reckoning with an entirely new form of self-presentation, introduced an intense awareness not just of the self, but of the face.
Parallels to the later invention of television and smartphones are apparent.