Transforming the Theater: Celebrity Cabinet Card Portraits & Cartes-de-visite

     As my historical interests lay in the performing arts, I was interested in investigating the relationship between performance and photography. Performance may be executed more than once, but every performance is different and disappears from the moment once it is performed. A photograph is the opposite, catching and freezing a particular moment in time. Do these mediums ever meet? The photograph has played an important part in theater history by not only helping to define theatrical representations, but influencing theater practice as well. How did these relationships originate? I was interested in learning about the earliest forms of photography that would influence and start to transform the theater: celebrity cabinet card studio portraits and cartes-de-visite.

Brief History and Conclusions

     Theatrical photography emerged in the United States in the 1860s when Gurney & Son Studio began selling cartes de visite and cabinet cards of stage performers in costume first in a studio setting with a minimal background.

Photographer: Studio, Gurney and Son

Performer: Kate Santley

Production: The Black Crook

Provenance/Credit: Harvard Theater Collection, TCS 2, Box 407

     The cartes-de-visite were mounted on 2-1/2-by-4-inch card stock and could be produced cheaply. Collectors were fond of purchasing photographs of their favorite performers. These images could also be sold in theaters as souvenirs of the play, transforming the markets of the theater. The card trade flourished as performers realized the publicity value of the collectible photographs. By the 1870s-1880s millions were sold in the United States, when the process reached its greatest popularity.

Photographer: Sarony Studios

Performer: Ada Dyas

     As more and more celebrity portraits were created, the role of the photographer started to develop - that is, to enhance the imperfect representations of a subject through the art of photography; to convey personality. In order to bring out the best qualities of a subject, photographers would use the following techniques: lighting, coaching the sitter's poses, surrounding the subject with an enhanced visual environment / scenery (something brought over from the theater arts), retouching the negative, and sometimes tinting the print. “The characters are not only caught in the moment of impersonation" writes a journalist from The World in 1875, "but are accompanied by the appropriate scene.  The photographs are thus literal pictures of the play. . . .So strong is the characterization of these photographs and so admirable do they tell the story of the play while they fix the endeavor of the player, that they may be said to constitute a new advance in dramatic photography.” In conjunction with the market and collector culture that would develop for these prints, the celebrity photo would become a unique form of art that would transform the worlds of both theater and photography.

Photographer Spotlight: NAPOLEON SARONY

Napoleon Sarony, self portrait

     Napoleon Sarony was an American photographer known for his portraits of late-19th-century theater stars. Sarony established a studio on Broadway in 1866 and, for the next 30 years, photographed virtually every actor and actress working on the New York stage. 

Performer: Barrymore, Maurice
Photographer: Sarony, Napoleon
Date: ca. 1886
Collection Info: UW Special Collections. 19th Century Actors and Entertainers Cabinet Card Collection. PH Coll 59.

Photographers would pay their famous subjects to sit for them, and then retain full rights to sell the pictures. Sarony reportedly paid famed stage actress Sarah Bernhardt $1,500 to pose for him, the equivalent of more than $20,000 today.

 

French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) as Cleopatra, photograph by Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896)

 

His earliest images of the great tragedians in costume (Ristori, Edwin Booth, Tomasso Salvini, Mrs. Scott Siddons) eschewed backgrounds, concentrating on the facial expression and pose of the sitter.  Only when sitters did so in modern dress did Sarony include furnishings—a carved chair, an elaborate wardrobe, a modest background painting. This soon began to change, however. Beginning in 1870, he specified kinds of scenes appropriate for particular costumed characters—a seascape for Edwin Adams playing Enoch Arden, a woody copse for Sydney Cowell playing Rosalind in “As You Like It”—that did not reproduce the plays scenic design.  The art of such would soon develop. Even so, it has been noted that an encyclopedia of American scenic design could be created for the final quarter of the 19^th century using cabinet cards. These portraits immediately elevated Sarony to first place among portraitists. From 1870 until Napoleon Sarony’s death in 1896 he was deemed the premier portrait photographer of the United States, and one of the greatest in the world.

Works Consulted

Shields, David. "Photography and the American Stage". Broadway Photographs. http://broadway.cas.sc.edu/

Unknown Journalist. "Theatric Photographer”. The World (March 19, 1875).

UW Special Collections. 19th Century American Theater. http://content.lib.washington.edu/19thcenturyactorsweb/essay.html 

VANHAESEBROUCK, KAREL. "Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination". Visual Studies 24, no. 2 (September 2009): 97-106. 

Wikipedia: Napoleon Sarony. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Sarony