Picturing men : a century of male relationships in everyday american photography PDF
Preview Picturing men : a century of male relationships in everyday american photography
Picturing Men A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography John Ibson Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London © 2002 by the Smithsonian Institution All rights reserved Copy editor: Joanne Reams Production editor: Duke Johns Designer: Brian Barth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ibson, John. Picturing men : a century of male relationships in everyday American photography I John Ibson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58834-055-4 (alk. paper) i. Photography of men-History. 2. Photography of men- Social aspects United States. 3. Male friendship-United States-Pictorial works. 4. Men in popular culture- United States-Pictorial works. I. Title. TR68i.M4 126 2002 302.3141081022-dc21 2002021014 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available Manufactured in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 @ The recycled paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39,48-1984. For permission to reproduce illustrations appear ing in this book, please correspond directly with the author, who owns the works. The Smithsonian Institution Press does not retain reproduction rights individually or maintain a file of addresses for photo sources. ,JO sn:aa Contents PREFACE A Note on Sources, Purposes, and Assumptions ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv 1 Introduction: Whence Came the Void? Men's Uneasy Relationships in Contemporary America 1 2 The Lost Ritual: American Men Together in Studio Portraits 9 3 Pageants of Masculinity: Photography as Cultural Performance 51 4 Merry Bands of Brothers: Military Photographs through World War I 77 5 Straightening Up: The Evolution of the Team Portrait 99 6 Whatever Happened to Intimacy? American Men Together in Snapshots 119 7 Men Set Free: World War II and the Shifting Boundaries of Male Association 159 EPILOGUE Out of the Attic- Vernacular Photography and Cultural Studies 197 NOTES 203 INDEX 231 Preface A Note on Sources, Purposes, and Assumptions This is a book about two general subjects that I believed needed more attention- the history of everyday photography in the United States and the history of the nation's male residents' relationships with each other. I have examined these histories not separately but in what I see as their revealing intersection. I based the study primarily on my own collection of vernacular photographs of two or more American men together, from the antebellum dawn of photography through the early 1950s, a collection that now approaches five thousand images. Since beginning the collection in 1994, I have been interested in sim ply this: men photographed together, with no women in the picture. Represented in the collection, then, are men of various ages, occupations, regions, races, and relationships. Though admittedly one cannot by any means always be certain of the exact age, job, residence, race, or relationship of the men in a photograph, or even precisely when a photograph was taken, there are often clues. Better still, more precision is sometimes pos sible because of such things as an inscription, a date, a postmark, a photographer's address, or a subject's article of clothing. The photograph's particular format--daguerreotype, cabinet portrait, photo postcard, snapshot--is also useful in dating, since each format has been pop ular only during certain periods of time. Because of photographers' addresses, especially common in late-nineteenth-century cabinet portraits, or because of an inscription or a postmark, I know that I have many photographs from every region of the country and virtually every state. I have collected widely, with visits to pho tography sales, antique shows and shops, flea markets, and estate sales throughout California and beyond, as well as through participation in auctions conducted by mail and telephone, from the eastern, midwestern, and southern United States. Of particular use in building the sheer size of my collection, as well as the breadth of the collection's coverage, has been my extensive par ticipation in internet auctions of vintage photographs, especially eBay auctions. ix X PREFACE At any given time there are, astonishingly have been destroyed or are still in private enough, around twenty-five thousand vin hands surely number in the millions, a sim tage photographs for sale on eBay, each item ple fact that limits the definitiveness of every offered for no longer than ten days and typi generalization I make in this book. cally for just a week. Not only has eBay been I am well aware that the racial and ethnic a rich source for adding to my collection, but composition of my entire collection, and that my frequent perusal of its photo wares has of the necessarily small but representative greatly enhanced my sense of how represen segment of the collection displayed in the tative my collection actually is and how dis pages that follow, does not remotely resem tinctive the images of men together have ble the racial composition of the country at been, in contrast to images of women to large. One encounters comparatively few gether or of men and women together. On photographs of men of color, either for sale eBay but also at the countless flea markets, or in archives; precisely what this intriguing photography sales, and other sources, I have phenomenon reveals is not clear and is looked not simply at potential items for my beyond this study' s purview. With profes collection but also at those other images that sional photographs, the few portraits of men place my collection in a comparative context. of color may to some degree be linked to a With that goal in mind-a better under disproportionately large number of white standing of how representative my collection men behind the camera, especially during the is and of how distinctive photographic heyday of studio portraits of civilian men images of men have been-I also consulted, together, the years before the 1930s. That in person and on-line, several archives of photos of men of color are quite collectible vernacular photographs: the Huntington and hence quickly bought nowadays, and Library in San Marino, California; the perhaps that, say, African Americans or Asian Museum of Photography at the University of Americans have not as readily let go of fam California, Riverside; the Getty Center in Los ily pictures, may also have a bearing on the Angeles; the Pasadena (California) Historical scarcity of photographs available for pur Museum; the Los Angeles Public Library; the chase. I am utterly unprepared to say or even Minnesota Historical Society in Saint Paul; speculate on whether disproportionately the Denver Public Library; and the American fewer images of men of color actually exist Memory Collections of the Library of (or have existed) anywhere, but I recognize Congress. I believe I have realized the goal of that they are few and far between in these contextualizing my collection. And I am con pages. This study explores what photographs vinced that my large collection is meaning meant to their subjects; I certainly wish I had fully representative, so much so that unless a better understanding of the role that race otherwise indicated, every generalization in and ethnicity have played in this matter. this study is based on the images that I have This book ends with the 1950s for a few collected. Further, every photograph pre reasons, some pragmatic yet others of more sented and, with just a few noted exceptions, substance. The closer one gets to the present, every image described in this book is one of the more likely it is that photographs are still mine. Though my research has been exten in private hands, with many of their subjects sive, I have, of course, encountered only a still alive, thus unavailable for a scholar's minuscule fraction of the photographs taken attention. Of the nonetheless numerous pho of American men together. Photographs that tographs taken around five decades ago that
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