J.M.W. Turner Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In the archives of the National Library of Jamaica is a bound volume inscribed on the spine “Livingston Album.” It contains a sequence of studio photographs that depict, for the most part, people who lived on the island of Jamaica during the second half of the nineteenth century. Likely compiled by Noel B. Livingston, the Kingston lawyer who donated it to the library, and consisting of a series of pages with pre-cut window openings intended for the easy insertion of cartes-de-visite and, intermittently, larger-format cabinet photographs, the album presumably was purchased off-the-shelf from a stationer or photographic studio in Kingston. On an initial encounter it seems an unremarkable object that would have been found in many middle-class homes in Jamaica during the later nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The amateur pastime of assembling photographic albums and scrapbooks was extremely popular during the Victorian era, and the results were often highly elaborate hybrid montages that combined photographic, printed, and hand-painted images. The compiler, or compilers, of the Livingston Album chose to eschew fanciful conceits, however, focusing exclusively on commercial portraiture and adhering assiduously to the volume’s prescribed format to create an unembellished and austere gallery of portraits.
In 2005 Geoffrey Batchen noted in his groundbreaking essay “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” to which this paper is indebted, that photographic historians had hitherto tended to denigrate carte-de-visite portrait photographs as being quotidian, formulaic, and marginal to the master narrative of the development of the medium. Batchen argued, however, that the invention of the carte represented a revolution in photographic practice and that the genre offers rich possibilities for productive reimagining of the “small dreams and anxieties of ordinary life.” Given its unassuming appearance, the apparent lack of aesthetic ambition of its creator(s), and the absence of archival evidence of the circumstances of its compilation, it is perhaps not surprising that the Livingston Album has been overlooked thus far by scholars both of Jamaica and of photography. Close examination, however, reveals the volume to constitute a richly textured and compelling visual archive.

In this paper I will recuperate the project of the Livingston Album, arguing that it constitutes a significant endeavor to construct a portrait of post-emancipation colonial Jamaican society during a transitional period marked by social and political unrest and economic decline, between 1865, the year of the Morant Bay Rebellion, and 1901, the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Photography, and specifically portrait photography, played a significant, if hitherto unexplored, role in the social formation of Victorian Jamaica, enabling individuals to construct a sense of cohesion and collective memory, albeit fragile if not illusory, in the colony at a time of profound economic and social instability. Although sentimental relationships are embedded into the fabric of the album, the overarching organizational principle is that of class and occupation: we encounter clerics of various denominations, as well as army officers, civil servants, a newspaper proprietor, lawyers, merchants, missionaries, physicians, planters, and politicians, all male, the majority white but some brown, mostly Christian, but some Jewish, and just one black sitter. Occasionally wives, sisters, and children are included, but the central project of the album seems to be to construct a portrait of a homosocial social network, and the album serves to remind us of the possibility of constructing an alternate history of empire, one in which civil servants, solicitors, and clerks, constituted the category of “men of eminence.” I will suggest that there is a politics inherent in the act of compilation of what seems on first sight a collection of banal images of mainly forgotten individuals, constituting as it does an endeavor to normalize the life of a colony that had its foundations in slavery, institutionalized brutality, and trauma.
Allan Trachtenberg has characterized Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans as a “figurative domestic circle in which all are familiar and thereby familial,” and this conception also seems to lie at the heart of the project of the Livingston Album.

Whilst insisting on the local significance of the album, I will also situate it in a broader transnational framework, in relation to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in London as well as to the publications of portrait photographs that proliferated in Britain and North America in the late nineteenth century.