Posteriors: Sitters’ Backs in 19th-Century Photographs
A beguiling international fad was photographs of sitters from behind, ca. 1860-1900. For the first time in history, people easily could see and record the backs of their entire bodies without two mirrors, offering a novel way of portraying themselves.
As exposure times became quicker and photography became more affordable, customers were less concerned with recording social status and more interested in collaborating with photographers to create playful scenes. They relished photography as a form of entertainment, personal expression, and power. Backside portrayals deny viewers scrutiny and classification based on frontal appearances and individual experiences, reducing the possession and control of the gaze.
Such images initially held importance only to those who commissioned and made them. Today, however, they continue to delight viewers with their sense of spontaneity, comradeship, vulnerability, trust, repetition, patterns, fashion, mystery, and anonymity, symbolically representing all of humanity. Highly collectible, posterior views are hard to find now.
The variety of photographs from behind in the late Victorian era is astonishing. Women showcase luxurious long locks and fashionable dresses while men, in briefs, flaunt muscles and elaborate tattoos. Pairs and trios of homosocial friends, as well as heterosexual couples, link elbows or wrap arms around each other’s waists. Toddlers hug draped studio chairs, get weighed, and wear matching gingham clothing. Double exposures reveal babies’ faces and backs of heads in the same composition. Paired prints and double-sided cabinet cards present front and back images together. Pictures within pictures depict sitters gazing at cabinet cards or in mirrors. A woman bent over on a bicycle offers a racy view of her derriere for chewing gum customers.
While some of these photographs are amusing visual jokes, others are sentimental, documenting fleeting youth, beauty, and intimate relationships. Some are nostalgic, as when sitters pose with cabinet cards of loved ones. Others, like that of actor Sarah Bernhardt, bodybuilder Eugene Sandow, boxer Tom Sharkey, and tattooed attraction Captain Fred Hadley, are promotional, not unlike today’s selfies of female celebrities from behind.
This exhibition, of 120 photographs features cabinet cards, tintypes, stereographs, an ambrotype, and a carte-de-visite, almost all from two private collections in Ohio and Kansas. Included is the work of acclaimed photographers Charles Eisenman, Eadwaeard Muybridge, George Rockwood, and Napoleon Sarony, as well as female image-makers from small towns, such as Annie Dulaney Streetman (Abilene, TX), and Susan Spence (Blanchester, OH). The photographs originated in 21 states and 46 cities in the U.S., and Liverpool, England; Naples and Rome, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; Paris, France; and Berlin, Germany.
The denial of a frontal view relates to contemporary artists, such as Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) and Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953), who photograph sitters from behind, frequently paired with the associative power of written words.
According to art historian Huey Copeland, Simpson portrays "turned-back figures" or “anti-portraits” not only to "refuse the gaze" but to also "to deny any presumed access to the sitter's personality, and to refute both the classificatory drives and emotional projections typically satisfied by photographic portraiture of black subjects." Work by these women, published in books and exhibition catalogues, is on display in the DAAP Library entryway, along with additional vintage cameras.