If in photography the viewfinder concentrates foresight, the print must manifest hindsight, as if to confirm the notion of predestination found in classical legend. Indeed, there is a Greek myth that would seem to presage photography; that is, transformation by the action of light.

In Sophocles’ tragedy Women of Trachis of c. 450–425 BC, Deianeira, the wife of Heracles complains of her husband’s neglect of their family during his ongoing adventures. At last he returns with prisoners from the siege of the mountain city Oechalia against whose king Eurytus Heracles had vowed revenge for being enslaved there. Among the captives is the girl Iole, whom Deianeira soon learns is Heracles lover.

She remembered that when younger she had been abducted by the centaur Nessus, whom Heracles shot with an arrow in rescuing her, and that as the creature lay dying he had told her that his blood, now mixed with the poison of the Lernaean Hydra on Heracles’ arrow, would keep Heracles from loving any other woman more than her.

Accordingly, Deianeira makes a robe with the blood-soaked wool and sends it to Heracles, warning that no one else is to wear it and to keep it in a dark place until he puts it on.

Having sent it, she throws the remnant material into bright sunlight. There, it seethes like boiling acid; Nessus’ love charm was to be his revenge! Her son returns with grim tidings; Heracles is dying in such scorching pain that he had dashed out the brains of servant Lichas who delivered the gift:

Hyllus heaps blame on his mother, who kills herself. But he discovers she had no intention to kill his father. Heracles is carried home in mortal torment, also believing Deianeira (her name means “husband-killer”) had murdered him, before Hyllus explains and Heracles realises this is what was foretold; that he would be killed by someone who was already dead; Nessus. Begging to be put out of his misery, he first makes the unwilling Hyllus promise to marry Iole. Heracles is burned alive to extinguish his agony.

Josef Maria Eder, in his technological History of Photography (1905 edition translated by Edward Epstean) writes that “the narrative is so realistic that one cannot but feel that Sophocles knew something of the destructive effect of sunlight on wool.”

Eder, proudly German, ignores a woman of his own country, painter Friederike Wilhelmine von Wunsch, residing in Paris, who claimed to have discovered; “a process permitting portraits to be made in natural size as well as in miniature, such is its speed, and, unlike the results obtained by Talbot and Daguerre, coloured in true tones under the influence of light or of fire.” Significantly, her approach to the ambassador in Paris Von Arnim to communicate her sensational breakthrough to the King of Prussia was made on March 2 1839, after news of Talbot’s discovery had already been reported. The communiqué was never sent and evidence of her invention never materialised.

Ulrike Matzer accuses Eder, the photo-chemist and early historian of our medium, of overlooking women who were nineteenth-century photographers by reporting only their passive role in the production processes. It is true that mention of any ‘woman’ or ‘women’ appears only six times in Eder’s dense 860-page book. However, he does admit roles were played by women in the discovery of photographic effect. He tells of Empress Eudokia Macrembolitissa in Byzantium at the turn of the first millennium, who in an old historic-mythological dictionary, Ἰωνιά, describes material being dyed purple;

“The purple colour becomes first class only if the material is exposed to the sun, because the rays of the sun add great fire which darkens the color, and the brilliancy is brought to its greatest perfection by the fire from above.”

Eder cites scholars who assert that the author of Ionia was male, but concludes; “Whoever may be the author of the book Ionia, it is without doubt the most lucid and important of early contributions to our knowledge of the photochemical change of colours in the dyeing with purple.”

He goes on to discuss [Elizabeth] Fulhame, in whose case “after the activity, although disputed, of Princess Eudokia, [. . .] we see for the second time within several centuries a woman interesting herself in the development of photochemistry.” This early British chemist in the 1780s-90s invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction,  described at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. Her interest in finding way of staining cloth with heavy metals under the influence of light led her to her work on silver chemistry and the role of light sensitive chemicals (silver salts) on fabric, predating Thomas Wedgwood‘s photogram efforts of 1801 by the same means, though her aim was not to make representational shadow prints as he did, but confirmed photoreduction using light.

Is this witchcraft—material made light-sensitive by a potion; the employment of a dark room to keep it from sunlight; exposure that transforms it; cloth turned to gold or silver—or is it photography?

Earlier histories of photography, such as Eder’s, place male pioneers and their innovations along a timeline of optimisation, just as do the technical handbooks written by practitioners for practitioners. Histories of art photography take up Giorgio Vasari’s “master narratives”, in which apart from Julia Margaret Cameron who began photographing in 1860, or Lady Clementina Hawarden, active from 1857, and some female Pictorialists, women are few.

They were however valued in the commercial and industrial sphere for their ‘feminine touch,’ literally, in ‘retouching.’ That was a role seen to use skills in which they were drilled from childhood, such as needlework, through which ‘femininity’ was naturalised, as Harriet Riches argues, through patience; “labor that demanded stillness, discipline, and the instillation of insufferable patience, in addition to an almost mindless attention to detail, in what was considered to be the mere reproduction of decorative pattern.” And isn’t photography itself ‘mere reproduction’?

I’d like here to look at one who was born this date in 1815, that is Bertha Beckmann. I’m certainly not alone in doing so, as there is ready access to a huge number of her photographs at the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig; one who has is Sarah L. Leonard in “Reading Early German Photographs for Histories of Emotion,” her chapter in the 2020 book Feelings Materialized : Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500-1950.

Like many others who took up the medium in Germany and elsewhere after the summer of 1840, Beckmann’s commercial practice of portraiture was made possible by inventions, especially the fast lens produced by Austrian mathematician Joseph Max Petzval which from May 1840 dramatically shortened exposure time so a sitter might successfully hold a pose.

Leonard holds that the daguerreotypes and photographs of the mid-nineteenth century Germany were unspectacular by design; they  presented individuals in domestic settings and embraced middle class values in the midst of the Biedermeier era. This cultural period was so named, retrospectively, from various poems published in the Munich Fliegerblatt newspaper from 1855 onwards. They parody the innocent petit bourgeois Gottlieb Biedermaier, based on the real village school teacher Samuel Friedrich Sauter and his insipid poetry. The Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815 and the European revolutions of 1848 bookended these decades of political suppression and cultural conservatism. After 1900 the term denoted a petty-bourgeois culture of domesticity with emphasis on the private sphere, but without the original derogatory connotation.

Therefore the sitters for these daguerretoypes conform to conventional gestures and costume that physically embody discipline and reserve and are presented in comfortable but not ostentatious studio settings. Early photographers, such as the partners Edouard Wehnert and Bertha Beckmann, at first overcame technical constraints to produce creative and emotionally expressive daguerreotypes. Krone produced beautiful, expressive portraits of his family and self-portraits, while Wehnert-Beckmann experimented with daguerreotype self-portraits, nudes, and still-life studies.

Born in Cottbus in 1815, Bertha Beckmann relocated to Dresden in 1839. In 1843, and believed to be the first in Europe to do so, she established her own photo studio specialising in portrait photography. Two years later, in 1845, she married her professional colleague, Eduard Wehnert, and simultaneously acquired an official business license from the Council of the City of Leipzig. Following this, she managed a photo studio on Burgstraße in Leipzig before her husband died just two years later, leaving her to continue the business on her own.

Between 1849 and 1851, Bertha Beckmann was in the United States, where she set up a studio in New York and earned recognition from the American Institute in New York, receiving a “Diploma for Special Services to Portrait Photography.” Upon her return to Leipzig, she propelled her studio to new heights, becoming one of the city’s most renowned portrait photographers in the ensuing years. Her elegant studio on Elsterstraße, completed in 1866, welcomed a diverse clientele, including women, children, and prominent figures from Leipzig and its surroundings, solidifying her reputation as a leading portrait photographer, a career she continued until 1883.

Rolf Sachsse, an author of, and contributor to, books on Anna Atkins, Lucia Moholy, Marie Goslich, Anja Schlamann and other women photographers, writing in Hannavy’s 2008 Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography is rather grudging of Wehnert-Beckmann’s significance in his fairly summary biography; “her historical importance lies in the fact that she successfully practised photography in a male world for nearly half a century,” and “seemed to be the female entrepreneur par excellence in 19th century photography.” That she “owned a studio in New York City, and around 1866…a branch of her businesses in Vienna,” even had she been male, would have been a notable achievement.  Speaking from his interest in art photography, he is less impressed with such commercial success and argues that “her work was of very good quality but in no way different from typical work, with the exception that she had a sensitive approach to human beings. She never seemed to have aimed at any fate but fulfilling the needs of her clients.”

The photographs below show Beckmann’s progressive adoption of the available media from daguerrotype to albumen print from the faster glass collodion negative. In photographing children she adopts strategies including props that will keep the younger children still, where she asks the girl to embrace the taxidermied gull, while her older brother holds her sister steady by gently holding her hand.

In this uncropped albumen print we seen the reassuring presence of the mother holding back the curtain, and can detect that she places a hand, hidden behind the tapestry, on the child’s back. The furniture has been stacked to permit the necessary equalisation of the relative heights of parent and child. In the final print in an oval frame would conceal these interventions and produce the impression of a composed and self-assured little boy, dressed in his infant costume but already possessing male traits considered desirable.

Here, once again the presence of an immobile toy bird in a cage provides both a model of static composure, and a prop for this little boy’s elbow and hand.

Such examples define precisely her artistic talent that she put very successfully to commercial purpose. Beckmann’s portraiture increasingly appealed to a diverse clientele; aristocrats, urban middle-class individuals, and ordinary citizens. By the 1860s, patrons willingly paid to have their portraits taken within carefully arranged photographic “sets,” within her studio mimicking orderly domestic environments and furnished with a curated selection of props like wooden chairs, tables, potted plants, toys and books. The sitters, adorned in formal attire, purposefully adopted expressions, postures, and gestures that are intended to represent them to their future generations with a precision and presence that had not been possible 20 years before, prior to the advent of photography.

In the era of the daguerreotype, young children, her special subject, present further challenges apparent in this very early example of Bertha’s work from before the death of her husband Eduard Wehnert. While the boy gallantly mounts the rocking horse provided by Beckmann’s studio his sister holds it still during the long exposure, he is too young to hold his head still, and even his sister has not been able to resist looking about the room, so that both his head, and her eyes, are blurred, while the oldest obediently achieves utter stillness.

It’s easy to assume that early German photographic portraits provide little insight into the emotional lives of the sitters or the emotional styles of the period, as they appear formal and lack spontaneity. However, Leonard examines these portraits from the 1840s to the 1860s to understand what they reveal about emotional practices and styles of the time using the portraits of Wehnert-Beckmann, as her work as a photographer is well-documented and technically and aesthetically accomplished. She finds that early German photographic portraits required sitters to perform specific emotional styles, which could be challenging to achieve within the studio setting. So studios often advertised comfort for their clients, such as heated waiting rooms and reading materials, in order to make the process more manageable. Handbooks and manuals were also available to photographers, providing tips on how to comfort sitters and elicit the desired facial expressions and postures. Leonard cites textual evidence, such as a handwritten note from a client providing insight into the attitudes and expectations of those who sat for photographs. For example, a note from publisher Rudolf Brockhaus in 1867, expresses his desire to have his portrait taken in a specific format and within a limited time frame, despite the fact that achieving the static posture required for the carte-de-visite format would have required him to stand still and relax.

Any portraitist treads the knife edge between fawning flattery and honest likeness, and we can see Beckmann develop approaches that permit emotional states to be made visible, so that the candid warmth of personality in this young woman shines forth…

…while Beckmann’s creativity in the use of mirror (probably even before Hawarden’s famous use of such a prop) vividly conveys two sides of this subject’s character; her seeming tight-lipped determination, and her coquettishness…

and here, where the subject is posed to turn her back on the window, a quite sombre introspective mood is made apparent.

Large archives of seemingly identical postures in early German photographic portraits can be challenging for historians trying to understand the emotional histories they depict. Individual portrait and the family portrait photographs were part of a transnational visual vocabulary of the mid-nineteenth century. Sitters across various geographical contexts had these photographs taken of themselves in dark suits and dresses, often seated in wooden chairs and at tables, holding flowers or books. However, recent scholarship on vernacular photography argues that such photographs should be more closely examined as they reveal important information about communities and their desire to be represented in specific ways. The photographs in a series, although seemingly identical, contain important variations in the choices of both sitters and photographers. Although it is tempting to assume that sitters were members of the bourgeoisie due to their dress and settings, this correlation was not always accurate. Historians have shown that slaves, domestic servants, and colonized peoples also sat for such portraits. The classic portrait casts sitters in relatively homogenous styles that seemed to erase differences while also highlighting them.Historians are encouraged to “listen” to the emotional register of these images as they may appear quiet, but should not be mistaken for silence.

The early German photographs of families shared many features with individual portraits, such as similar clothing and studio settings that mimicked semi-private spaces in bourgeois homes. However, family photographs also represented relationships between people, with patterns and choices of touch, positioning, and order speaking to hierarchies, attachments, and relationships within the family. Even in the case of her early work in the daguerreotype that required the family members to cooperate with the photographer to ensure they remained still during long exposures, these gestures of affection or of hierarchy are acted out.

In the case of this sumptuously framed daguerreotype, the respect and tenderness between this newly wed husband and wife is recorded faithfully by Beckmann.

Like individual portraits, family photographs tell us about how families wanted to appear and the emotional registers they hoped to set down. They are seen as affective and material practices that construct and reproduce the family as it would like to be seen. Additionally, these photographs as objects had emotional value and were meant to be held, displayed, worn, and exchanged. They captured the light emanating from the person photographed and were often held close or worn on the body, making the emotional impact tied to touch. Furthermore, photographs as objects are seen to have agency and are coconstructed with people, working to mediate relationships between people and between generations and provide important visual markers of belonging and difference.

Historian Monique Scheer, American-German historical and cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany, wisely argues that emotions, far from being internal, are brought into being through material practices in the world and are embodied through physical practices. The gestures and adornment of those who sat for portraits were not the stuff of everyday habit, but performances of the occasion captured on silver plates. Props such as chairs, tables, and plants in the studio staged bodies in a realm removed from cold, clutter, and difficult work, so that the subjects’ minds were free to range. However, the materiality of emotions also complicates the argument that the German self in this period was primarily imagined in terms of interiority. The use of objects and social gestures as markers of social belonging or exclusion can be observed in these portraits in which the emotional and physical discomfort of lower-status sitters is evident. Even formal, seemingly uniform photographs tell us about the affective stances sitters went to great lengths to perform through a formal range of bodily expression embodied in touch, and thus we learn about how people yearned to appear in a form of self-predestination!