family—domination, subservience, and violence. Generations of American politicians have used dogs to validate their claim to an upright character, and so an entire nation can debate what kind of dog the president will chose, because dogs are such an important symbol of everything we say we hold dear.
Finally, the dog invites our participation in a moment otherwise largely inaccessible to us. One of the features of antique photographs is the stiffness of the unsmiling subjects. For example, my Grandma Morey was suspicious of the camera, and not always very supportive of Grandpa’s interest in the new instrument. She is famous in family pictures for crimping her lips instead of smiling, and I was given to understand that she was vain, and didn’t think she looked good smiling. But histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography suggest that people were advised that only a lower-class person would be so vulgar as to show his or her teeth in a photograph. A slack, open mouth suggested a slack character. So Alice White, born in 1897, may simply have been following the conventions of the day. The commanded smile is a later development in the history of photographic conventions, and has become a conventional artiface. But for contemporary viewers the smile establishes a friendly, welcoming moment. Smiling people are inviting, opening the doors so that we can easily see ourselves joining those scripted moments around the birthday cake, graduation ceremony, or family picnic table. Without the smile, there is no implicit welcome that speaks to us.
I suggest that the dog is the missing smile in the photograph. The strangeness of our ancestors’ clothing, homes, and manners is normalized by the dog, who, in the photographic moment, seems timeless. Dogs sprawl, sleep, pant, and wriggle, just as they always have. And because we recognize dogs as familiar and valued, the dog smiles to us that these people are not so different from us, and that despite their stiff demeanors and strange clothing, they too might have joined the dog on the floor in a game of tug-the-sock. Whether we meant for them to be in the picture or not, dogs are unselfconsciously themselves, speaking across time and cultural boundaries. By presenting their dogs, our forebears open the door and welcome us in.
1
THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF EVERYDAY PEOPLE
“Am still in Des Moines and working for my pa. I worked in a downtown drug store for some time slinging soda water but the late hours and Sundays left me no time for my family which I send a cut of. Sid.” Posted in 1906 to a Mrs. Chas Vorhies (?), the real photo postcard (RPPC) in figure 13 features a photograph of five neatly dressed young men with a dog seated in the middle of the group, elevated to eye level with the human companions by a crate. Sid captions the image: “Me ’n’ me friends.” The image is a good example of a mascot picture, a thematically popular genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we can reasonably suppose that Sid and his friends are a team, club, or group of co-workers who have a shared animal that represents them, grounds them, and expresses something about their collective spirit. The format of the RPPC is relatively late in the chronology of photographic formats, so the centrality of the canine is not surprising. But even the earliest and usually most costly form of photographic images for collectors, daguerreotypes, sometimes included dogs, as do all of the formats that followed them.
With the RPPC it is possible to have pictures and words in the same communication, as we have with Sid’s card. Here is yet another meaning of visual rhetoric—that words, spoken or written, stand in relationship to something visual, and they are mutually enhancing. I begin by describing the conventions of dog photography, along with introducing the photographic formats that make up the bulk of the collection. It is important to describe the protocols that governed the dog in the picture, because, as with any folklore, deviation from what is expected is part of the surprise and charm of the event. What is different, or what is absent, is part of the reading.
FIGURE 13
Sid. Used RPPC, 1906, 7.3 × 7.5 cm.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CONVENTIONS
Although the dog is the animal most commonly presented in antique photographs, people documented their household menageries with a generous inclusivity. People kept horses, chickens, cats, rabbits, and a variety of tamed wild animals and birds, and all of these critters can be found in nineteenth-century photography. Even before urban sprawl, animals have always occupied an ambiguous position in the economy of family values. Some of these animals were destined for love and others were destined for the market or the dinner table. Moreover, displaying livestock in a photograph was one further way of documenting one’s success, so the animating motivations for making a portrait with an animal could be ambiguous. In figure 14, both the image and the history of race relations require us to wonder if the black man holding the horse is the proud owner or one of the proud owner’s hired hands, that is, one of the creatures on display. He is standing at an angle rather than greeting the camera head-on, as a proud owner might do. The dog is attentive to him, suggesting that he cares for the dog, but that doesn’t mean he owns the dog any more than he owns the horse. In figure 15, the effect of including livestock is more comical. The little girl’s worried face makes us suspect that it was not her idea to hold the disheveled fowl. In this family group, the dog, an English setter, and the bird are meaningful possessions for display. It’s surprising how often animals—not just dogs—show up in studio photographs, because the presence of animals also pushes the presentation toward the casual, if not the unexpected.
FIGURE 14
Unused RPPC, 1910–1918, 13.2 × 8.2 cm.
But photographs with dogs reveal a wide variety of settings, from forests to fields, to front porches and parlors, to the front seat of the family wagon or automobile. Wherever people could go, so could dogs. And where people were relaxed and comfortable, so was the dog. Conversely, where people were formal and rigid in their demeanor, so was the dog. Typically, we explain the stiffness of nineteenth-century photographs by referring to their exposure time. Headrests and stands were used to ensure the stillness of the subject, and many photographs of people standing show the “third foot” of the stand that is keeping them fixed in place. But while it was important for subjects to remain still, the exposure time was not the entire explanation, nor was it just that the subjects were uptight. The exposure time for the daguerreotype was less than sixty seconds, and that format was rapidly succeeded by far more sitter-friendly modes. As early as 1851, the use of glass-plate negatives reduced the sitting time to a few seconds for outdoor exposures and thirty to sixty seconds for indoor portraits.1 Yet we have stiff-looking portraits long past the time when such rigidity was necessary. Why?
FIGURE 15
Cabinet card, 1880s, 13.3 × 9.6 cm. Photograph by A. Hurst. Marshall, Illinois.
The formality of portraiture has to do with both the novelty of the medium and the way in which the camera invaded private space. Much like Native Americans, who felt that the camera robbed one’s soul, many Americans felt that “unguarded facial expressions were reflections of deep and sincere feeling,” and that the undisciplined face revealed emotions and feelings that perhaps were better reserved for private spaces. “Kodakers” took gleeful pleasure in catching people off guard, and thereby surprising them as their real selves, so late nineteenth-century Americans had to be constantly on guard to “avoid exhibiting the wrong feelings.”2 It was the marketing of the camera by George Eastman that moved the technology beyond its original class-based exclusivity. By 1889, photography had been pronounced a “craze”