and dog to stand on. The carpet seems to suggest the domestic amenities of a civilized household, and perhaps a certain income level as well. By bringing the carpet outside, the subjects imply that a full, respectable household supports the picture, and they introduce an element of control in an outdoor setting. That piece of carpet is so ubiquitous that, along with the dog, we can recognize it as an essential part of the visual rhetoric. It is common to find a small carpet on the front porch, but sometimes it is on the bare ground, as in the family photograph in figure 25. In this large cabinet-card presentation, we find a formally posed family of nine in the informal outdoors, positioned in front of a tarp or blanket that has been affixed to cover a house wall. The family members are neatly centered around a small square of carpet, which looks like a home-loomed pattern rather than the Oriental design sometimes favored in studio presentations. Although they all look serious, and it’s possible that two of the women are in mourning clothing, both the dog and the hands on the shoulders hint at more affectionate demeanors off camera. Even formally, they are in physical contact with one another. The interesting exception is the patriarch in front, who is touched by no one, and the dog positioned at the feet of its master.
While the RPPC belonged most to lower- and middle-class Americans, it is not the photographic format that determines the content and presentation. There are any number of CDVs and cabinet cards that, like the RPPC, may capture an improvised or poorly composed moment, indoors or outdoors, as well as presenting thoughtfully arranged subjects in ornate settings. Moreover, some presentations are staged, and have their roots in “earlier nineteenth-century customs, such as amateur theatricals.”10 Some studio settings, such as figure 26, suggest not the handsome parlor but the stage show or carnival backdrop. Rosamond Vaule, in As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905–1930, documents the range of campy settings that were used in RPPC photographs, so this image is not unusual except for the fact that the romantic setting has been defined around the dog. A note on the back of this RPPC says, “1910, Silver Beach, St. Joe, Michigan.” Silver Beach was an amusement park on the shores of St. Joseph, Michigan, that operated from 1891 to 1971, and the website documenting its history notes that “it was common for courting couples to promenade along the boardwalk at night.” In figure 26, it seems that the young man had a date with his elderly dog, which leans comfortably against him, framed by the romantic crescent moon.
But even when the framing, posing, and editing of extraneous detail is casual, if not haphazard, the result can run the gamut from comical to compelling. Figure 27 is an example of the latter. The boy and his dog stand amid the rubble of a backyard and the back porch of a store. Behind the boy, on his left, is a crate that says “Borden’s Evaporated Milk,” and the box farther back on the porch behind him says “Ridgeway Tea.” There is adult-size laundry flapping on the line to his right. The boy is dressed in a school outfit that could have been found in the Sears catalogue anytime between 1909 and 1920, although the RPPC stamp box indicates that it could be as late as 1930. It appears that the dog is on a chain, which the boy may be gripping at the collar. This lonely-looking child appears to be Asian, making this a rare image for that reason alone, and he is biting his lower lip, as if apprehensive. Perhaps he is facing a first day of school and is marching off into the world from the rubble of his private world, with only the stalwart dog standing beside him for comfort. The dog, looking much like Little Orphan Annie’s Sandy, functions as a guardian figure in the photograph. Little Orphan Annie debuted as a newspaper strip in 1924, so the visual suggestion that Annie’s dog has made its way into this photograph as part of a deliberate communication is enticing. If the background were removed, and this child were simply standing in front of a tarp backdrop, or within a regular studio setting, his face would still be interesting but not nearly so compelling. It is the setting, in combination with the boy’s evocative face, that gives the image such implicit narrative poignancy. His context suggests a life lived amid workaday rough-and-tumble, where unseen adults have tossed crates and lumber and litter but have also taken the time to button his jacket and shoes. There is both care and carelessness here, and it takes both elements to produce an image like this.
FIGURE 26
Used RPPC, 1910, 7.5 × 13 cm. Silver Beach Amusement Park, St. Joseph, Michigan.
FIGURE 27
Unused RPPC, 1918–1930, 13.2 × 8 cm.
VERNACULAR AND VISUAL FOLKLORE
But we are not just looking at singular images; we are looking at them as a collection and a group from within which I am creating narrative juxtapositions. It’s important to suggest why and how a seemingly random collection can come to have a significance larger than any of its individual components. Photography is now so pervasively associated with advertising and consumer culture that it takes some deliberation to contemplate the trajectory of cultural influence represented by the technology. Although people wanted their portraits to look respectable, which means that there was a shared visual formula to follow, they also wanted to appear as individuals. Gwen Wright says that “middle-class Victorians wanted to believe that their houses were impressively unique. At the same time, certain patterns were necessary so that other people could clearly read the symbolism of social status and contented family life in the detail.”11 This drive for a homogenous individuality is also a feature of these photographs. We can certainly understand this oxymoronic impulse today. As consumers, we are urged to purchase brand-name products in order to be individualistic, which is hardly possible if everyone in our income range is purchasing the same product. Then as now, consumers, and especially housewives, were urged to show how “smartly” they could dress, and how they could lift their families above the toil and trouble of everyday life simply by purchasing and maintaining the right accessories. Indeed, advertising promised “the maintenance of domestic harmony through intelligent consumption.”12
This consumerist vision is intimately linked to photography, as Susan Sontag and many others have pointed out. Photography and its products provide compelling visual instruction about what to want, and the visual desire produced through our consumerist culture becomes our ruling value. “Our very eyesight has been pressed into service as a mode of social control,” comments Laura Wexler. At the same time, there is something about photography that encourages us to take the appearance as sufficient representation or explanation. Because a photograph seems to make something visible and apparent, it becomes difficult to press upon that appearance for further insight. “The institutions of production, circulation and reception of photographs effectively discourage inquiry into how things got to be the way that they appear.”13 The seeming realism of the moment captured on film seems to trump all discussion, in part because we are so conditioned to seeing these images as dominant without recognizing the extent to which photographic images are also domineering and coercive.
In short, we fail to converse about photographs. Wexler suggests that our “active and selective refusal to read photography” can be called photographic anekphrasis, which is a play on the Greek word ekphrasis, meaning the skill of putting words to images. In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism, Wexler argues that our failure to discuss and read photographs as artifacts implicit in creating cultural meaning is a “class-and-race-based form of cultural domination. It represses the antidemocratic potential of photography and distorts the history of the significance of race and gender in the construction of the visual field.”14 Since its inception, photography has been a key element in the design and perpetuation of cultural hierarchies, but we have yet to grapple with this powerful visual rhetoric and its historical impact. Thus the role of photography in the expression and creation of American identity is at once fascinating