Early photography physically immobilized subjects whose ordeal prefigures postmodern art’s effects

Evidence

We are told, for instance, that in the early days of photography, or rather, of the daguerrotype, subjects were obliged to sit in absolute immobility for periods of time which, although not long as the crow flies, could nonetheless be characterized as being relatively intolerable. One imagines the uncontrollable twitching of the facial muscles, for example, or the overwhelming urge to scratch or laugh. The first photographers therefore devised something on the order of the electric chair, in which the heads of their portrait subjects, from the lowliest and most banal generals all the way to Lincoln himself, were clamped in place and immobilized from the back for the obligatory five or ten minutes of the exposure. Roussel, whom I’ve already mentioned, is something like a literary equivalent of this process: his unimaginably detailed and minute description of objects — an absolutely infinite process without principle or thematic interest of any kind — forces the reader to work laboriously through one sentence after another, world without end. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 216

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle on the history of bodily discipline in image technologies — from head clamps to selfie posture to surveillance screens.
• SHARE: The daguerrotype head-clamp (the ‘electric chair’ portrait device used on Lincoln) is a perfect fact for someone into the material history of photography.