This photo shouldn't exist.
Unidentified, 1873-c. 1916 (probably c. 1885-1895), C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Don't get me wrong. I don't object to photos of young women kissing each other. After all, images of that sort can be very enjoyable to look at.
What I mean is this, the photo is a mystery. It's an anomaly -- an utter outlier -- in the archive in which I found it.
I stumbled across the kiss in the online archive of the C.M. Bell Studio at the Library of Congress. Bell's was one of the most successful -- and respectable -- portrait studios in Washington, D.C. Its archive has recently been digitized, and it turns out that it contains some remarkably beautiful portraits.
Miss J. Taliaferro, c. 1894-1901, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
(You can click on any of these images to see larger versions.)
Unidentified, c. 1873-1916, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Most of the portraits, however, are more conventional -- even the portraits of presidents.
T.R. Roosevelt, 1873-c. 1916 (probably c. 1900), C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Bell's studio catered to the nation's social and political elite. Here's how the Library of Congress describes Bell and the business he founded:
Charles Milton Bell (1848-1893) was one of Washington's leading portrait photographers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The studio became known for its large collection of portraits of Washington notables, including politicians, leading businessmen and educators, embassy officials and distinguished visitors from other countries, church leaders, athletes and entertainers, and members of Washington's black middle class.
So it's no surprise that Teddy Roosevelt sat for a portrait at the studio.
Mrs. Jas. Brown Potter, c. 1873-1890, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Or that the socialite and actress Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter chose Bell's to make one of her many portraits.
C.M. Bell Studio, Frederick Douglass, c. 1890, cabinet card, Middlebury College.
And that Frederick Douglass, who was as sophisticated as anyone in his knowledge and use of photography, trusted the studio to produce a strong and faithful likeness.
These are portraits of exceptional people, of course. But they're representative of the portraits that Bell's Studio made and the kind of clients it attracted. It wasn't interested in pushing at the boundaries of propriety, and to do so would surely have been bad for business.
Yet, the photo of the two young women kissing each other exists. And that raises all sorts of questions that I can't answer. (Maybe this blog post will get someone interested in looking for the answers.)
Unidentified, 1873-c. 1916 (probably c. 1885-1895), C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
As you can guess from looking at the photo directly above, the kiss at the top of the page was made from one half of a glass plate negative. That is, after loading the plate into the camera, the photographer masked first one side of the plate and then the other in order to make two different exposures on a single plate. Ordinarily this was done to save the client a little money -- two for one, you might say.
The photo of the two women that was made from the right side of the plate is actually quite conventional, perhaps surprisingly so. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was common for two unrelated people of the same gender to pose in ways that, to contemporary eyes, suggest the possibility of sexual intimacy. The Bell's archive contains many such photos.
Misses Walter and Grave, c. 1891-189, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Cheney and Shipper, c. 1905-1906, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Men sometimes posed in ways that we'd now find entirely inappropriate. (I teach in a university. Believe me, if I posed like this with a student, my dean would surely want to know what the heck is going on.)
Atwood, Meyer, c. 1901-1903, C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
Of course, when we see photos like the three directly above, we all find ourselves wondering what the heck is going on. The question comes down to "were they sleeping with each other or not?" The answer is we don't know. Or, to put it another way, probably sometimes yes and probably sometimes no.
Reading these photos, and the many just like them from all over the western world, isn't easy. We do know that when these photos were made physical intimacy didn't necessarily imply sexual intimacy.
The photos are insistently ambiguous in all sorts of ways. We usually don't know whether we're looking at sisters, brothers, cousins, parents and children, uncles and nephews, friends, or lovers. (Sometimes the archive itself acknowledges the uncertainty.)
People have been pondering the meaning of physically intimate same-sex portraits for the last couple of decades. You can read a good introduction to the problem, here.
But that kiss at the top of the page ought to remove whatever doubts we have about the relationship. On the one side of the plate, we see the two women in one of those ambiguous nineteenth-century poses, and, on the other, they're locked in a passionate embrace. Problem solved. Right?
Maybe not.
The women show up in another Bell photograph, and one of the women is the subject of a third. And these photos only make the water even muddier.
Unidentified, 1873-c. 1916 (probably c. 1885-1895), C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
In this photo we have the same two women as in the kiss, dressed in widow's weeds, but not looking at all mournful. I have no idea what's going on here. This portrait was made at more or less the same time as the kiss. Are the women really in mourning? If not, why are they posing in mourning clothes? And wait, there's more.
Unidentified, 1873-c. 1916 (probably c. 1885-1895), C.M. Bell Studio, Library of Congress.
This portrait of one of our anonymous kissers stopped me in my tracks. It was very clearly made at exactly the same time as the kiss and as the portrait of the two women in mourning clothes. You can see her black dress under her coat! We have here a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Questions upon questions. What were the women doing in Bell's Studio? I can't believe that it had anything to do with mourning the dead. Then what? Had they be recruited to help the photographer check out a new piece of equipment? A new lens? A new emulsion? This strikes me as a real possibility. The women's coats and hair styles suggest that they were working class. If that was the case, it's unlikely that they could have afforded to have a series of portraits made by Bell's.
Whatever brought the women into the studio, what made them feel free enough to kiss in front of whoever was operating the studio's camera on that day? Was he (or she -- Annie E. Colley, Bell's wife, briefly ran the studio after his death in 1893) a friend? (We know it was daytime. Bell's was a daylight studio -- no artificial lighting.)
Or was the kiss not really a kiss? Were the women just goofing around? The kiss, complete with motion blur, looks real to me. But who knows?
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Just to be clear, all of these questions come out of finding the kiss in the Bell's Studio archive. That photo is strangely, extravagantly out of place in the archive of such a well established, respectable, elite nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portrait studio. On the other hand, snapshots and pornographic photos from the era that show same-sex couples kissing aren't rare at all. You can see some here, here, and here. The kiss is different, and it got me wondering.
Granted, this is a small mystery, not a big one. But if you've got any answers, the comments are open. I'd love to hear from you. All I have are questions.
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Interesting and yes there are a multitude of same sex photos of that era looking "pornographic" but as you say not usually from such a distinquished studio it may have been just a test phot & not ment to have survived archiving it is artistic in content for sure!
Posted by: Mariya Field | 01 August 2017 at 06:12 PM