This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

This dissertation excavates the work of early special effects cinematographer Norman O. Dawn in order to explore film spectatorship, the ephemerality of the cinematic image, and motion picture preservation and archival practices. Best known for his innovations of glass and matte shot techniques, Dawn produced 861 composite images while working in the U.S. film industry between 1906 and 1954. Although technological film historians acknowledge the importance of Dawn’s innovations to the development of motion picture special effects, the composite images themselves as well as the films for which they were produced remain in relative obscurity. Rather than attempting to recover these objects for inclusion in an existing film canon, my research interrogates their obscurity by analyzing Dawn’s special effects processes against the broader economic concerns that inform the dominant practices of the US film industry during the first half of the twentieth-century. My research begins with the Norman O. Dawn collection housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, which is the most comprehensive historical record of Dawn’s work in the film industry. Constructed by Dawn himself between 1962 and 1974, this collection consists of 164 poster-sized collages of archival ephemera that illustrate the special effects processes employed in the production of 235 composite images for eighty-five films. While these eighty-five film titles constitute a tentative corpus upon which to base my research, seventy of these films are lost, which raises questions concerning the relationship between motion picture preservation and film history, specifically why these films have not been preserved while others have and to what extent the economic imperatives of the film industry have determined these conditions. I address these questions in my analysis of archival material related to these films, finding that they traverse several distinct domains of film practice—including early scenic footage for newsreels and the amusement park ride Hale’s Tours of the World, early one-reel travel films, silent-era studio shorts, serials, and B features, and poverty row and independently-produced silent and sound feature-length films—thereby situating Dawn’s special effects at the intersection of the early and contemporary cinematic modes often aligned in studies of cinematic special effects. I argue that this heterogeneous corpus points to a studio-era Hollywood cinema alternative to the classical model, largely forgotten because it is dominated by low-budget product intended to supplement more costly feature films. In contrast to the classical model, this alternate cinematic mode emphasizes the scenic and thrilling elements that characterize both early exhibitionist films and contemporary effects-driven blockbusters. In this context, Dawn’s special effects processes constitute a historically marginalized practice precisely because they are non-routine techniques that provide cost-effective means to produce otherwise economically infeasible scenes, and, as such, operate on the periphery of conventional film production.