Posing for Posterity: PhotographicPortraiture and the Invention of the

Time Capsule, 1876–89

Nicholas Yablon

In response to scholars’ recent preoccupation with the circulation of photographs,this article advocates greater attention to instances in which they have beenwithdrawn from circulation or reserved for future use. The focus here is on themost extreme of these closed collections, namely the time capsule, which wasconceived in Philadelphia in 1876. The article shows how photography played acrucial role in the earliest time capsules – not just as their principal content, butalso as a medium associated with fantasies of time travel, conceptions of posterity,and practices of storage. It then recovers the complex and contradictory politicalmeanings of these photographic collections, thereby challenging the rhetoric ofaltruism and neutrality that has accompanied so many efforts to preserve photo-graphs for future viewers and historians.

Keywords: portraiture, time capsules, posterity, Gilded Age, celebrity and fame, aura,photography and media, photography and history, photographic conservation, photo-graphic display, albums, Centennial Exposition, Mathew Brady (ca. 1822–96),Charles D. Mosher (1829–97), Anna Deihm (1834–1911)

The bells that rang out across a rainy, wind-swept Philadelphia to signal the CentennialExposition’s opening on 10 May 1876 also heralded the birth of a cultural innovation.Most of the 186,272 visitors who inundated the fair grounds on opening day elbowedtheir way towards the chief sights, especially of President Ulysses Grant and BrazilianEmperor Dom Pedro II pulling the levers of the mammoth Corliss steam engine tobreathe life into thousands of exhibits throughout Machinery Hall. But elsewhere onthe exhibition grounds, a smaller, quieter invention was revealed to the public. In acorner of the Art Gallery, the New York magazine publisher Anna Deihm displayedher Century Safe, a 5-foot 4-inch iron safe containing a collection of photographs,autographs, and other mementos (figure 1); while in Photographic Hall, the Chicagoportrait photographer Charles D. Mosher unveiled his own embryonic collection ofphotographs, which he later deposited in his Memorial Safe (figure 2). AlthoughDeihm’s and Mosher’s exhibits would barely have stood out from the more thanthirty thousand other businesses flaunting their wares, they represented the earliestprototypes of what would be christened – at the New York world’s fair of 1939 – a timecapsule. Unlike cornerstone deposits and other precedents, these safes were timeddevices: both were intended to be opened at the Bicentennial.1

Mosher’s and Deihm’s time capsule projects further departed from corner-stone deposits in their devotion to photography. While containing a few printeddocuments (such as newspapers and pamphlets) and hundreds of autographs, theywere, above all, collections of photographic portraits. Deihm assembled an

I am indebted to Paula Amad, JohnDurham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, andJohn Raeburn for reading the chapter onwhich this article is based; and to the twoanonymous readers for History ofPhotography. For assistance with theresearch, I must thank the Curator for theArchitect of the Capitol, Barbara Wolanin,and her assistants Pam McConnell andAndria Field; and Lesley Martin at theChicago History Museum.

Email for correspondence: nick-yablon@uiowa.edu

1 – On Deihm’s exhibit, see J. S. Ingram,The Centennial Exposition, Described andIllustrated, Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros.1876, 620; on Mosher’s exhibit, see‘Photography in the Great Exhibition’,Philadelphia Photographer, 13:150 (1876),184. The only secondary source on Mosheris Larry A. Viskochil, ‘Chicago’sBicentennial Photographer: Charles D.Mosher’, Chicago History, 5 (Summer1976), 95–104. The library studies scholarWilliam E. Jarvis traces the time capsule’santecedents back to antiquity. William E.Jarvis, Time Capsules: A Cultural History,Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2003, 82–137.

History of Photography, Volume 38, Number 4, November 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2014.949050

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

enormous album containing photographs of the President and his cabinet,Supreme Court justices, and every member of Congress, while also solicitingphotographs from the nation’s leading figures in ‘Science, Literature, and theFine and Mechanical Arts’ (figures 3, 4).2 Mosher’s Memorial Safe was evenmore ambitious. Growing out of his exhibit in Philadelphia of 590 portraits ofleading Chicagoans, it expanded to include politicians, generals, entrepreneurs,inventors, literary figures, and other ‘notables’ (and their wives) from across thenation, and ultimately any middle-class American willing to pay. He eventuallydeposited as many as ten thousand portraits, some of which he inserted into large,specially designed photographic albums (figure 5).3

As photographic collections intended for future viewers, Mosher’s and Deihm’s‘time vessels’ – as I will call these above-ground deposits, to differentiate them fromthe time capsules buried since the 1930s – draw attention to the limitations ofprevailing methodologies. For the past three decades, a social–historical approachhas dominated the study of photography. Reacting partly to earlier approaches thatreduced the history of photography to a chronicle of evolving techniques and tech-nologies or to an aesthetic lineage of ‘great masters’ canonised for their formalinnovations, and partly to the ahistoricism of textual, semiotic readings of images,social historians of photography have called attention to the non-aesthetic functions ofphotographs (that is, their social utility).4 Resituating photographs within the broaderdiscourses and institutions of their period, they have shed light on their popular usesas tokens of a family’s middle-class social status or as ritual objects in mourningpractices; as journalistic media disseminating events from wars to world’s fairs; aspromotional agents for consumer products, modern technologies, or political candi-dates; or as tools for scientific inquiry. Above all, they have investigated the conscrip-tion of photography as an instrument of state or corporate power. VariousFoucaultian-inflected studies have explored the identification and prosecution ofcriminals through police mugshots and the legal evidence of photography; the sub-jugation of ethnic others through topographic and ethnographic photography; the re-training of factory and office workers through Taylorist chronophotography; theregulation and sanitisation of slums through social-reformist documentary photo-graphy; and the pathologisation of the ‘abnormal’ and the ‘diseased’ through psychia-tric and medical photography. These various discourses, sites, and practices havefunctioned as an interrelated network, connecting the asylum, hospital, and policestation to the factory, school, and colony, and thereby diffusing forms of self-govern-ing power across the social field.5 Such studies have been supplemented, moreover, byinquiries into photography’s mnemonic function: its role in constructing certainnational pasts to be deployed in the present.6

This investigation of the camera’s instrumentality has implicitly privilegedcertain types of photographs: those that circulated. The social–historical approachhas foregrounded the networks through which photographs, as material artefacts,were distributed, viewed, and interpreted, thereby furthering various social andpolitical ends. We are now familiar with how they were exhibited in daguerreotypegalleries, photographers’ studios, world fairs, and eventually museums; how theywere exchanged by collectors and salesmen, and distributed from vendingmachines and cigarette packs; how they were projected in slide shows to illustratelectures and travelogues; how they were reproduced as engravings and halftones inbooks, magazines, newspapers; how they were disseminated across and beyond thenation in envelopes or as postcards; and how they were ultimately, in our own era,emailed, texted, and posted online.7 This unfettered, promiscuous circulation hasbeen posited as a defining feature of the medium, central to its reputation as‘democratic’ and ‘democratising’, in contradistinction to painting, which, evenafter the emergence of the public museum, remained largely the preserve ofupper-class and middle-class viewers.8 Historians have also emphasised the circu-lation of photographs within the private sphere, exploring how Victorians dis-played photographs in their parlours (either as framed images or in scrapbooks

2 – Anna Deihm, standardised printed let-ter, 15 December 1876, in Centennial SafeCollection, Office of the Curator, Architectof the Capitol (AOC), Washington, DC.

3 – Estimates of the total number ofphotographs in Mosher’s safe vary; thisfigure from ‘To be Opened A.D. 1976’,Chicago Tribune (19 May 1889), 11.

4 – The technical approach is best repre-sented by Helmut Gernsheim and AlisonGernsheim, The History of PhotographyFrom the Camera Obscura to the Beginningof the Modern Era, London: Thames &Hudson 1969; the aesthetic approach byBeaumont Newhall, The History ofPhotography: From 1839 to the Present, 5thedn, New York: Museum of Modern Art1982; and textualist approaches are cri-tiqued in John Tagg, The Burden ofRepresentation: Essays on Photographies andHistories, Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press 1988, 29.5 – See, for example, Tagg, Burden ofRepresentation; Allan Sekula, ‘The Body andthe Archive’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64; Jonathan Mathew Finn, Capturing theCriminal Image: From Mug Shot toSurveillance Society, Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press 2009; Anne Maxwell,Colonial Photography and Exhibitions:Representations of the Native and the Makingof European Identities, London and NewYork: Continuum 2000; Elspeth H. Brown,The Corporate Eye: Photography and theRationalization of American CommercialCulture, 1884–1929, Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press 2008; and SurenLalvani, Photography, Vision, and theProduction of Modern Bodies, Stony Brook,NY: SUNY Press 1996.6 – See, for example, Locating Memory:Photographic Acts, ed. Annette Kuhn andKirsten McAllister, New York and Oxford:Berghahn Books 2006; and Rob Kroes,Photographic Memories: Private Pictures,Public Images, and American History,Lebanon, NH: University Press of NewEngland 2007.7 – On some of these forms of distribution,see Simone Natale, ‘Photography andCommunication Media in the NineteenthCentury’, History of Photography, 36:4(November 2012), 451–56.8 – See, for example, Robert Hariman andJohn Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed:Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, andLiberal Democracy, Chicago: University ofChicago Press 2007.

Nicholas Yablon

332

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

and dedicated photograph albums), carried them around in lockets, and exchangedthem in rituals of social interaction, such as the presentation of one’s carte devisite.9 Even the archiving of photographs – for police, military, medical, colonial,scientific, industrial, or historiographical purposes – constitutes another means offacilitating their circulation, albeit one restricted to so-called experts.

Figure 1. Unknown engraver, untitled(Anna Deihm’s Century Safe, showingautograph and photograph albums, framedphotographs, and other items), n.d. FromPresident James A. Garfield’s MemorialJournal, ed. C. F. Deihm, New York: C. F.Deihm 1882, 196.

Figure 2. Unknown designer, untitled(detail from backmark of one of the cabinetcard photographs deposited in Charles D.Mosher’s Memorial Safe), n.d. ChicagoHistory Museum.

9 – Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ere the SubstanceFade: Photography and Hair Jewelry’, inPhotographs Objects Histories, ed. ElizabethEdwards and Janice Hart, New York:Routledge 2004, 32–47.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

333

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

This focus on contemporaneous circulation – what Allan Sekula called the ‘traffic inphotographs’ – occludes a crucial feature of photography: its orientation to the future.10

From its very conception, writers have articulated the special relationship betweenphotography and posterity. Photography, the Athenaeum stated in 1845, has ‘enabledus to hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday, or a memorial ofthe haze of to-day’.11 This focus upon future generationswas especially central to projectsthat sought to record cultures or structures that seemed about to disappear, such as theSmithsonian’s mid-nineteenth-century collection of portraits of Native American chiefs,or the early-twentieth-century British surveys of old buildings, the latter recently analysedby Elizabeth Edwards. There have also been numerous efforts to withdraw photographs

Figure 3. ‘Photographs of the GreatAmerican People of 1876’, a photographalbum from Deihm’s Century Safe. Recordsof the Architect of the Capitol.

Figure 5. ‘Mosher’s Centennial HistoricalAlbum, 1876’, one of five albums depositedin Mosher’s Memorial Safe. ChicagoHistory Museum.

10 – Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic inPhotographs’, Art Journal, 41 (1981), 18–19.

11 – ‘The Pencil of Nature. By Henry FoxTalbot, F.R.S.’, Athenaeum, 904 (1845), 202.

Nicholas Yablon

334

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Figure 4. Mathew Brady, untitled (portraits of – clockwise, from top left – President Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Secretary of theTreasury Benjamin Bristow, and Vice President Henry Wilson), albumen prints on cabinet card, n.d. From the album ‘Photographs of the Great AmericanPeople of 1876’, deposited in Deihm’s Century Safe. Records of the Architect of the Capitol.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

335

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

from circulation, in some cases by governments and corporations (the sealing ofclassified images in state archives and the consigning of fragile ones to refrigerated,underground storage facilities), and in others by individuals duringmoments of politicalor personal crisis (such as Robert Capa’s ‘Mexican suitcase’) or by anyone who consignstheir surplus photographs to a shoebox or hard drive. For some photographers therefusal to circulate yielded remarkable hoards, such as the recently rediscovered storagelockers of unseen negatives and prints accumulated by Vivian Meier.12

Far from rejecting the social–historical approach, then, we need to deepen it byattending to photography’s orientation towards the future, and to the political usesthat future orientation enabled. Similarly, we may build on scholarship in memorystudies that emphasises the construction of a usable past by turning to photography’sconstruction of usable futures. To do so, this article will examine the earliest, andperhaps most extreme and deliberate, of these closed collections – namely the timecapsule. Not content merely to prioritise future use over contemporary use, the timecapsule allows access only to posterity. And rather than invoking ‘future generations’in a vague or rhetorical sense, it addresses them explicitly and self-consciously. Thisarticle will thus begin by asking what led Mosher and Deihm to seal away photographsfor a century, or, put differently, why photography played such a prominent role inthese first-time vessels. The article will then go on to question the assumption thatphotographs need to circulate in order to serve political ends. Despite their removalfrom circulation, and despite the rhetoric of altruism and impartiality that hasaccompanied so many efforts to preserve photographs for future viewers and histor-ians, Mosher’s and Deihm’s collections were closely allied to specific political move-ments. Those allegiances, moreover, appear to have shifted over time. Originallymotivated by (socially, politically, economically, and racially) conservative agendas,by the time they were sealed they assumed a more ambivalent stance towards the class,gender, and racial inequalities of the Gilded Age.

Models of Transtemporal Communication

It would be tempting to dismiss these pioneering time vessels – as some contempor-aries indeed did – asmere publicity stunts. Certainly, the Century Safe served in part toadvertise the New York-based publishing business of its architect AnnaMary Deihm –orMrs. C. F. Deihm, as she called herself for decades after her husband fell at the battleof Fredericksburg (figure 6) – by showcasing her magazine, Centennial Welcome, andher newspaper, Our Second Century.13 The Memorial Safe similarly promoted thegallery and studio of Charles Delevan Mosher, one of Chicago’s leading portraitphotographers (figure 7).14 His project was arguably an ingenious scheme devised, itseems, in the exposition’s aftermath, to lure customers with the bait of a complimen-tary photograph for his memorial safe, while profiting on the duplicates they wouldinvariably order for themselves at $5 per dozen.15 Even amid the profusion of exhibitsat the Centennial Exposition, Deihm’s and Mosher’s elicited some praise. The formerreputedly ‘attracted […] much attention’ and the latter won first prize for ‘excellencein art photography’.16 Mosher meanwhile proclaimed the exposition a ‘golden oppor-tunity’ for photographers to attract new customers by displaying their wares, and thusthe ‘best cash investment’ they couldmake.17 His idea of photographing customers forposterity, moreover, promised to elevate portraiture, usually considered subordinateto artistic photography, to the status of a prestigious civic deed.

To dismiss these projects as self-promotional schemes, however, would be tooverlook the deeper cultural forces that contributed to the invention of the time vessel.The nation’s one-hundredth anniversary generated not just celebrations of the pastand the present – and appraisals of the spectacular progress (technological, economic,and social) made in the intervening century – but also anticipations of the future. Insome cases, these consisted of predictions – generally optimistic – about the state of thenation by the Bicentennial. But they also included several efforts to communicate withposterity itself. A joint resolution of Congress in 1876 called on every town and county

12 – Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend:Photography and the American West, NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press 2004,207–74; Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera asHistorian: Amateur Photographers andHistorical Imagination, 1885–1918, Durham,NC: Duke University Press 2012; see alsoPeter James, ‘Evolution of the PhotographicRecord and Survey Movement, c. 1890–1910’, History of Photography, 12:3 (July–September 1988), 205–18; The MexicanSuitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil WarNegatives of Capa, Chim, and Taro, ed.Cynthia Young, New York: ICP 2010; andVivian Maier, ed. John Maloof, Brooklyn,NY: powerHouse Books 2011.

13 – Biographical information from ‘1876Century Safe Lost in Oblivion’, WashingtonPost & Times Herald (12 September 1954),Centennial Safe – Correspondence folder,Art and Reference Files (A&RF), AOC.14 – ‘Charles D. Mosher: VeteranPhotographer Succumbs to Attack ofApoplexy’, [newspaper not cited], CharlesD. Mosher Papers, 1876–1915, ChicagoHistory Museum (CHM).15 – Requests for copies in Mosher Papers,CHM; prices in Charles D. Mosher,Catalogue of Memorial Photographs ofProminent Persons Whose Likenesses WillAppear in Memorial Halls at the SecondCentennial, 1976, Chicago: Mosher 1887, 7,Mosher Papers, CHM; he claimed to pro-vide the memorial portraits ‘withoutcharges’ (ibid., 2).16 – National Republican (1879), quoted inPresident James A. Garfield’s MemorialJournal, ed. C. F. Deihm, New York: Deihm1882, 198. Mosher was not the only one toreceive first prize; see ‘The CentennialAwards’, Philadelphia Photographer, 13:154(1876), 319.

17 – Charles D. Mosher, ‘Voices from theCraft’, Philadelphia Photographer, 13:146(1876), 45.

Nicholas Yablon

336

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Figure 6. Unknown photographer, Mrs. C.F. Deihm (silver-framed photographdeposited in her Century Safe). Records ofthe Architect of the Capitol.

Figure 7. Charles D. Mosher, C. D. MosherPhotographer 125 State St., albumen printon cabinet card, n.d. Chicago HistoryMuseum.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

337

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

to compile its local history and submit it to the Library of Congress as a gift to ‘futurehistorians of the country’.18 Some even envisaged the exposition buildings as a kind ofcumulative time vessel, writ large. They could be topped up each year with subsequentinventions and discoveries, proposed one centennial commissioner, so that ‘when ourposterity comes to do honor to the close of the second century of American civilizationthey will find in them trophies of the [last] hundred years’.19

The idea of communicating with future generations was further stimulated bynew technologies of communication such as the automatic telegraph and thetelephone, both exhibited at the Centennial Exposition. If such devices enabledcommunication over vast distances, thereby ‘annihilating’ space, they also made itpossible to imagine new ways to bridge or annihilate the chasms of time. As severalscholars have observed, telegraphy and telephony, and indeed photography andphonography, inspired spiritualists to call up the ghosts of the past.20 But they alsogenerated fantasies of contacting the unborn generations of the future. A contri-butor to an 1881 time vessel remarked that it ‘is a manifest improvement on thetelephone, when you wish to commend a glowing sentiment to remote ages’.21

Implicit in this fantasy was the notion of overcoming the loss or, in Derrida’s term,‘deferral’ of meaning inherent in any text. Just as the telephone offered direct, one-to-one contact between addresser and addressee, so did the time vessel promise adirect, albeit one-way, communication between two points in time, supposedly freefrom any interference or undecidability.22 The latter attempted (unsuccessfully, aswe will see) to fix its contents’ meanings by rooting them in an originary (andspecious) present, and by conflating that present with its future reception.Depositors and recipients were imagined as co-present, able to shake hands oreven embrace one another (figure 8).

The Centennial time vessels might also be viewed as an extension of theexhibitionary practices of the exposition itself. In their drive to assemble a ‘com-plete’ set of photographs and autographs of a city’s or nation’s ‘representativemen’, Mosher and Deihm mirrored the efforts of world’s fair organisers to gather asample of artefacts that represented the technological, aesthetic, and materialaccomplishments of all nations. Moreover, just as the Centennial Expositionstructured its exhibits by country and type, and according to fixed hierarchies ofrace, ethnicity, and gender, so too would Mosher systematically classify his photo-graphs by profession, with sixteen categories in all. This taxonomy was inscribedon the safe’s inner door and in a printed catalogue inside, effectively a finding aid

Figure 8. Unknown designer, Mosher’sMemorial Offering to Chicago (detail frombackmark of one of Charles D. Mosher’s‘memorial photographs’), Chicago, n.d.Chicago History Museum.

18 – ‘Joint Resolution on the Celebration ofthe Centennial’, in Statutes of the United Statesof America, 1875–76,Washington, DC:Government Printing Office 1876, 211; quo-tation from Red Cloud Chief (4 May 1876), 2.19 – Quoted in Lynn Spillman, Nation andCommemoration: Creating NationalIdentities in the United States and Australia,Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press 1997, 79–80.

20 – John Durham Peters, Speaking into theAir: A History of the Idea of Communication,Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999,94–101 and 142–44; and Jeffrey Sconce,Haunted Media: Electronic Presence fromTelegraphy to Television, Durham, NC:Duke University Press 2000, 21–58. Theautomatic telegraph transmitted messagesmechanically and thus at greater speedsthan the manual telegraph.21 – Ceremony at the Sealing of the CenturyBox by the Ancient and Honorable ArtilleryCompany in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Boston:Alfred Mudge 1882, 36. Time vessel architectsalso appropriated the language of the mails,offering for instance to send messages to thefuture at the postal rate of ‘a dollar for eachhalf ounce’ (‘The Centennial Through Mail’,Observer & Chronicle [8 June 1876]). Theythus indicated their equal indebtedness tolow-tech innovations such as the manufac-tured envelope in 1849 and the public post-box in 1858, both of which permitted private,one-to-one communication.22 – Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, Marginsof Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:University of Chicago Press 1982, 1–28.Users of the telephone did of course remaindependent on the operator until the intro-duction of direct dialling in the 1920s.

Nicholas Yablon

338

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

to his archive (figure 2).23 His and Deihm’s projects also embodied the fair’sunderlying function as a laboratory for new strategies of commercial display.Deihm’s safe in particular, with its iron doors opened but its contents lockedbehind an inner glass door, resembled exhibits in the Main Building, wherecommodities were fetishistically enshrined in display cabinets or ‘vitrines’.24

Finally, the Exposition may have inspired these time vessels through its inattentionto history. Deihm’s confessed disappointment at its lack of revolutionary ‘relics’spurred her to create these instant, fabricated ones for the Bicentennial Exposition,which she continued to do after the Fair had closed, with ‘a fervor that approachedfanaticism’.25

The phenomenon of the time vessel also owed its appearance to a largerdiscourse of posterity that had been emerging in the years preceding theExposition. The ascendant notion of a duty to posterity gave rise to a numberof institutions and movements in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.The first municipal art museums – such as New York’s Metropolitan (1866) andBoston’s Museum of Fine Arts (1870) – were justified in part on the grounds oftheir social and cultural benefits to future generations, a rhetoric also mobilisedby the founders of public libraries.26 Advocates of architectural and historicpreservation called for Mount Vernon and other sites to be rescued for theenjoyment of ‘future generations’, while advocates of national parks such asYosemite invoked their ‘value to posterity’.27 A growing sense of duty to posteritywas even evident in the great infrastructural projects of mid-nineteenth-centurycities, conceived as lasting civic monuments as well as capitalist investments.Such endeavours – including time vessels – were often defined in opposition to alarger culture of ephemerality or ‘present-mindedness’.28 In the face of so manydisposable products – from dime novels and detachable collars to expositionbuildings – they aimed to foster a regard for posterity and a desire forpermanence.

Instead of entrusting their gift to posterity to public monuments,museums, or libraries, however, Mosher and Deihm planned to seal themaway in iron safes, thus betraying a growing concern about the vulnerabilityof documents to decay and destruction. The most obvious threats were the‘great fires’ that ravaged several US cities in the nineteenth century, with that of1871 incinerating all 100,000 books, pamphlets, and manuscripts in the ChicagoHistorical Society, along with Mosher’s first gallery and studio.29 But Mosheralso alluded to other hazards, such as the polluted air of industrial cities, whichprematurely ages and discolours paper documents.30 Contemporaries weresimultaneously discovering the vulnerability of modern, paper-based docu-ments, especially compared with ancient media such as parchment, papyrus,and clay tablets.31 Mosher and Deihm therefore drew on the latest advances inthe construction of fire-proof, rust-proof, and damp-proof bank safes, and onmodern materials such as powdered charcoal, indelible ink, and imitationparchment.32 A concern about the dangers of archival loss may also havemotivated their choice of a prominent, highly visible, above-ground locationfor their safes: Mosher’s in the lobby of Chicago’s new City Hall and CountyCourthouse, and Deihm’s in Statuary Hall, the circular neoclassical gallery inthe US Capitol, where ‘the statues of the fathers of the republic […] likeguardian angels [would] keep watch and ward over it’.33

Centennial Shadows: Photography and Posterity

The special status Mosher and Deihm gave to photography, however, suggeststhat it was the most crucial catalyst for the invention of the time vessel. Sinceits invention, photography had been considered remarkable not just for itsaccuracy, detail, and apparent objectivity, but also for its capacity to preserveits subjects by directly bearing their physical imprint – the light reflecting off

23 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887). On the Exposition’s‘dual system of classification’, see BrunoGiberti, Designing the Centennial: A Historyof the 1876 International Exhibition inPhiladelphia, Lexington: University Press ofKentucky 2002, x and 1–2.

24 – On the Exposition’s vitrines, seeGiberti, Designing the Centennial, 118–39.

25 – On the Exposition’s neglect of the past,see ibid., 24. Garfield’s Memorial Journal,ed. Deihm, 197; and Deihm, ‘To the Peopleof these United States’ (handwritten letter),in Safes – Centennial Safe folder, A&RF,AOC. See also Mary Jane Moore, ‘U.S.Capitol’s Queerest Safe Must Be Cracked’(typed manuscript, 1944), 2, in CentennialSafe – Correspondence folder, A&RF, AOC.

26 – See Neil Harris, ‘The Gilded AgeRevisited: Boston and the MuseumMovement’, American Quarterly, 14:4(1962), 545–66. Boston Public Library’sfounders spoke of the ‘need to meet thefuture no less than the present demands ofthe public’, in Second Annual Report of theTrustees of the Public Library, Boston: CityDocument 74 1854, 15.27 – ‘Editor’s Table’, Southern LiteraryMessenger, 24 (May 1857), 394. FrederickLaw Olmsted, ‘The Yosemite Valley and theMariposa Big Tree Grove’ (1865), inAmerica’s National Park System: The CriticalDocuments, ed. Lary Dilsaver, Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield 1997, 12.28 – See, for example, Louis Ehrich,‘Posteritism’: An Address Delivered at theDedication Exercises of The Century Chest,Colorado Springs: privately printed 1901, 8.

29 – Libraries of the City of Chicago, Chicago:Chicago Library Club 1905, 27; and‘Mosher’s National Photographic ArtGallery’, Chicago Tribune (6 March 1881), 5.30 – ‘Shades of the Departed’, Inter-Ocean,n.d., Mosher scrapbook, 148, Box 8, MosherPapers, CHM.

31 – ‘Editorial Notes and Gleanings’,National Magazine, 12 (February 1858),180; and Henry George, Progress andPoverty (1879), New York: Appleton 1886,484.

32 – On Deihm’s safe, see Moore, ‘U.S.Capitol’s Queerest Safe’, 2; on Mosher’s, see‘For Posterity: Ten Thousand Photographsof Prominent Chicagoans Being Preparedfor Future Generations’, Chicago Tribune(28 February 1885), 7, in Scrapbook, Box 8,142, Mosher Papers, CHM; Charles D.Mosher, Catalogue of Memorial HistoricalPhotographs of Prominent Men and Womenand Souvenirs for the Second Centennial,Chicago: Mosher 1883, 53, Mosher Papers,CHM.33 – Backmark of Mosher cabinet card,CHM; National Republican, quoted inGarfield’s Memorial Journal, ed. Deihm,198.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

339

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

their body – on the surface of the image, rendering that image an indexicalsign, to use philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s term.34 It was photography’sperceived indexicality that appeared to confer on the sitter some kind of after-life, thus triggering associations with resurrection or time travel. This medium,Mosher proclaimed, ‘has no bounds; it leaps all space and spans the heavens’.Through the portraits in his safe, he added four years later, the ‘living of to-day’ will cast ‘shadows’ over the celebrations of 1976.35 He thus conceivedphotography as a means to extend oneself not only across space but also acrosstime.36

Photographs were believed to share this indexical relationship to thehuman body with other forms of direct inscription such as autographs.Indeed, Deihm and Mosher combined the two in their time vessels. The formercollected the signature of every member of all three branches of governmentand of various ‘eminent men’ from every state, along with ‘protographs’ (wholedocuments handwritten by their author, now termed ‘holographs’). Moshercompiled an equally impressive collection of signatures, which he mountedbeneath each portrait in the album.37 More than simply a caption, the auto-graph was to contribute to the extension of the subject’s physical presencebeyond the present.

But photographs (and autographs) did not merely embalm the body. Theywere also believed to extract and preserve the essence of an individual’s characteror soul. ‘By the early 1850s’, writes the historian of photography BarbaraMcCandless, ‘the standard for a truly accurate likeness had become not merelyto reproduce the subject’s physical characteristics but to express the innercharacter as well’.38 The introduction of the cabinet card format in 1866 – theformat both Mosher and Deihm employed, one significantly larger (4 inches !5.5 inches) than the older carte de visite – permitted even ‘greater attention todetail and expression of character’.39 And just as graphology claimed to deducecharacter from the idiosyncrasies of an autograph, phrenology and physiognomydid so from the shape of the head and the facial features (or posture) captured ina photograph.40

What Mosher and Deihm did was to extrapolate such beliefs aboutphotography’s expression of character into the distant future. Photographsof eminent individuals could not only inspire contemporary viewers across theglobe, Mosher wrote, but could also ‘transmi[t]’ a ‘manly face and noblecharacter […] to posterity’.41 He devised plans for his photographs to beremoved from the safe in 1976 and displayed in glass cabinets in a vast‘memorial gallery’ or ‘temple’ he proposed to have erected on Chicago’slakefront, just south of where the Art Institute now stands. The structurewould ‘outdo the grand Memorial Hall at the Centennial, not only in itsarchitecture and elegance, but in the heaven honored purposes for which itwill be dedicated and sustained’.42 Visitors during (and after) the Bicentennialwould be able to perceive those men’s ‘very thoughts’ from these ‘speakinglikenesses’ and learn about their lives from the accompanying biographies,thereby imbibing their virtues.43 Mosher went as far as to claim that pregnantmothers, by ‘studying intently’ his photographs, would be able to ‘photograph’their subjects’ physical, moral, and intellectual features onto their foetuses’‘face and brains’ – an early instance of prenatal imprinting or in-wombeducation.44

While anticipating the inclusion of photographs as exhibition objects inpublic museums in the twentieth century, Mosher’s prospective ‘memorialgallery’ was in many respects a refinement of the commercial photographicgalleries of his own period.45 The most famous of these was Mathew Brady’s.First opening on New York’s Broadway in 1844, Brady’s Daguerrean MiniatureGallery quickly became a leading attraction of the city, second only to thenearby Barnum Museum. His collection of portraits of the nation’s leading

34 – Charles Sanders Peirce, The EssentialPeirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2(1893–1913), Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press 1998, 7–8. On Victoriannotions of photography as materially pre-serving the past, see Stephen Bann, TheClothing of Clio: A Study of theRepresentation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge andNew York: Cambridge University Press1984, 122–37 and 139.35 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 23; andMosher, Catalogue of Memorial Photographs(1887), 6.36 – On photography as a medium ofcommunication across space, see Natale,‘Photography and Communication Media’,451–56.37 – Garfield’s Memorial Journal, ed.Deihm, 196. Signed scroll and protographsin Centennial Safe Collection, AOC.Mosher centennial albums, Mosher Papers,CHM.38 – Barbara McCandless, ‘The PortraitStudio and the Celebrity’, in Photography inNineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A.Sandweiss, Fort Worth, TX: Amon CarterMuseum 1991, 55.39 – Ibid., 65. On the arrival of the cabinetcard in the United States (from Britain), see‘The New Size’, Philadelphia Photographer,3:34 (1866), 311–13.

40 – See, for example, W. H. Lipton,‘Anatomy, Phrenology, and Physiognomy,and their Relation to Photography: I’,Philadelphia Photographer, 14:158 (1877),53–54. Such claims did not entail a literal,mimetic mirroring of the real; see my sub-sequent discussion of Mosher’s retouchingof the negative. Nevertheless, retouchingand other interventions were believed toaccess a deeper truth; see Miles Orvell, TheReal Thing: Imitation and Authenticity inAmerican Culture, 1880–1940, Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press 1989, 90and 95.41 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887), 2 and back cover.42 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 10; Mosher,Catalogue of Memorial Photographs (1887),27; and ‘Shades of the Departed’, n.p. ForMosher’s comparison with the Centennial’sMemorial Hall, see ‘A Gigantic Plan: TheComing Union Memorial Home’, Inter-Ocean, n.d., Mosher scrapbook, 149, Box 8,Mosher Papers, CHM.43 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 23.44 – Ibid., 24. Charles D. Mosher, A Scrap-Book and Half-Hour Chit-Chats with thePresident and Lawmakers at Washington,upon Subjects of Vital Importance, Chicago:Mosher 1892, Mosher Papers, CHM, 11.45 – Through the end of the century,museums viewed (and collected) photo-graphs as a means to document aesthetic,biological, or anthropological specimens, oras contextual backdrops to exhibits, but not

Nicholas Yablon

340

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

figures, begun the following year and numbering about ten thousand by 1861,anticipated – and possibly inspired – Mosher’s and Deihm’s collections inmultiple ways.46 It included one of the first efforts – along with those ofEdward Anthony and J. M. Edwards, John Plumbe, and Jesse HarrisonWhitehurst – to photograph every member of Congress and the administra-tion, an undertaking that led each of these photographers to open a branchstudio in Washington, DC; indeed, it was Brady’s Washington gallery thatlater supplied the photographs for Deihm’s vessel.47 It evaded the charge ofundemocratic hero-worship by presenting itself as a kind of neoclassicaltemple of virtue, inculcating (according to one contemporary) ‘the civicvirtues required by the Republic’.48 And by depicting politicians from bothparties and both sides of the Mason–Dixon line, it dodged the charge ofpolitical or sectional partisanship. The collection grew, moreover, to embracenot just politicians and generals but also businessmen, intellectuals, artists,reformers, clergymen, and even theatre stars, along with the occasionalEuropean celebrity, thereby foreshadowing New York’s first waxworksmuseum, the Eden Musee (1883).49 While Brady was not averse to copyingportraits taken by other photographers, he mainly accumulated his collectionby inviting dignitaries and celebrities to his gallery to have their portraitstaken, usually by an assistant – a model Mosher copied.50 Concealing thosephotographic processes in a back studio, Brady transformed the front roomsinto a quasi-domestic space, where visitors could scrutinise the portraits andsocialise with one another, unencumbered by the hazards and gender (im)proprieties of the street.51 Mosher similarly transformed his studio onChicago’s State Street into an ‘elegantly appointed gallery’, with multiple,salon-like rooms exhibiting life-sized portraits of presidents and other leadingfigures. ‘Finished in the latest style of architecture and adorned with thecopies of thousands of pictures of eminent men and women’, enthused onevisitor, Mosher’s gallery ‘is simply a paradise’.52

Brady further paved the way for the time vessel by raising ideas about thefuture utility of photographic portraits. While driven by short-term profitmotives, he presented his collection ultimately as a gift for posterity. This wasparticularly apparent in the Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850), Brady’sattempt to render his gallery as a book, issued to subscribers in semi-monthlyparts, containing lithographic reproductions, autographs, and biographicalsketches. ‘We wish before those great men […] are gone’, the introductionannounced, ‘to catch their departing forms, that through this monumentof their genius and patriotism, they may become familiar to those whomthey will never see’.53 However self-serving, Brady’s pose as a selfless patriot‘endeavor[ing] to anticipate the awards of posterity’ was enthusiasticallyendorsed by the press, with the Journal of Commerce predicting thatthe Gallery ‘will furnish a monument of art and patriotism for comingtimes’.54

In particular, Brady’s portraits were imagined as sources for future historians.Visiting this invaluable collection of ‘materials for history’, wrote Harper’s Weeklyin 1863, makes one long for ‘such a portrait gallery of the revolutionary days’.55

Celebrations of Brady’s gallery drew on a larger discourse elevating photographyover all other historical sources, articulated most famously by Oliver WendellHolmes in his 1859 prophesy of ‘vast’, ‘comprehensive and systematic’ librariesof (stereographic) photographs where future scholars could call up images ratherthan books.56 ‘All our books’, wrote the New York Times on the opening of Brady’snew gallery in 1860:

all our newspapers, all our private letters, – though they are all to be weighedyearly by the ton, rather than counted by the dozen, – will not so betray us toour coming critics as the millions of photographs we shall leave behind us.

as exhibition objects in their own right;Susan A. Crane, ‘The Pictures in theBackground: History, Memory, andPhotography in the Museum’, in Memoryand History: Understanding Memory asSource and Subject, ed. Joan Tumblety, NewYork: Routledge 2013, 123–28.Photographs, however, gained exhibitionarystatus much earlier at world’s fairs, andwere accorded a Photographic Hall at theCentennial Exposition, where Mosherexhibited his collection.46 – Alan Trachtenberg, Reading AmericanPhotographs: Images As History, MathewBrady to Walker Evans, New York:Macmillan 1990, 33–70; comparison withBarnum on 39 and 42, and number ofportraits on 43. On the inception of Brady’scollection, see McCandless, ‘PortraitStudio’, 55. On the other Daguerrean gal-leries of the period, such as those of EdwardAnthony and John Plumbe, see ibid., 52–53and 55–56.47 – On Brady’s studio in Washington, DC,and his collecting of portraits of politicians,see Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and theImage of History, Washington, DC:Smithsonian 2004, 93 and 99. Anthony andEdwards were apparently the first tophotograph every member of Congress(1843); see McCandless, ‘Portrait Studio’,55–56.48 – Root quoted in Trachtenberg, ReadingAmerican Photographs, 32; see also 43 and 48.49 – Ibid., 38.50 – Ibid., 37–38; and McCandless, ‘PortraitStudio’, 54–55.51 – Trachtenberg, Reading AmericanPhotographs, 41; and Panzer, Mathew Bradyand the Image of History, 43–45.52 – ‘Mosher’s Reception’, untitled news-paper, n.d., and untitled article by ‘Junius’,untitled newspaper, both in Mosher scrap-book, 146, Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.

53 – C. Edwards Lester’s preface to MathewB. Brady, Gallery of Illustrious Americans,New York: Brady, D’Avignon, EdwardsLester 1850, n.p., New-York HistoricalSociety.54 – Ibid., n.p.; and Journal of Commerce,quoted in McCandless, ‘Portrait Studio’, 57.

55 – ‘Brady’s Gallery’, Harper’s Weekly,7:359 (1863), 722.

56 – Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘TheStereoscope and the Stereograph’, AtlanticMonthly, 3:20 (1859), 748, reprinted in AlanTrachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography,New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books 1980,71–83.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

341

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Fancy what the value to us would be of a set of imperial photographs of theimperial Romans! How many learned treatises we would gladly throw in tothe sea in exchange for a daguerreotype of ALEXANDER the Great.57

It was this idea of serving the future historian that Walt Whitman claimed to haveshared with Brady in the 1840s, thereby spawning the project. Imagine, Whitmanallegedly suggested, if we had, instead of the mass of ‘contradictory records’ ofRoman emperors and philosophers left ‘by witnesses or historians’, just ‘three orfour’ portraits; ‘that would be history – the best history – a history from whichthere could be no appeal’.58 In these more extreme articulations of the discourse,photography itself becomes history. Rather than merely a source for future histor-ians (as Holmes and others maintained), photographs would bypass the need forhistorians altogether. As expressed by the Scottish optical scientist David Brewsterin 1856, ‘the sun will thus become the historiographer of the future, and in thefidelity of his pencil and the accuracy of his chronicle, truth itself will be embalmedand history cease to be fabulous’.59

Such rhetoric aside, Brady did very little in practice to ensure the transmissionof his photographs. Unlike Mosher and Deihm, he made no plans to set aside anyof his photographs during his lifetime. High costs, poor sales, and a shiftingpolitical climate led him to abandon his printed Gallery after completing onlytwelve of the projected twenty-four issues.60 Facing mounting financial difficultiesin the late 1860s, stemming largely from the expense of covering the Civil War, hetried but failed to sell his vast collection, first to the New-York Historical Societyand then to Congress.61 After he was declared bankrupt in 1873 and forced to sellhis New York galleries, his collection of negatives was dispersed – some claimed bycreditors, others acquired cheaply by the War Department, while many weredamaged, destroyed, or lost. Subsequent transfers of ownership during the ensuingdecades further compromised the integrity of Brady’s corpus.62 His dreams ofconferring a great gift upon the nation thus came up against the harsh realities ofthe capitalist marketplace. Only by taking images out of circulation could Deihmand Mosher be confident of preserving them for posterity.

One can trace the time vessel’s genealogy not just to commercial galleries likeBrady’s but also to private collecting practices. Mosher’s and Deihm’s mammothphotographic albums were merely expanded versions of those kept by middle-classAmericans – especially women – as a symbol of bourgeois status and domesticharmony, to be displayed on the centre table of the parlour alongside the familybible. Evolving out of earlier kinds of blank books – from the commonplace bookand friendship album of the early modern era (in which one, or one’s friends,inscribed poems, proverbs, and other writings) to the autograph albums andkeepsake or ‘memory’ albums of the nineteenth century (which, as forerunnersof the scrapbook, included locks of hair and pressed flowers as well as autographs)– the photograph album was introduced in 1861 as a means to extend the life of asimilarly ephemeral artefact.63 Although cabinet cards were intended to be dis-played on a drawing-room cabinet (hence the name), and did not fit the olderalbums designed for cartes de visite, special albums were soon introduced toaccommodate them, with as many as twenty patented by 1873.64

In his booklets, Mosher himself explicitly advocated the collecting of cabinetcards in such albums.65 He encouraged customers to fill them not only with familypictures but also with his celebrity portraits, which he sold both directly andthrough dealers (separate family albums being a twentieth-century innovation).66

He also dedicated himself to correcting flaws in their design. To prevent the ‘greatannoyance’ of photographs being ‘frequently removed without authority’, perhapsby domestic servants or children, he invented and patented his own photographalbum, which ‘secur[ed] the pictures in place’ while providing a slot for eachsubject’s name or autograph.67 With the further introduction of hasps and min-iature padlocks (note the hasp in figure 5), such albums anticipated the

57 – ‘A Broadway Valhalla: Opening ofBrady’s New Gallery’, New York Times (6October 1860), 4.58 – Walt Whitman, reminiscing in 1889 tohis biographer, quoted in Orvell, The RealThing, 8; and in Trachtenberg, ReadingAmerican Photographs, 6.59 – Sir David Brewster, The Stereoscope: ItsHistory, Theory, and Construction, London:John Murray 1856, 181.60 – Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image ofHistory, 65.61 – On his bankruptcy, see ibid., 20. Onthe loss of other photographic collections,such as the burning of Edward Anthony’sgallery in 1852, see ibid., 61. Panzer attri-butes Brady’s failed attempts to sell hiscollection to the following: copies of hisphotographs were by then widely available;his Civil War scenes were too recent for apublic that wished to forget the carnage;and politicians were now viewed in a lessidealised light (ibid., 116–18). It may alsobe that historical societies were slow torecognise the value of photographs and thattaxpayers were unwilling to underwrite sucha purchase by Congress.62 – Jeana K. Foley, ‘Recollecting the Past: ACollection Chronicle of Mathew Brady’sPhotographs’, in Panzer, Mathew Brady andthe Image of History, esp. 190–91;McCandless, ‘Portrait Studio’, 62; and RobertWilson, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation,New York: Bloomsbury 2013, 210–11.63 – Elizabeth E. Siegel, ‘“Miss Domestic”and “Miss Enterprise”: Or, How to Keep aPhotograph Album’, in The Scrapbook inAmerican Life, ed. Susan Tucker, KatherineOtt, and Patricia P. Buckler, Philadelphia,PA: Temple University Press 2006, 253–55;and Sarah McNair Vosmeier, ‘PicturingLove and Friendship: Photograph Albumsand Networks of Affection in the 1860s’, inThe Scrapbook in American Life, ed. Tucker,Ott, and Buckler, 208.64 – Siegel, ‘“Miss Domestic”’, 255.65 – Charles D. Mosher, Half-an-Hour’sChit-Chat with My Friends, Photography theSubject, Chicago: Mosher 1873, 27–28,CHM. He also urged homeowners to con-vert their upper floor, through the additionof skylights, into a space for exhibitingthose cabinet cards, preserving the family’s‘relics’ and ‘souvenirs’, and ‘hold[ing] sweetcommunion’ with deceased relatives andfriends. Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 25; andMosher, Scrap-Book, 46; see also ‘Face toFace’, untitled newspaper, Mosher scrap-book II, 132, Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.66 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887), 7. Prior to the intro-duction of the halftone printing process in1885, which allowed magazines, books, andnewspapers to reproduce photographs,these hybrid albums were the primarymeans for collecting and viewing celebrityimages; see Siegel, ‘“Miss Domestic”’, 253.67 – Charles D. Mosher, ‘Improvement inphotograph-albums’, U.S. Patent 169,186,

Nicholas Yablon

342

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

hermeticism of the time vessel; indeed, both were arguably responses to theongoing problem of photographs straying beyond their original context and thussuffering a loss of meaning and value (a similar problem arose with signatures,which autograph collectors excised from letters and documents). Mosher’s andDeihm’s projects thus grew out of, and sought to further stimulate, everydaypractices of collecting and storing photographs.

Withdrawal from circulation may also have been a response to another problemspecific to photographs – namely, their tendency to fade or stain when exposed tolight, humidity, atmospheric pollutants, or oil from viewers’ fingers. Photography’sinstability had been a known issue from its inception. One could narrate themedium’s technical history as a quest not just for greater detail, quicker exposuretimes, and increased affordability, portability, and convenience, but also for greaterpermanence of the final, printed photograph. In 1855 the Photographic Society ofLondon appointed (and Prince Albert funded) a special committee to determine thecauses of fading and thus restore public confidence in photographs’ longevity. Thesalted prints of the 1840s and 1850s, such as those made from Talbot’s calotypenegative, were notorious for rapid and almost total fading – one reason why theyfailed to supplant the daguerreotype as the preeminent medium for preserving one’sportrait for posterity.68 Albumen prints, popularised in the late 1850s and employedby both Mosher and Deihm, were more durable yet still susceptible to fading,staining, and yellowing, ultimately contributing to their own obsolescence by the1890s. In 1866 the leading photographic scientist in the United States, MatthewCarey Lea, detected unavoidable and destructive traces of silver in albumen prints.69

Experts therefore recommended that such photographs be stored in a dry, secludedplace, insulated from the depredations of air, light, and touch.70 As a sealed con-tainer, the time vessel merely constituted a more extreme version of such a solution.

Lastly, and most crucially, the depositing of photographs in bank safes must beviewed as a reaction to the de-auraticisation of the medium. The invention ofphotography did not immediately strip images of their aura. Examining the earliestdaguerreotypes, Walter Benjamin perceived a lingering, auratic quality, which hedefined not simply as uniqueness but as a ‘semblance of distance’, a distance that istemporal as well as spatial. Although that generation had not been ‘obsessed withgoing down to posterity in photographs’, instead withdrawing ‘rather shyly […]into their private space in the face of such proceedings’, their daguerreotypeportraits conferred an ‘air of permanence’ and a sense of ‘fullness and security’upon them, right down to the creases in their coats. It was as if the length of theexposure enabled the haut-bourgeois male subject to ‘focus his life in the moment’and ‘[grow] into the picture’.71 This aura was soon displaced, not just by the abilityto produce multiple copies but also by the introduction of faster exposure timesand smaller cameras, which could catch a fleeting incident or a casual pose, and bythe ‘industrialization’ or mass commodification of photography.72 (The signature,too, was stripped of its aura at this time with the introduction of the rubber stampand the use of lithography and the halftone process to produce facsimile signatures– although, as Derrida reminds us, the signature is inherently both unique andrepeatable: it marks the ‘absolute singularity’ of a signature-event but must have an‘iterable, imitable form’).73 But instead of embracing the implications of these newtechnological developments, Benjamin argues, studio photographers continued to‘simulate’ the lost aura in various ways: by retouching the negative or paper (asMosher did), by adopting printing processes and techniques that imparted a‘penumbral tone’ or ‘artificial highlights’, by dressing sitters in evocative clothesand encircling them with draperies, palm trees, or even classical columns, or bymounting the pictures in leatherbound, gilt-edged albums.74 By the 1860s, artphotographers were also summoning up the lost aura by using soft focus, combin-ing multiple negatives, and other pictorialist effects.75

It was this desire to conjure a substitute, faux aura, I would argue, thatprompted photographers like Mosher to encourage their sitters to self-consciously

filed 26 October 1875. An editorial entitled‘Keep Your Albums Locked’ encouraged‘owners of albums to save their contentsfrom the grubby hands of domestic servantsand the nimble fingers of carte thieves’;quoted in Siegel, ‘“Miss Domestic”’, 257.

68 – James M. Reilly, The Albumen & SaltedPaper Book: The History and Practice ofPhotographic Printing, 1840–1895,Rochester, NY: Light ImpressionsCorporation 1980, chapter 11.69 – M. Carey Lea, ‘An Examination intothe Circumstances under Which Silver isFound in the Whites of Albumen Prints’,Photographic News, 10:415 (1866), 394.70 – ‘The Care of Pictures – IV:Photographs’, Cassell’s Household Guide, 1(1877), 377.

71 – Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History ofPhotography’, in Walter Benjamin: SelectedWritings, Volume 2: Part 2: 1931–1934, ed.Michael W. Jennings et al., Cambridge, MA:Belknap 2005, 519, 514, 515 and 517;further references cited in text.72 – Ibid., 527, 517 and 507.

73 – Joe Nickell traces rubber-stamped sig-natures back to the Civil War, and discusseslithographic and halftone facsimiles in Realor Fake: Studies in Authentication,Louisville: University Press of Kentucky2009, 34 and 36. See also Derrida,‘Signature Event Context’, in Limited Inc,Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press1977, 20.74 – Benjamin, ‘Little History ofPhotography’, 515, 517 and 518.75 – Henry Peach Robinson popularisedthis term and style. Henry Peach Robinson,Pictorial Effect in Photography, London:Piper & Carter 1869.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

343

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

pose for posterity. In addition to advertising his ability to manipulate lighting toproduce a ‘delicate modeling of the features’ and to enlist his artists to retouch thenegative so as to erase ‘unsightly freckles and blemishes of the skin’, he also advisedthem about how best to present themselves to the gaze of posterity, guiding them, forinstance, on their choice of clothes and their pose.76 His sitters appear to haveinternalised that future gaze. Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked in a letter toMosher that she was less happy with his ‘side face’ portraits of her, as they revealedher ‘double chin’ and were ‘too animal looking, to go down to future generations’(figure 9).77 And finally, while none of his and Deihm’s portraits was a unique imagebut rather one of several prints made from a glass negative – the others of whichcontinued to circulate – the process of sealing a print away for one hundred years, asthough it was a precious relic, granted it a kind of compensatory ‘cultic value’.Locked up in a safe, the collection resisted what Benjamin described as the impulse ofthe masses to dissolve distance and difference by consuming photographic copies.

Pledges of Faith: Conserving Nation, Class, Race, and Party

The sealing away of these photographic portraits did not render them politicallyimpotent, but reinforced their potency as bearers of ideological meaning. Thosemeanings, however, remained fluid and contradictory. Initially, they appear toadhere to a conservative, even reactionary, agenda. Despite the labour conflictand populist insurgence that broke out in 1876 and spread across the countrythe following year, threatening to engulf the nation in class warfare, Mosherand Deihm expressed their faith in the status quo by making advanced arrange-ments for the opening of their vessels during the Bicentennial celebrations.National and civic leaders would read aloud their messages then top-up and

Figure 9. Charles D. Mosher, Mrs. ElizabethCady Stanton Womans Rights, albumenprint on cabinet card, Chicago, n.d.Chicago History Museum.

76 – Mosher, Half-an-Hour’s Chit-Chat,30–32.

77 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter toCharles D. Mosher, Mosher ExhibitManuscripts, Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.

Nicholas Yablon

344

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

reseal the vessels for the Tercentennial.78 One article in Deihm’s CentennialWelcome, deposited in her safe, echoed this optimism, declaring that ‘ourchildren’s children […] may still avow themselves citizens of a storied EmpireRepublic’ and presumably share the same values and assumptions. Not onlywould they celebrate a Bicentennial, they would celebrate it with ‘still prouderjubilation than this’ – as would, the contributor hoped, ‘our descendants to theremotest generation’.79

More than just assertions of the republic’s vigour, the compiling and sealing ofMosher’s and Deihm’s time vessels – and their periodic topping-up with thephotographs and autographs of subsequent office-holders – were to actively con-tribute to its reinvigoration by functioning as nationalist rituals.80 Through them,the nation could be imagined as an organic community extending not only acrossspace and backward in time but also into the future, binding current and succeed-ing generations as participants. Deihm thus planned to take her ‘CentennialAutograph Album’ from Philadelphia to other ‘leading cities’, includingWashington, DC.81 Similarly, Mosher, an extreme advocate of national centralisa-tion who believed that federal laws should supplant all state laws, identified himselfnot as a photographer of Chicagoans but as a ‘National Historical Photographer’.82

Through such efforts, they attempted to transform a personal project into, inDeihm’s words, a collective ‘gift from the American people’.83 The contributionof one’s portrait and/or signature thus constituted a pledge of national allegianceas well as an act of self-commemoration. Perhaps to confer a sense of tradition onthis invented ritual, Mosher appointed Masonic Grand Masters to mark the‘sealing with the highest honors and sacred rites of their order’, and their succes-sors ‘to unlock the safe’.84

Mosher’s writings, included in his safe, hint at an even more reactionaryagenda. His belief in the possibility of ‘photograph[ing]’ great men’s virtues ontounborn children stemmed from his larger belief in ‘stiripiculture’, or what wassubsequently called eugenics.85 In addition to portrait galleries disseminating the‘science of stiripiculture’, Mosher called for a ‘National Progenerate College’ andlocal, compulsory ‘progenerate schools’ to educate the young in motherhood andfatherhood; a federal law requiring couples wishing to marry to obtain a certificateproving they have ‘no hereditary incurable diseases of the body or brains, thatcould be transmitted to the unborn generations’; and another law banning dimemuseums from exhibiting and breeding genetic ‘monstrosities’. By the close of thetwentieth century, these measures will have produced a ‘beautiful world with anoble race of men and women […] with perfect forms [… and] noble characters’ –a world ‘without misery or crime’.86 Projected into that racial utopia as a kind ofself-fulfilling prophecy, Mosher’s time vessel was thus endowed with a proto-eugenicist raison d’etre. In fact, his portrait collection grew in part out of analbum of ‘very distinguished’ Americans he had been asked to produce in 1873as a gift for T. H. Huxley, a British evolutionary biologist whose recent contribu-tions to racial theory included an article dividing humanity into four separate racesand a photographic project undertaken for the British Colonial Office that pur-ported to distinguish those races visually.87

The conservative-utopian vision of the republic’s future expressed in thesetime vessels was founded, above all, on a resolute faith in the business class’sability to maintain its hegemony. Successful businesspeople themselves, Deihmand Mosher celebrated the commercial elite and sought its endorsement. Theformer worked closely with corporations such as Southern Express and thePennsylvania Railroad, and appointed Benjamin B. Sherman of the NationalExchange Bank of New York to perform the final turning of the key. Hermagazines and newspapers, included in the safe, were also touted by leadingbusinessmen.88 Mosher similarly appealed to the largesse of Chicago’s leadingcapitalists, nominating no less than Marshall Field (incidentally his landlord) asthe president of his Memorial project, and Philip Armour, Cyrus McCormick,

78 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887), 6.

79 – W. H. D., ‘How Many More?’, UnitedStates Centennial Welcome (15 March 1876),7, Box 3, Centennial Safe Collection, AOC.

80 – Garfield’s Memorial Journal, ed.Deihm, 197. On Mosher’s plans, see ‘Shadesof the Departed’, n.p. ; and Catalogue ofMemorial Photographs (1887), 7.

81 – ‘The Centennial Autograph Album’,United States Centennial Welcome (15March 1876), 1, Box 3. She also sent looseblank sheets ‘to every State and Territory inthe Union’; Garfield’s Memorial Journal, ed.Deihm, 196.82 – Mosher, Scrap-Book, 30 and 31; andMosher, Catalogue of Memorial Photographs(1887), 5.83 – ‘The Centennial Autograph Album’, 1.

84 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 5.

85 – Mosher, Scrap-Book, 11.

86 – Ibid., 8, 51 and 6–7.

87 – Mrs. S. H. Stevenson commissionedthe album; see her letter to Charles D.Mosher, 24 November 1873, MosherExhibit Manuscripts, Box 8, Mosher Papers,CHM. See also T. H. Huxley, ‘On theGeographical Distribution of the ChiefModifications of Mankind’, Journal of theEthnological Society of London, 2:1 (1870),404–12. On the 1869 project, see AnneMaxwell, Picture Imperfect: Photography andEugenics, 1870–1940, Brighton: SussexAcademic Press 2010, 29–34.88 – United States Centennial Welcome andOur Second Century, both in Box 3,Centennial Safe Collection; see alsoGarfield’s Memorial Journal, ed. Deihm,200. As seen below, Sherman did not endup performing this task.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

345

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

and George Pullman (figure 10), among others, as vice presidents; there is noevidence, however, that they accepted his invitation.89 Although exploitativewages and poor working conditions at McCormick’s and Armour’s plants hadalready provoked workers to strike in the 1870s, Mosher made flattering refer-ences in the vessel to the ‘sagacity of [Chicago’s] business men’.90

The time vessels’ commercial bias is borne out by the class of individualsenshrined within them. In so far as one needed to belong to one of the sixteenprofessions to be admitted into his albums, Mosher’s safe was effectively a memorialto the propertied middle class. Merely to sign one’s name, occupation, and addressin his ‘memorial autograph register’ cost $1, the equivalent of $25 today.91 Alsotelling are its exclusions. Omitted from his photograph albums were labour leaderssuch as Terence Powderly of the Knights of Labor, leaders of the first socialist partyin the USA (founded 1876) such as Philip Van Patten, agrarian radicals such asIgnatius Donnelly and James B. Weaver, and the single-tax radical Henry George.Nor is there any discernible working-class presence. The Memorial Safe’s exclusivitywas reinforced by the expense of the cabinet cards that customers were expected topurchase. This new format allowed wealthy patrons to distinguish themselves fromthose who could only afford the older, smaller cartes de visite.92 Through well-placedadvertisements, recommendations of luxury hotels for his customers, and denuncia-tions of cheap photographers, Mosher further promoted his studio as the preserve ofhigh society.93 His time vessel thus resembled another invention of the Gilded Age:the collective, illustrated biography of the local elite or, as it came to be known, the‘mug book’. Appearing in various cities, mug books ostensibly celebrated their mostdistinguished or ‘representative’ citizens, memorialising each with a photographic(or engraved) portrait and a biographical entry. But they were in fact commercialschemes immortalising only those willing to pay a substantial subscription fee.94

This allegiance to the business class was most evident in the tributes Mosher andDeihm paid to the political party that represented its interests, the Republicans.

Figure 10. Charles D. Mosher, George M.Pullman, albumen print on cabinet card,Chicago, n.d. Chicago History Museum.

89 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 33.

90 – Ibid., 48. On risingmilitancy in Chicago,see Richard Schneirov, Labor and UrbanPolitics: Class Conflict and the Origins ofModern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97,Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1998; onstrikes at the McCormick plant in 1873, seeibid., 45 and note 59; and on a failed strike atArmour’s factory in 1879, see ibid., 107–108.

91 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887), 25.

92 – Mosher’s prices (75 cents for one; $1for half a dozen, etc.) appear on the back-mark of some of his cabinet cards, CHM.

93 – Charles D. Mosher, ‘Specialties’,Philadelphia Photographer, 14:168 (1877),advertising supplement; and Mosher, Half-an-Hour’s Chit-Chat, 26.

94 – See, for example, Biographical Sketchesof the Leading Men of Chicago,Photographically Illustrated by J. Carbuff,Chicago: Wilson & St. Clair 1868.

Nicholas Yablon

346

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Despite the semblance of political impartiality they borrowed from the daguerreo-type galleries, neither concealed their loyalties. Mosher was subsequently appointedofficial photographer to the Republican National Convention in 1880, and issued anadvertisement endorsing the Republican ticket in the 1884 presidential election.95

Deihm expressed her political affiliations by depicting the current Republican pre-sident Ulysses Grant on the safe’s inner doors in a kind of holy triptych with Lincolnand Washington. To maintain Grant in the national pantheon in 1876 was todisregard the mounting outrage at the corruption scandals enveloping him bythen. Deihm’s Centennial Welcome vaguely conceded that ‘we have had someoccurrences recently, that when viewed with a jaundiced eye, might strengthen anydoubt we harbored about the permanency of our institutions’, yet concluded that‘corruption’ and ‘venality’ could not destroy ‘our free and Christian land’.96 She alsopermitted the depositing of a book on national banking laws by William A.Richardson, the very Treasury Secretary who had been forced to resign over theSanborn incident, one of the most damaging scandals of the Grant administration.97

In this light, Deihm’s photographic memorial to perhaps the most corrupt admin-istration – and congress – in US history represents a massive act of political denial.Like Mosher, Deihm thus enlisted photographs in this larger struggle to shape howfuture generations would remember present conflicts and problems.

‘Immortal Legacies’, Progressive Visions

Although conceived during the centennial, neither time vessel was launched thatyear. Perhaps because of her partisan affiliations, her gender, or simply the noveltyof her invention, Deihm struggled to generate interest. Several distinguished indi-viduals she hoped to include were apparently ‘reluctant or indifferent’.98 She there-fore continued to accumulate autographs and photographs – sending outsolicitation letters, bringing her album to ‘all parts’ of the country, but especiallyelite gathering-places such as Saratoga Springs, and exhibiting her safe in themanufacturer’s New York offices – for a further two and a half years, by whichtime two elections had rendered her collection of Congressional portraits obsolete.99

Mosher postponed his sealing even longer, but most likely because the time vesselscheme was too successful as a marketing device. His collection, provisionally storedin the vaults of Chicago’s First National Bank, continued to grow through the1880s, while his safe remained on display in his photographic gallery as a ‘monu-ment to his own enterprise and generosity’.100 As with subsequent time capsules,the compilation process was arguably as significant as the end product.

As a result of this long gestation, the time vessels came to register the intensifiedsocial unrest of the post-centennial years, in particular the Great Railroad Strike of1877, and perhaps Mosher’s and Deihm’s own growing ambivalence about thecapitalist elite. It is telling that Deihm invited the radical temperance advocateElizabeth Thompson to play a key role at the ceremonial sealing and to add someof her own materials, including her photographs.101 In addition to addressing thesocial and economic conditions that drove the poor to drink, Thompson wasinspired by Robert Owen’s utopian socialism to found the anti-monopolistAmerican Worker’s Alliance and to subsidise cooperative colonies in the West.102

The inflamed political climate also seems to have compelled Mosher to articulatehis time vessel to a reformist agenda. His projected ‘Memorial home’ on Chicago’slakeshore, housing not just the portrait gallery (including, ultimately, the photographsrecovered from the safe) but also a library, concert hall, historical society, art supplystores, and lecture rooms, would uplift the poor – ‘Protestant, Catholic, Jew, or Infidel’– by rescuing them from the ‘misery and crime’ of the streets; indeed, he envisaged acanteen in the basement to feed ‘apprentices, sewing girls, and others that [sic] subsiston small salaries’.103 At the same time, it would redeem the rich by distracting themfrom the narrow pursuit of wealth. To address that ‘serious question before thepeople’, namely the ‘centralization of millions of dollars into one person’s possession’,

95 – Mosher’s photographs of the conven-tion, in Prints and Photographs Division,Library of Congress, Washington, DC; andhis political advertisement in scrapbook,Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.

96 – W. H. D., ‘How Many More?’, 7.

97 – William A. Richardson, Public Debtand National Banking Laws of the UnitedStates, Washington, DC: W. H. and O. H.Morrison 1873, in Centennial SafeCollection, AOC.

98 – Moore, ‘U.S. Capitol’s Queerest Safe’, 3.

99 – Ibid., 3 and 4; and ‘1876 Century SafeLost in Oblivion’, 2.

100 – ‘For Posterity’, 7.

101 – Garfield’s Memorial Journal, ed.Deihm, 197. See also Elizabeth Thompson’smaterials in Box 2, Centennial Safe, AOC.She appears in the photograph album andin a framed photograph.102 – Elizabeth Thompson, The Figures OfHell: Or The Temple Of Bacchus, privatelyprinted 1878, and prospectus for theAmerican Worker’s Alliance, both depos-ited in the safe. On her funding of utopiancolonies, see Richard Trahair, Utopias andUtopians: An Historical Dictionary,Westport, CT: Greenwood 1999, 399.103 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialPhotographs (1887), 23; Mosher, Catalogueof Memorial Historical Photographs (1883),10, 30, 20 and 22; and Mosher, ‘A GiganticPlan’, n.p.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

347

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

it would also contain aMemorial Security Legacy Bank that would distribute business-men’s mounting ‘surplus capital’ to charities as well as to their children.104 Mosher’swritings are replete with further, somewhat paternalistic proposals to mitigate theinequities of capitalist society throughout the nation, along with scathing denuncia-tions of the government’s ‘shameful neglect’ to do so. Arguing that the latter shouldprotect the working classes as it does the ‘rich man’s interests, the corporation andcompanies’, and that ‘the daily toilers of the nation are the creators of all wealth’, heenvisioned National Savings Banks to teach them ‘the art of saving’, a National LaborBureau of Servitude to provide work (also a plank in the Greenback Party’s platform),and a national, tax-funded public library and school system to educate their children.‘Such immortal legacies’, he concluded, ‘would be the crowning glory of ourGovernment’.105

Mosher further democratised his project by opening up his albums to undis-tinguished Americans. Unlike Brady, who had denounced and resisted the trendtowards cheaper, standardised photographs in the 1850s and 1860s, Mosher soughta larger, middle-class clientele.106 His time vessel enshrined not just militaryleaders, political figures, and cultural celebrities (including Mark Twain, P. T.Barnum, and Edwin Booth), but also thousands of middle-class men and theirwives. He even interpreted ‘profession’ broadly, to include butchers and salesmen(figure 11). Such a collection thus dissolves the distinction – made by AlanTrachtenberg among others – between a public sphere of photographic galleriessuch as Brady’s, where portraits were consumed for their didactic or ‘emulatory’function, and a private sphere of the parlour, where smaller, cheaper, pocket-sizedimages of family and friends were consumed for ‘memorial’ purposes.107 InMosher’s memorial safe, and his customers’ albums, the two were combined.

Deihm similarly democratised her vessel by allowing anyone to sign her‘Citizens’ Autograph Album’, a decision that provoked some indignation.108 One

Figure 11. Charles D. Mosher, C. W.Wald[r]ick. Salesman Garfield Lodge,albumen print on cabinet card, n.d.Chicago History Museum.

104 – Mosher, Catalogue of MemorialHistorical Photographs (1883), 15 and 21.

105 – Mosher, Scrap-Book, 15–18, 25, 34and 28.

106 – McCandless, ‘Portrait Studio’, 58 and62–63; and Panzer, Mathew Brady and theImage of History, 18.

107 – Trachtenberg, Reading AmericanPhotographs, 30–33.

108 – Citizen’s Autograph Album,Centennial Safe Collection, AOC.

Nicholas Yablon

348

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

journalist, visiting the Centennial Exposition, denounced her exhibit for cheap-ening the institution of ‘posthumous fame’. Already wealthy donors may have theirnames engraved on monuments; but now, he complained, anybody,

for a ridiculously small sum, a mere pittance, […] may have his autographlocked up in this iron box, kept from the tooth of time until the year 1976,and then held up to the gaze of posterity. Rarely is such a chance given tobecome illustrious on cheap terms. It is economical, universal, infallible. Itbrings immortality within the reach of the humblest of us, and the price is, wewill say, five dollars a head. Think of it! Five dollars for a century of fame!Was ever anything so tempting heard of?109

Even an illiterate boy, he sneered, can inscribe an X in the ‘sacred tome’ and ‘withoutmore ado [he] sails down the stream of glory’. No longer necessitating prior accom-plishments or involving the judgement of later generations, fame could now bebestowed instantly on anyone at the stroke of a pen – or the release of a shutter.

In addition to extending national memorialisation to the masses, Mosher andDeihm also tied their time vessels to a progressive racial agenda. Expanding on the‘civilising’ and ‘Americanising’ goals of the Office of Indian Affairs, Mosher urgedthe government to establish similar savings banks and common schools on everyreservation and to allocate several million dollars a year to them. Even after thecollapse of Reconstruction, he continued to believe in the federal government’sresponsibility to ‘erec[t] school houses, suppor[t] schools, [and] educat[e] illiteratepoor colored people’s children in the South and North’, and to establish ‘equalrights and equal privileges’ for African Americans. These racial sympathies, whichcomplicate our perception of eugenicists, may have been the motivation behindMosher’s inclusion of photographs of several African-American leaders, includingFrederick Douglass and Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, a former abolitionist who hadrecently become the first black municipal judge elected in the USA (figure 12).110

Figure 12. Charles D. Mosher, M. W. Gibbs.Little Rock[,] Ark., albumen print on cabinetcard, n.d. Chicago History Museum.

109 – Philip Quilibet (pseudonym forGeorge Edward Pond), ‘Safe Celebrity’,Galaxy, 22:1 (1876), 125.

110 – Mosher, Scrap-Book, 22–24, 28 and49; see also his portraits of S. P. Gill, S. H.Holland, S. J. Hollensworth, John H.Johnson, John Jones, and H. B. Robinson.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

349

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Figure 13. Mathew Brady, untitled (portraits of US congressmen, including Joseph Hayne Rainey at top left and Robert Smalls at lower left), albumenprints on cabinet card, ca. 1876. From Deihm’s album ‘Photographs of the Great American People of 1876’. Records of the Architect of the Capitol.

Nicholas Yablon

350

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

Deihm’s photographic album was also racially inclusive. Her decision to commem-orate every member of Congress was an implicit celebration of its unprecedenteddiversity. Despite the erosion of Republican control of the South, the Forty-FourthCongress (1875–77) was the most racially diverse, and remained so for ninety-fouryears. Among its eight African-American members were Joseph Hayne Rainey(South Carolina), a former slave who in 1870 became the first African Americanelected to the US House of Representatives, and Robert Smalls (South Carolina),whose heroic take-over of a Confederate vessel in 1862 persuaded Lincoln to admitAfrican Americans into the Union Army (figure 13).

The progressive implications of these time vessels also extended to the issue ofgender equality. Deihm’s appointment of Elizabeth Thompson to officiate at thesealing hints at a feminist as well as anti-capitalist agenda. Thompson was asupporter of women’s causes ranging from the plight of working women in theUSA to child widows in India. She funded the publication of the multi-volumememorial History of Woman Suffrage, conceived by Elizabeth Cady Stanton andSusan B. Anthony in 1876, and as president of the Women’s Memorial Associationled efforts to erect monuments to leading women.111 Mosher also commemoratedStanton, Anthony, and other women’s rights advocates in his safe, and continuedto receive letters from them.112 And if the New York Times criticised Deihm’s safefor including ‘few’ photographs of ‘ladies’, Mosher’s gender ratio was morebalanced; if only because he extended his memorial-photographic services to thewives of his male subjects.113 Mosher’s apparent sympathies are corroborated byhis subsequent writings, which denounced the denial of suffrage to women as a‘burning disgrace’ and imagined a future ‘Paradise’ in which ‘man and woman [aretreated] equally before the law’.114 His vessel, together with Deihm’s, thus embo-died progressive visions for the future in which it would emerge, with eachdeposited item constituting a token of hope. It was the withdrawal of thoseitems from circulation – combined with the publicising of their larger venturesthrough exhibitions, publications, and, ultimately, the sealing ceremonies – thatappeared to invest them with magical powers.

Epilogue

Given the publicity they generated at the exposition and the length of time theytook to fill, the sealing of these time vessels proved anti-climactic. Arriving inStatuary Hall in the Capitol for the launching of her Century Safe on 22 February1879 (Washington’s Birthday), Deihm discovered that several guests, includingPresident Rutherford Hayes, had declined to attend. Going ahead without them,Senator Thomas W. Ferry, the president pro tempore of the Senate, turned the keyand then ‘beat a hasty retreat to the Senate chamber’. Having ‘expected some moreextended ceremony’, the spectators took ‘some time’ to realise it had alreadyconcluded.115 Deihm’s disappointment would have been compounded by thecontroversy that erupted three days later, when the New York Tribune accusedher of mercenary motives, alleging she had charged congressmen $5 to beenshrined in her safe and was now asking Congress to pay an additional $1,500for the so-called gift. In an open letter she denied receiving ‘a dollar from anyone’,claiming instead that ‘my enterprise cost me $15,000’.116

If Deihm’s sealing ceremony (according to newspaper reports) was a non-event, Mosher’s failed altogether. Exactly a decade later, Mosher also choseWashington’s Birthday for the first stage of the process: the installation of thesafe in the lobby of Chicago’s City Hall.117 A second ceremony took place on 18May to deposit the first eight thousand photographs. At that event, Mosher raisedexpectations of a grand finale ‘a few months’ later, when he would deliver a lastbatch of two thousand photographs and fasten shut the doors. ‘When I am readyto deposit [them]’, he promised to the assembled throng, ‘we will have some

111 – William B. Tyler, ‘Profiles of theFounders [of the Thomas ThompsonTrust]’, http://thomasthompsontrust.org/id1.html, accessed April 2013. On both theHistory and the memorial association, seeSelected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stantonand Susan B. Anthony, Volume V, ed. AnnD. Gordon, New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press 2009, 331.

112 – Stanton, letter to Mosher, n.d.; letterfrom Susan B. Anthony, 20 April 1895; andtranscription of two letters to Mosher fromFrances E. Willard, in Mosher ExhibitManuscripts, Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.113 – ‘Centennial Safe Closed’, New YorkTimes (23 February 1879), 1; and Mosher,Catalogue of Memorial HistoricalPhotographs (1883), 35.114 – Mosher, Scrap-Book, 50 and 24.

115 – Moore, ‘U.S. Capitol’s Queerest Safe’,5 and 3; and ‘Washington’s Birthday’,Washington Post (24 February 1879), 2,Centennial Safe folder, A&RF, AOC.

116 – New York Tribune and Deihm, quotedin Charles E. Fairman, Art and Artists in theCapitol of the United States of America,Washington, DC: GPO 1927, 272.

117 – ‘Observance of the Day:Arrangements Made for the Celebration ofFeb. 22’, Chicago Tribune (22 February1889), 8.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

351

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

ceremonies, with an oration by some prominent man’.118 There is no evidence,however, that any such event took place.

The apathy and hostility that accompanied the time vessels’ launches were aportent of the abuse and neglect they would soon encounter on their scheduled voyagetowards the Bicentennial. Incensed by Deihm’s ceremony, a senator introduced aresolution that day forbidding the display of any ‘work of art or manufacture otherthan the property of the United States [… in] Statuary Hall, the Rotunda, or thecorridors of the Capitol’, a prohibition that was incorporated into the sundry civil actof 3 March 1879.119 Despite her pleas, Deihm’s safe was thus removed and storedunder the east steps of the Capitol, alongside ladders and boxes. ‘Relegated toignominy’ and ‘exposed to the weather’, the ironwork became rusty, the paintings,inscriptions, and ornaments eroded, and the dial mechanism broken.120 It was redis-covered in time to be incorporated into the Bicentennial celebrations, only for furtherdifficulties to arise: the key that Deihm allegedly deposited in the Smithsonian couldnot be found, and when the spare key eventually surfaced in Florida, the keyholderclaimed possession of the safe and its contents. The subsequent dispute over owner-ship, compounded by Deihm’s failure to record a deed for the safe and her offspring’sfailure to survive her, was eventually resolved when Congress formally and belatedlyaccepted her gift. Repainted and restored to Statuary Hall, it was finally opened at12:19 p.m. on 1 July 1876, by President Gerald Ford, in the presence of senators,congressmen, and staff officials (figure 14).121

If Deihm’s vessel nearly overshot its target date, Mosher’s suffered the oppo-site fate. In embedding it in the lobby of the new City Hall, he had failed toaccount for the accelerated cycles of architectural obsolescence. When the buildingwas demolished in 1908, the Memorial Safe was prematurely opened, its contentsmoved to the new City Hall, and seven years later – after it was opened withoutauthorisation by a ‘curious clerk’ and deemed ‘of no use or value while in thevault’ – to the Chicago Historical Society.122 Thus, the vessel never enjoyed thegrand, ceremonial opening its creator had envisaged.

Even when revealed to the public, the vessels continued to fall short of theirintended purpose. Although the contents, including the photographs, emerged fromtheir journey in very good condition, they failed to arouse much interest. To beginwith, Ford seemed not to take Deihm’s offering seriously. After proclaiming that ‘nosafe is big enough to contain the hopes, the dreams, the energies of our people’ andthat ‘our real national treasure does not have to be kept under lock and key’, heremoved a photograph ofMrs Rutherford Hayes, andmockingly called out to a femaleRepresentative that he had found a ‘picture of a “chairperson” […] and she looksmighty pretty’ (figure 15).123 The safe’s contents were reportedly a ‘disappointmentfor those present’, with one staffer criticising Deihm for failing to recognise ‘whatwould be important and interesting 100 years later’.124 Mosher’s photographs, exhib-ited at the Chicago Historical Society that same year, prompted similar indifferenceand criticism. ‘His work’, wrote one reviewer, ‘doesn’t compare favorably with that ofbetter-known practitioners, nor does it seem especially “artful”. […] They have all theimage-stereotypy and repetitiveness associated with the genre […] the project is awashin a sea of stolid Midwestern faces […] a fairly grim and unattractive lot’. This wasevidently, the reviewer continued, ‘a business venture’.125

Such remarks were symptomatic of a historical gulf between senders andrecipients regarding attitudes towards fame, photography, and historiography.Photographs, autographs, and biographies of political and civic leaders simply nolonger bore the moral and historical significance they had for Victorian viewers.The recipients’ indifference may also have stemmed from the mood of theBicentennial. While post-war fatigue, economic recession, and political scandalcharacterised 1876 as much as 1976, the traumas of Vietnam, OPEC, andWatergate – combined with the existential threats of nuclear and environmentalapocalypse – appeared to erode faith in the kinds of utopian-national futuresimagined by Mosher, Deihm, and their contemporaries.126 The Bicentennial was

118 – ‘To be Opened A.D. 1976’, 11. Seealso ‘For the Second Centennial:Photographs and Other Relics placed in theMemorial Vault’, Chicago Times (19 May1889) and Chicago Herald (19 May 1889), n.p., both in Xeroxes of Mosher scrapbook,Box 8, Mosher Papers, CHM.

119 – Journal of the Senate […] ThirdSession of the 45th Congress, Washington,DC: GPO 1879, 345.

120 – ‘14 Years to Glory’ (1962) and ‘1876Century Safe Lost in Oblivion’, WashingtonPost & Times Herald (12 September 1954),both in Century Safe – Correspondencefolder, A&RF, AOC.

121 – The Floridian Thomas L. Watts’sletters are in Centennial Safe –Correspondence folder, A&RF, AOC.‘Concurrent Resolution Accepting the Giftof the Centennial Safe’, H. Con. Res. 84,93rd Congress, passed 16 October 1974. ForFord’s diary for 1 July 1976, see Daily DiaryCollection (Box 82A), Gerald R. FordPresidential Library, 3.122 – Viskochil, ‘Chicago’s BicentennialPhotographer’, 95 and 104; and ‘OldPhotographs Arouse Memories’, ChicagoTribune (12 August 1908), 5.

123 – ‘Ford Bids Nation “Keep ReachingInto the Unknown”’, New York Times (2July 1976), 35; and ‘History in CapsuleForm’, A&RF Display, AOC.124 – ‘Mrs. Deihm’s Centennial Safe’,Bicentennial Times (November 1976),A&RF Display, AOC.

125 – Marie Czach, ‘Time Capsule: “C. D.Mosher’s Bicentennial Gift to Chicago”, atthe Chicago Historical Society’, Afterimage,4:5 (1976), 15–16.

126 – David Lowenthal, ‘The BicentennialLandscape: A Mirror Held up to the Past’,Geographical Review, 67:3 (1977), 255.

Nicholas Yablon

352

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

thus a subdued affair. Rather than a glorious national celebration involving ‘formalrituals’ orchestrated with a ‘high moral tone’ by leading officials, it was largelydecentralised into local activities devised to avoid antagonising various social andpolitical groups.127 Mosher’s and Deihm’s vessels also had to confront very differ-ent expectations regarding time capsules. While many of the local celebrations of1976 involved the sealing of new time capsules, they bore new kinds of artefactsand meanings. They tended to memorialise not the nation as a whole but theindividuals or local communities who created them, and to contain not official butvernacular objects, ranging from soda bottles to a Kawasaki motorcycle.128 This‘craze for burials’, complained the historical geographer David Lowenthal a yearlater, ‘appeared to be animated less by a desire to show future generations present-day artifacts than to achieve immortality for [one’s] personal effects, if not forone’s person. Like the ancient Pharaohs, some Americans seemed determined totake it all with them’.129 Far from embodying a commitment to the future, 1970scapsules – including the cardboard boxes Andy Warhol was filling with random,

Figure 14. William Fitz-Patrick, untitled(President Gerald R. Ford and Architect ofthe Capitol, George S. White, removing thephotograph album from Deihm’s CenturySafe, Statuary Hall, US Capitol,Washington, DC, 1 July 1976), print fromTri-X panchromatic negative, 1976. GeraldR. Ford Library White House photograph,B0463-6A. Courtesy Gerald R. FordPresidential Library.

Figure 15. William Fitz-Patrick, untitled(President Ford holding up a silver-framedphotograph of Mrs. Rutherford Hayes,which he has just removed from theMemorial Safe), print from Tri-X panchro-matic negative, 1976. Gerald R. FordLibrary White House photograph, B0462-10. Courtesy Gerald R. Ford PresidentialLibrary.

127 – John E. Bodnar, Remaking America:Public Memory, Commemoration, andPatriotism in the Twentieth Century,Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press1994, 236–37, 241 and 243; MichaelKammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: TheTransformation of Tradition in AmericanCulture, New York: Vintage 1991, 572.128 – ‘Bicentennial Opens Up New Interestin Time Capsules’, New York Times (21 June1976), 31 and 62.

129 – Lowenthal, ‘Bicentennial Landscape’,263. See also Bodnar, Remaking America, 238.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

353

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

personal items and calling ‘time capsules’ – were arguably symptomatic of whatChristopher Lasch in 1978 called ‘a culture of narcissism’, one feature of which wasan ‘inability to identify with posterity’.130

In addition to exhibiting a lack of interest, the recipients failed to comply withthe senders’ instructions to top-up and reseal the safes for another century and toprominently and permanently exhibit their contents. Deihm’s safe and its contentswere not included in that year’s blockbuster exhibition at the Smithsonian, ‘1876’,an otherwise exhaustive reconstruction of the Centennial Exposition. And, likeMosher’s lavish Memorial Home on Chicago’s lakefront, the Bicentennial exposi-tion she presumed would be organised never materialised.131 Instead, their materi-als were consigned to the oblivion of the archive. Until my visit to the Architect ofthe Capitol archives, Deihm’s collection had not been consulted by any researchersince its opening, perhaps because the survival of many of Brady’s photographs ofpoliticians has rendered her copies redundant; and her safe continues to languishin a remote storage facility (figure 16).132 Meanwhile, Mosher’s portraits wereremoved from the albums, absorbed into the Chicago Historical Society’s largercollection of cabinet cards, catalogued by the subject’s rather than the photogra-pher’s name, and thus reduced to the status of generic archival sources forbiographers or genealogists.

Despite this litany of neglect, Deihm’s and Mosher’s troves of photographsand autographs constitute a crucial source for historians, albeit not as testimony tothe ‘character’ of distinguished individuals, as they had intended. By studying these

Figure 16. Unknown photographer, MovingCentennial Safe From Capitol To Storage(after the ceremonial opening), 1976.Records of the Architect of the Capitol.

130 – Christopher Lasch, The Culture ofNarcissism: American Life in an Age ofDiminishing Expectations (1978), New York:W.W. Norton 1991, 51; see also Henry SteeleCommager, ‘Commitment to Posterity:Where Did it Go?’, American Heritage, 27:5(1976), 4. On Warhol’s collection of timecapsules, which eventually numbered 612, asan ‘archive of the ordinary’, see Arthur C.Danto, ‘Looking at the Future Looking at thePresent as Past’, in Mortality Immortality?:The Legacy of 20th-Century Art, ed. MiguelAngel Corzo, Los Angeles: GettyConservation Institute 1999, 8.131 – 1876: A Centennial Exhibition, ed.Robert C. Post, Washington, DC: NationalMuseum of History and Technology 1976.

132 – According to the Registrar of theCuratorial Office, Pam McConnell, who hasworked there since 1976.

Nicholas Yablon

354

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014

time vessels – and other closed collections – we may correct the assumption thatphotographs need to circulate in order to serve any ideological use. The perfor-mative ritual of sealing them away may in fact have enhanced their capacity toevoke certain political visions, whether conservative or progressive. These two casestudies also demonstrate how photographs, even those immediately circulated andconsumed, may be oriented towards some kind of future reception and thus tied tolarger discourses of posterity. Indeed, with its perceived ability to project thesubject’s body and soul forward in time and its compatibility with Victorianstorage devices (from albums and cabinets to bank safes) – and, at the sametime, its perceived vulnerability to light, touch, atmosphere, or chemical degrada-tion – photography was arguably the most important catalyst sparking the inven-tion of the time capsule.

Photographic Portraiture and Invention of the Time Capsule

355

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of I

owa

Libr

arie

s], [

Nic

k Y

ablo

n] a

t 14:

20 0

1 D

ecem

ber 2

014