How do you study the Library of Congress’ collection of nearly sixteen million photographs when the objects themselves are out of reach? It’s an esoteric riddle, perhaps, but one that Adrienne Lundgren, a conservator of photographs at the library, was forced to solve when lockdowns began in 2020. She decided that using data science to understand the early history of photography and the context of her institution’s collection might prove interesting, and she was right.
As Lundgren digitized records of the country’s first photographers, an unexpected pattern emerged. During the medium’s first two decades in the United States, the largest concentration of women photographers wasn’t in the Northeast, the country’s most populous region. Women photographers were most active in the Midwest. Between 1840 and 1860 more than half the country’s women photographers were working in just nine states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Lundgren didn’t identify any new photographers in her research; she just looked at the existing records in a new way. “The data was all there,” she told me. “The geographic trends just couldn’t be seen in the original analog format.”
Feminist historians often ask, metaphorically, where were all the women? By this they mean: Where do women appear in history? Where can we find them in the historical record, which rarely includes their names? By taking this question literally, Lundgren has not only found an answer (they were in the Midwest) but also unsettled the early history of photography in the United States, which has long privileged Northeastern cities.
In the Midwest, women made up a little less than 6 percent of the photographers working between 1840 and 1860. This is still a small number, but it is three times more than the percentage of women commercial photographers in the Northeast at the same time. Across the United States, about 3 percent of photographers were women. Beyond asking Where were the women? we ought to begin asking Why were the women there?
News of a chemical process for recording images from nature was first made public in France in 1839. It was named daguerreotype for its inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. (Where were the men? Oh, right there.) American experimenters took up the practice as word of it crossed the Atlantic, and within a few years daguerreotypes dominated portraiture. Their reign lasted until the early 1860s, when the process was replaced by cheaper and more easily reproducible techniques, such as the tintype and the albumen print.