The beautiful and the damned : the creation of identity in nineteenth century photography

We cite from the cover : /
"The Beautiful and the Damned looks for the first time at the broad social and cultural context for the development of portrait photography in the nineteenth century, showing how social and celebrity portraiture on the one hand, and scientific photography on the other, were different facets of the nineteenth-century fascination with classification and ordering.
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Between 1860 and 1900, editions of celebrity portraits, as well as the vogue for the carte de visite, fuelled the fashion for collecting and classifying photographs of the face. In an age of rapid industrialisation and the growth of the middle classes, the carte de visite became a means of conferring social status, and family albums -which often incorporated photographs of royalty and public figures — were used to position family members within society at large.
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Photographic portraiture's rapid rise to popularity encouraged its diffusion to other spheres, and the portrait photograph was adopted by the new sciences and technologies to provide empirical evidence for theories of evolution, phrenology, racial types, insanity and criminality. A system of scrutiny or 'surveillance' of the face emerged, represented here by extraordinary images from the files of the Parisian police of the nineteenth century, including some of the earliest scene of crime forensic photography.
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The Beautiful and the Damned is a significant addition to an important new area of photographic history. Illustrated with over 100 black-and-white images, this book also provides a comprehensive visual insight into the genre and features work by key figures such as Oscar Rejlander, Bassano, Eugène Atget and Julia Margaret Cameron."
Contents : /
I. The Beautiful and the Damned -- Social order and social classification /
II. Putting Faces to the Names : Social and Celebrity -- Portrait Photography -- The social context of photography -- Portraits and biographies -- The business of the studio -- The age of collodion -- The vogue for the carte de visite -- The damned 54 /
III. Policing the Face -- Introduction -- Exploring the body and the mind: physiognomy, psychology and psychiatry -- Exploring the face: anthropology -- Exploring the face: criminology and the degenerate -- Conclusion /
IV. Conclusion : Template for a New Order? /
Bibliography / Timeline / Glossar / Index.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, 6 June-7 October, 2001.