You might think that 19th-century photographs are of little importance to us—but these images and their makers shaped how we see the world today.
That’s the belief shared by contemporary artists Stéphanie Solinas, Laura Larson, and Stephanie Syjuco, whose work is currently on view in Getty’s exhibition Nineteenth-Century Photography Now. Organized around the key themes of Identity, Time, Landscape, Spirit, and Circulation, it explores the work of contemporary photographers who use earlier photographic images as a point of departure. Working with archives of 19th-century photographs and immersing themselves in the history of photography, Solinas, Larson, and Syjuco each reframe early photography in different ways for today’s audiences.
Recently, Solinas, Larson, and Syjuco shared what drives their work—from turning the lens back on the police officer credited with today’s pervasive identification systems, to creating a defiant community of women, to talking back to colonial archives.
Stéphanie Solinas
Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin, November 2, 1902, attributed to Alphonse Bertillon. Gelatin silver print, 3 1/8 × 5 in. Getty Museum, 2019.22.125
Many of Stéphanie Solinas’s artistic works are grounded in the human desire to understand ourselves and the universe—the visible and the invisible, the scientific and the spiritual, the body and the mind. In Sans titre, La Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon [Untitled, Life of Bertillon], she investigates the identity of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), who developed forensic anthropometrics in the 1880s. Working for the Paris Prefecture of Police and drawing on the pseudoscience of phrenology, Bertillon devised an elaborate system using photography and physical measurements to identify criminals.
“Bertillon formulated a definition of identity that has progressively evolved to today, when it is applied to all members of society. I am convinced that the 19th century invented our contemporary identities by inventing photography,” Solinas says.
Solinas turns the police officer’s techniques back on him in her series, approaching his life, physical traits, and personality with both forensic precision and imagination. Using Suzanne Bertillon’s biography of her uncle Alphonse Bertillon as a guide, Solinas photographed important sites around Paris from his life as if they were crime scenes, and paired each photograph with an audio excerpt from the biography (Read the excerpt for Untitled: M. Bertillon #14 here).
She also ran two “mugshot-like” portraits of Bertillon’s face through facial analysis software to create a three-dimensional sculpture of his gaze. Her 2011 book Sans Titre [M. Bertillon] includes the photographs, biographical excerpts, and printed sections of Bertillon’s face that one can cut out to create their very own sculpture.
“I anchor my work in photography because of its own dual nature, present since its beginning: a scientific document, as used by Bertillon, while at the same time a point of access to the ineffable, the elusive, as spirit photography,” Solinas explains. “Driven by the idea that this time period can accurately enlighten today’s questions, my field of investigation extends from the 19th to the 21st century, from the birth of photography to artificial intelligence.”
Laura Larson
Attitudes Passionnelles Extase (1878), 1878, Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard. Photogravure, 4 1/16 × 2 13/16 in. Getty Museum, 84.XB.730.7.25. Included in Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M. Charcot), Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard, 1878
In her project City of Incurable Women, Laura Larson reimagines the lives of female patients diagnosed in the 1870s with “hysteria”—then believed to be a nervous disorder specific to women—at the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière [Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital], Paris. These women were the objects of extensive study by the hospital’s director, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who staged photographs of them experiencing “hysterical attacks” for his three-volume reference work and teaching manual Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876–1880). After first encountering Charcot’s photographs in the 1990s as a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Larson returned to them in 2017—a moment, she observes, when leading figures of the Trump administration routinely described female opponents as “hysterical,” reflecting the long shadow of an ancient diagnosis.
For Larson, Charcot’s images are “photographs that fail”: “There was no curiosity in them, and no respect for the mystery of the subject,” she says. She began to consider aspects of the women’s experiences that went unacknowledged in the hospital’s archives.
“Maybe there were these other facets of these women’s lives that were nourishing, that were rebellious, that they worked in solidarity with other women or they loved other women,” Larson says. “The thing that was really fascinating to me about the hospital is, there were like 2,000 women living there. Where is the history of this as a community? Everyone was isolated in the photographs—there were very few photographs I saw where you would see more than one person in the frame. That’s a huge community, but there’s no history of that. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe part of my work here is to imagine that.’”
Working with dancer and scholar Lucille Toth, Larson engaged friends in Columbus, Ohio to explore women’s inner lives, healing, and community through improvised movement. “I really wanted to think about it as just talking to these women, not talking for them,” she says. Paying particular attention to the power of gestures, Larson’s friends perform before the camera in response to prompts, including Charcot’s photographs, phrases from the women’s case histories, and the artist’s own suggestions for movement and tempo.
Larson’s work is part of a broader effort to engage critically with photography and its histories. “The archive can be a terribly violent place,” she observes. “I’m trying to figure out a way to look at it critically and still understand its possibilities for showing forms of resistance, pleasure, and possibility.”
For nearly a decade, Stephanie Syjuco has explored questions of identity, citizenship, and representation through photography, sculpture, and installation work. From 2019–20, as a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History, she delved into the museum’s collections to understand how the Philippines, her country of birth, was historically represented. With the country under colonial rule for nearly 400 years—governed first by Spain from 1565–1898, and then by the United States until 1946—Syjuco was curious to see “what the Philippines looks like in the American archive.”
The result was Pileups, a series of three sets of collaged photographs. “It ranges from everything from herbaria samples of plant materials that have been collected, to glass negatives, images, all through an entirely colonial lens,” she says. “I wanted to show how an entire country and culture is kind of quantified through the archive.”
Working closely with the Museum’s collections shaped Syjuco’s work. “I found it physically really fascinating to be present, to touch and go through documents,” she observes. Struck by the sheer volume of material she encountered, she began to explore ways of evoking the experience of sifting through the archive—layering images upon images and including her own white-gloved hand in her works. “This series was really my attempt to push out of the single frame of the photograph and attempt to simulate the archive itself,” she explains.
That archive stood in sharp contrast to Syjuco’s knowledge and experience, as a Filipino-American artist, of her community. “I was raised in the United States, I grew up here, my family has a long history here of almost 100 years,” she says. “Yet if we’re to be defined by the American archives, it’s always through a visual lens of exclusion, through a colonial eye.” She is keenly aware of the challenges posed by this visual legacy.
“You can build on it by looking toward the future, or making new images that contradict it, but the problem with the archive is that it never goes away,” Syjuco says. “If I look at colonial-era photographs, which are really demeaning and were produced in the context of eugenics and racial hierarchies, those things are not going to disappear just because we don't use them anymore for that purpose. They still sit there and tell their stories.”
Ultimately, she hopes that Pileups will help liberate contemporary audiences by reframing these images. “My challenge in this body of work is: well, we can't remove these things, they’re part of history and they're attesting to an unjust reality, but we can still hopefully talk back to them, and not let them sit there in what appears to be a form of neutrality. I hope that frees up future generations to not feel restricted or conscribed by what history tells them.”
Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is on view at the Getty Center through July 7, 2024.
