Victorian Facebooks: Privacy Concerns at William Notman’s Studio

Abstract

The history of issues of privacy in relation to photography is generally dated to the introduction of handheld cameras and halftone printing at the end of the nineteenth century. Citing a remarkable series of notations in the records of famed Montreal photographer William Notman, this article argues that privacy concerns were at issue in the everyday operations of the photography studios that preceded amateur photography. These notations represent the rudimentary attempts that some of Notman’s clients made to restrict the circulation, sale and availability of their studio portraits starting in the 1870s. This article speculates that the emergent anxieties regarding privacy exemplified by such notations were informed by the setup and marketing practices of early photography studios. Ultimately, this analysis seeks to show that current debates about privacy, photography and visibility can be traced back to the commercial systems that developed in tandem with early photography technologies.

Keywords:

• privacy
• photography studios
• William Notman (1826–91)
• portraits
• nineteenth century
• Canada

In 1890, lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis famously called for a ‘Right to Privacy’ in the face of ‘instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise [which] have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life’.¹ Now, 130 years later, the authors’ call ‘to be let alone’ still resonates and is perhaps even heightened by the ubiquity of camera technologies from cell phones to CCTV surveillance. Despite extensive scholarly debate about various aspects of the text by Warren and Brandeis, one contention has remained largely unchallenged: that the arrival of handheld cameras and halftone printing signalled photography’s serious threat to privacy.² The lack of critical interrogation of this point is surprising because the specific photographic cases Warren and Brandeis used to build their torts argument for the right to privacy were not, in fact, examples of instantaneous photographs taken in private homes or in the course of domestic life, and neither were they circulated through the press. While the authors creatively imagined the potential threats posed by amateur and journalistic photography, their evidence consisted of legal texts and cases focused on the work of professional photographers in commercial settings.³ Specifically, Pollard v Photographic Company, their core case related to photography and privacy, concerned a young woman who sat for a portrait at a commercial studio, only to later find her portrait incorporated into a Christmas card and for sale in the shop window.⁴ Foreshadowing decades of future hand-wringing over privacy and photography, fears about the potential risks of new technology distracts from the reality that the commodification of images, even in a genteel Victorian photography studio, poses an equal, if not greater, concern for what Warren and Brandeis referred to as ‘the privacy of the individual’.⁵

Commercial studio records remain an understudied resource in efforts to comprehend how ideas about privacy developed in relation to early photography. The complexity and cost of early photographic processes meant that the vast majority of nineteenth-century photographs were produced by commercial studios. Victorian studios not only took photographs; they created image repositories, sold photographs, promoted their services and ushered in a culture of display that drew on their repositories. Within this crucial context, portraits were commodities, and that fact shaped the period’s wider norms of photographic consumption and circulation.⁶ When we widen the scope of analysis around photography and privacy to encompass the visual economy, the argument that photography’s threat to privacy is grounded in ever more rapid and rapacious technologies of capture at the end of the nineteenth century starts to falter. Despite their focus on imminent risk of new photographic technologies combined with an increasingly voracious press in 1890, even Brandeis and Warren briefly acknowledged that ‘for years there has been a feeling that the law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons’.⁷ Contrary to claims that privacy was not a concern before the end of the nineteenth century, a focus on handheld photographic technology and mass printing has limited our understanding of how Victorians responded to the anxieties generated by studio photography, and portrait photography in particular. From its inception, photography helped to shape social conditions of privacy and ideas about privacy have shaped the social conditions of photographic practice.

This article draws on a remarkable series of notations in the studio records of famed Montreal photographer William Notman. Starting in the 1870s, some clients sought restrictions on the circulation, sale and even archiving of their portraits. For instance, in 1874, Miss Molson, of an affluent banking and brewery family, sat for a series of portraits (figure 1). In the studio records, under the first half-length seated photograph of Miss Molson posed in an elegant coat and hat looking at the camera, a note was added by a Notman staff member: ‘None to be sold except to the family’. The restrictions logged in Notman’s studio records were relatively rare; they are, however, revealing in two important ways. The client directives offer information on who was concerned about retaining control over their image and how and when they sought to do so. At the same time, the existence of these notations confirms norms of studio practice which would make such notations necessary. That is to say that at least some clients were attuned to the fact that the interests of the profit-seeking commercial photography studio were not necessarily in alignment with their own interests around privacy – or personal profit. Not only does the example of Notman’s clients shift the prevailing narrative that ties privacy risks to the emergence of new photographic technologies, but these directives point to the important role played by individual consumers in response to archival systems as much as to new imaging technologies. Even the earliest ideas about privacy were broader than Brandeis and Warren’s call for ‘the right to be let alone’. Instead, Notman’s clients sought the right to engage in the world of commerce and photography but to do so on their own terms. They sought to protect their privacy insofar as it would be them, and not the studio, who would decide who saw and purchased their image. Privacy is more than the right to be left alone; privacy is the right to set the terms of one’s own engagement in public.

Figure 1 William Notman, Miss Molson, 1874. Page from Picture Book. McCord Museum, Montreal.

Efforts by Notman’s clients to exert control once their images entered the commercial enterprise echo more modern thinking about privacy, specifically who should be responsible for managing informational privacy, the core focus of debates around Internet privacy. Foreshadowing the intense challenges posed by the breadth of and wide access to the Internet, law professor Alan Westin defined privacy in 1967 as ‘the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others’.⁸ Within this framework, the particular technologies of photographic capture are of far less concern than the informational/computational technology used to store and circulate them as well as the profit motives that animate movement of information through the system. When we upload our photographs to Facebook, how they were made has little bearing on the more pressing question of who can see those photographs and how they might be accessed, framed and presented. Tension within informational privacy often emerges when users expect that privacy will be protected by the entity controlling the storage and circulation system, such as the photography studio or Facebook. In turn, when information circulates in ways users had not wished, blame is shifted to the user for sharing their information.

This article seeks to historicise current debates about privacy, photography and visibility by shifting the focus away from technologies of capture in the nineteenth century to the commercial systems that were used to manage increasingly vast numbers of photographs, highlighting the social tensions around privacy. Privacy and the rights to one’s own person are concepts so steeped in privilege that they have rarely been even retroactively imagined for most nineteenth-century subjects. In her article on the whiteness of Western privacy, Eden Osucha has argued that ‘Privacy is a form of property and legal personhood only available to those subjects whose entitlement to this rights claim is recognized by dominant cultural norms’.⁹ Scholars of photography including Tina Campt, Allan Sekula, Lily Cho and John Tagg have carefully investigated the power of photographic archives operated by the state and for research purposes.¹⁰ However, the repressive power of these state systems of capture from police files and ethnographic archives to medical and immigration records is also poised to be reconsidered in the context of privacy. By shifting our focus to corporate entities and photographic clients, the terms under which the modern conception of bourgeois privacy developed can be more clearly delineated and its limits carefully considered.

A Grand Version of Home

Studios worked to earn the trust of clients through a physical reconstruction of domesticity and harnessing the association of domesticity with privacy and security. In the photography studio, domestic comforts and hospitality were further regarded as vital to commercial success because a relaxed and inspired client was seen to yield better results in portrait sessions. For this reason, historian Shirley Teresa Wajda has observed that, as early as the 1840s, photography studios fashioned their reception rooms after the parlour rooms found in middle-class homes. She argues that many emergent industries during this period utilised the trappings of home to help rapidly acclimatise consumers to novel new technologies.¹¹ In 1853, American photographer Marcus Root advised an aspirational style for studio design. He argued that the photography studio’s furnishings and décor ought to put the client in the right frame of mind for portrait sitting: ‘I would fain have the daguerrean rooms a temple of beauty and grandeur, so that those entering may inhale a spirit which shall illuminate their faces with the expression desired by the artist alike for his own sake and that of his subject’.¹² To this end, he advised that photography studios be outfitted with stained glass, drapes, papered or painted walls, art, books and tasteful furnishings. Katherine Grier argues the resonances between the studio and the domestic parlour were mutually generative. Seeking to design their ideal parlour, she suggests that photographer’s studios were one of the key examples Victorian consumers would study along with ‘rooms opened for auctions in houses of rich people, or the “model” interiors at world’s fairs’.¹³ In turn, clients would return from the studios to display and view portraits in their own parlours, where they might display a basket of cartes de visite on tables alongside framed prints and an album or two to share with visitors.

Notman’s Montreal studio reception room, as seen in an 1872 lithograph (figure 2), exemplified this welcoming and aspirational aesthetic. Like an elegant parlour room, Notman’s reception room is carpeted and furnished with a combination of freestanding and built-in furniture, and the tabletops and walls are decorated with framed pictures. A visitor to Notman’s studio in 1864 reported that ‘the walls are completely covered with the finest specimens of the [photographic] art, comprising portraits of celebrities, foreign and local’.¹⁴ While this description might suggest photographs of only public figures would hang on the walls, the definition of ‘local celebrity’ was broad and might include those who did not seek the limelight, including the subjects of news stories or the scions of well-known families. In his industry handbook, The Camera and The Pencil (1864), Root suggested that studios label their specimens, presenting the possibility that some whose likenesses were exhibited at a photography studio may have been easily identified: ‘It were best to affix the name to each, as this would enhance the interest’. While he specifically recommends this practice for renowned sitters, we can speculate that there were clients across the social spectrum that had their images both displayed and labelled.¹⁵ Furthermore, evidence suggests that the daily production of the studio would also have graced the counters and shelves of the reception space, serving as both up to the minute marketing and a means of speeding up the process of reviewing proofs with clients and processing orders.¹⁶

Figure 2 Henry Sandham, Interior of Notman’s Studio, Montreal, 1872. Photolithograph from Canadian Illustrated News Portfolio & Dominion Guide, 1872. N-0000.2120.7, McCord Museum, Montreal.

The organisation of the studio segregated its occupants along gender and class lines in keeping with customs of idealised domesticity and its norms of privacy, thereby further echoing the sanctity of the home.¹⁷ In Victorian England, the ideal residence was equipped with both private spaces designed for solitude and public-facing spaces designed for exhibiting respectable domesticity to visitors and guests.¹⁸ Beyond the reception room, which was styled after a domestic parlour, there were increasingly private spaces, including the dressing rooms and studios. Studios were usually only occupied by an operator, the subject, and assistant and chaperones, if needed. Historian Colleen Skidmore suitably describes the Notman studio as ‘an environment whose public rooms pretended to an atmosphere of private hospitality and in whose studios a sense of the comfort of the sitter’s home was sought’.¹⁹ She argues that due to the careful construction of this home-like environment, Notman’s studio was seen to be compatible with the social idea of femininity. For example, women were afforded separate dressing spaces in photography studios, the location and function of which intentionally resembled the private drawing rooms and boudoirs found in genteel homes. To further put their clients at ease, the staff attending to clients in the dressing rooms were also divided by gender. In 1876, eighteen of the fifty-three employees at Notman’s Montreal studio were women.²⁰ Unless staff were directly serving clients in the reception room, dressing room or operating room, work undertaken by staff remained largely invisible to patrons, thereby reproducing the notions of class difference that dictated the organisation of middle-class Victorian interiors. The further labour required to produce photographic portraits was undertaken by staff in dark rooms, closets and offices that were not accessible by clientele.²¹ The physical divisions within studios worked in several complementary ways. In addition to creating an illusion of being a guest in a grand domestic home, they sequestered vast and messy commercial operations required for making, storing and retrieving photographs.

Facebooks and Studio Systems

In a broadside announcing the invention of photography in the first weeks of 1839, Daguerre predicted that his invention would be used not just to capture scenes from the world, but to catalogue and archive them. In a harbinger of the widespread data mining and monetisation of social media platforms that are currently understood as major threats to privacy, Daguerre was well aware that the resulting ‘collections of all kinds will be […] of great value’.²² By the end of the nineteenth century, the collections amassed by commercial studios had proven their great value. A short notice in the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer in 1892 reported a scheme to create alluring inserts for packs of cigarettes. Using a series of agents, a photographer working for the cigarette company would buy from studios ‘every new and suitable photograph obtainable of actresses, ballet dancers, popular celebrities etc.’.²³ The author observes this was a highly lucrative business. Therefore, it should come as little surprise that the vast commercial archives were also leaky: ‘In one instance the pictures of the entire list of pupils at a fashionable school for young ladies were secured surreptitiously and multiplied and distributed in packages of cigarettes’.²⁴

It would take decades after the invention of photography for collections to demonstrate their full value, but commercial photography studios almost immediately saw the value of their collections for their own business development. It was the norm for studios to place the finest examples of their work in their reception rooms and in street-front windows to attract business. The default position taken by early commercial photography studios seems to have been that photographs taken under their auspices were their property, and permission was not always sought or granted before portraits were publicly exhibited. The records of Boston studio Southworth & Hawes note a visit by a client who ‘admired the daguerreotypes, saw her own at the door […] and did not even request to have it taken away’.²⁵ Not all sitters found the public display as flattering. In 1859, the Photographic News reported on a court case in which a London photographer sued his neighbour. It was alleged that the neighbouring shopkeeper had ‘willfully destroyed two portraits exhibited in [the photographer’s] show-case as specimens’.²⁶ The portraits were of the neighbour’s wife. Not only had the photographer not sought consent from the neighbour – nor, one presumes, his wife – but the photographer had ignored repeated requests to remove the portraits from public display. The Photographic News expressed some sympathy with the defendant given that the photographer sought ‘to attract customers by hanging up a portrait of his neighbour’s wife as a sign, either for its beauty or deformity’. Despite the lack of consent and the fact that the neighbour’s requests to remove the offending portrait had been ignored, the Photographic News deemed the judgment in favour of the photographer to be reasonable and unsurprising since he was the producer and owner of the image.

Not long before that case, William Notman founded his first studio in 1856 after emigrating from Scotland to Montreal. Over the next thirty-five years, he forged one of the largest photographic operations in North America with seven studios – many in partnership – across Canada and more than twice that many permanent and seasonal studios in the Northeastern USA.²⁷ He worked in a wide range of genres, but studio portraiture was the backbone of his growing business. In 1861, Notman moved his Montreal studio to a large Georgian mansion where he and his team made three thousand portrait photographs in that year alone. Escalating production was fuelled in part by the new fashion for cartes de visite, transported quickly from Paris and London to Montreal, the commercial hub of Victorian Canada. Not one to stand back and wait for customers, Notman was aggressive in marketing his business from its first years of operation, often submitting photographs to international competitions as well as inviting patrons to visit the photographic displays at the studio. In August 1861, the London-based Photographic News reported receiving ‘a parcel of very fine card portraits’ from Notman of which ‘are some portraits we recognize’.²⁸ In all these public contexts, Notman would have highlighted his prestige in photographing public figures, but he also would have likely included examples of his uniquely Canadian winter portraits, posed in a special studio with fake snow and ice and props such as snowshoes. That same year, in 1861, the Notman studio initiated a set of interrelated archival systems to track, manage and connect the visual and textual information they gathered every day which involved books of customers, books of portraits and notations on the envelopes used to hold the negatives.²⁹ The studio kept two corresponding sets of records for portraits, ‘Picture Books’ and ‘Index Books’. The former were essentially books of faces, containing copies of every cartes de visite – and later cabinet cards – taken at his studio, each annotated with their sitter’s name and negative numbers. The index books contained an alphabetical list of all his sitters and the numbers of their negatives. Annotations in these surviving records provide us with insight into the early onset of privacy concerns by Notman’s clients and the extent to which they understood the archiving and promotional systems used by the studio.

The Notman studio’s system was of their own construction, but remaining records from other studios of the era suggest that their approach to recordkeeping was not uncommon. In 1858, Edward Reeves opened a studio in Lewes, England that is generally acknowledged to be the oldest continually operating studio in the world. The studio has been located in the same high street building for the last 165 years and has miraculously escaped the fires, bankruptcies and other mishaps that eventually destroyed negatives and business records of most photographic operations in the early days.³⁰ As a historical resource, the aggregated data of both the Reeves and Notman archives are invaluable. Photography historian Brigitte Lardinois leads a major research project to collect and digitise the Reeves studio records including various ledgers and negatives. She notes that ‘It should eventually be possible to select a portrait from the 1870s, find from the ledger who is the subject, find from the business records where the subject lived and how much they paid for the photograph’.³¹ While benign at a historical distance, all of the studio information linking a photograph to a person was also available at the moment those photographs were commissioned. In his survey of the final quarter of the nineteenth century, sociologist David Siepp described growing concerns about ‘businesses that conveyed, broadcast, bought, and sold information – a commodity of growing importance in a more and more organized society’.³² He noted particular disdain for executives at Western Union telegram who were suspected of leveraging information gleaned from telegrams to profit in stock trading in the late 1870s and early 1880s.³³ Concerns about what modern corporations might do with repositories of our personal information are not unique to the twenty-first century. Over the middle decades of the nineteenth century, large Victorian studios accumulated vast scores of personal data and developed powerful search capabilities able not only to identify photographs but to link photographs to personal information. In considering the implications of this informational wealth, how did the studios work to mitigate and manage concerns about privacy? When those mitigation efforts proved insufficient, who were the clients expressing concerns and in what contexts did their concerns emerge?

Setting Limits

While the emphasis on domestic comforts and spatial privacy may have worked to distract some of Notman’s clients from the studio’s relative lack of regard for informational privacy, by the 1870s some clients sought to gain some control of their images and related information. There were no significant changes in the operation of Notman’s studio in the years preceding these first few client-issued restrictions, but the craze for cartes de visite had generated exponential growth in the scale of their operations. In 1873, Notman’s Montreal studio took fourteen thousand photographs, almost a fivefold increase from 1861.³⁴ In a pattern common to commercial studios of the era, not only did Notman see more clients but each client purchased more photographs, gifting them widely and filling up albums to be viewed in parlours across the city. In a legal article in 1869, American J. A. Jameson expressed concerns about the abundance of photographic portraits, especially those of otherwise private subjects. While a decade earlier, the Photographic News had defended the rights of photographers to use commissioned portraits of their clients as they wished, the rapid increase in volume and circulation of photographs in the intervening decade led Jameson to different sympathies. Although he was generally supportive of storing photographs of private individuals by the state, police or courts, lest they later commit crimes or need identification, Jameson’s concerns lay with the ease of making prints and the financial impetus to do so:

If a likeness, once lawfully taken, were, without permission, to be multiplied for gain, the artist reckoning on the beauty or distinctness of the original for an extensive sale, it might be considered whether there was not a violation of a sort of natural copyright, possessed by every person of his or her own features.³⁵

In light of these concerns and the intense Victorian focus on women’s propriety, it may come as little surprise that two young, unmarried women clients were among the first to have circulation limits attached to their Notman portraits. Four years after Miss Molson sat for the photographs which would be restricted for sale to her family, Miss Stanton was photographed in the studio space designed to replicate an elegant parlour. She posed in three full-length portraits in two different, rather elaborate dresses as well as a headshot in profile (figure 3). The notes in the Picture Book stipulate that they ‘Not be sold to anyone but herself’. As intriguing as they are, the directives attached to both Miss Molson’s and Miss Stanton’s portraits raise questions rather than offer concrete information. While we can assume that Miss Stanton issued her own directive, Miss Molson’s might have been her own but could also have been issued by a protective family member. Neither the notes nor the fairly routine portraits offer an obvious explanation for restricting the images since they make no effort to flaunt standards of priority in dress or deportment. Miss Stanton was a regular client and even returned to Notman’s studio in 1880 for another, even more fanciful, costumed series of portraits with no restrictions, such as shown in figure 4. What the directives do offer in terms of information is that some clients were concerned about the possibility that their portraits might be sold commercially in the context of Notman’s studio. That is to say that although the norms of the studio might be to focus on the sale of portraits and copies to the sitter, the person who commissioned the photograph – if different – and their loved ones, this circle might have become so wide as to be meaningless or even compromising.

Figure 3 William Notman, Miss Stanton, 1878. Page from Picture Book. McCord Museum, Montreal.

Figure 4 William Notman, Miss Stanton, 1880. Albumen print, 15 × 10 cm. II-56962.1, McCord Museum, Montreal.

The directives attached to Miss Molson and Miss Stanton’s photographs seem to reflect an understanding that such images of young women, especially those from prominent families, might well be of particular interest to studios and a cross section of customers. Writing in 1862 of London-based commercial photographer Camille Silvy, essayist Andrew Wynter reported that the studio’s system was ‘to print fifty of each portrait, forty going to the possessor, and ten remaining in stock, as a supply for friends’.³⁶ Stocking copies for sale was an expensive and, as Wynter notes, space-consuming practice, but Notman’s visible numbering system on most photographs would have made it easy for friends or admirers to order photographs to be printed as needed. While there were surely moments when the fashionable Miss Stanton might have welcomed the interest in collecting her image, the portraits taken in 1878 were ones she wanted to keep for herself and perhaps gift to selected recipients. Concerns about the potential uncontrolled circulation of images of women align with idealised Victorian narratives about gender. In order to assume their gendered roles as so-called Angels in the House, unmarried women were required to strike the same balance between being seen and unseen that was expected of their more established peers. There was a considerable amount of anxiety regarding the possibility that a young woman’s image might circulate in unseemly contexts, such as the schoolgirls whose photographs ended up alongside actresses in cigarette packages. The restricted images exemplify the social expectation that young women exhibit their physical beauty whilst also discouraging unwanted attention. Patrizia Di Bello notes that, while there was a long history of circulating and collecting prints of ‘professional beauties’, these would have clearly been sourced from shops. As Di Bello argues: ‘Photographs could imply a greater intimacy than the prints […] as exchanging photographs in person was considered a sign of intimacy, especially between the sexes’.³⁷ While the uncontrolled circulation of images of women is often framed as a risk to their reputation, in a legal context Jameson positioned it as an economic issue, arguing for a woman’s ‘right to control the market of her own beauty’ even if potential suitors are the primary customers.³⁸ By framing the issue as one of copyright and pointing to the unauthorised sale of portraits, even artistic ones, Jameson gestures to the more complex risks of the commercial studio, which Molson and Stanton may have been trying to address.³⁹

Nuns and members of the clergy amount to another notable group within Notman’s clientele who applied restrictions to their portraits. It is tempting to presume that there were limitations placed on these portraits because they were not condoned by the Church; however, these are staid headshots and half-length portraits of priests and nuns in religious dress against plain backdrops. It would be difficult to attribute any impropriety to them. In 1881, Reverend Monk’s carte de visite was entirely absent from the Picture Book. In the blank space dedicated to the negative number II-62639 was his name and the note: ‘Not to be put in & Not to be sold to anybody but himself’. Two years later, Reverend John Quinlivan, a popular and charismatic leader of the Irish Catholic St Patrick’s Basilica, sat for Notman.⁴⁰ His 1883 portrait carried a directive similar to Monk’s: ‘Not to be put in nor sold’ – although Notman’s 1893 photograph of Quinlivan carries no such restriction and was included in a 1900 composite portrait of the Clergy of St. Patrick’s (figure 5).⁴¹ In 1884, a copy of Mother Teresa’s portrait was also missing from the space allotted to the negative number in the Picture Book. In its place was a blank space annotated with handwritten script indicating that her image is ‘not to be sold’. In 1886, a half-length portrait of Sister Aloysius was also ‘not be sold to anyone’; however, her portrait was permitted in the Picture Book, suggesting the controls on these religious portraits was likely not a standardised directive issued by the church (figure 6). Nor were restrictions limited to leaders in the Catholic Church. On New Year’s Eve 1884, Methodist minister Reverend George H. Kenney sat for two cabinet card portraits both of which carried the directive ‘Not to be put in or not to be sold’.

Figure 5 William Notman & Sons, Clergy of St. Patrick's Church, Montreal, QC, 1900. Composite 1900, copied 1903. Digital positive from glass plate negative, 20 × 25 cm. II-145300.0, McCord Museum, Montreal.

Figure 6 William Notman, Sister Aloysius, 1886. Albumen print, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. II-79419.1, McCord Museum, Montreal.

The explanation for the directives not to sell these religious portraits to Notman’s clients or even archive them through the normal means seems to be financial ownership, as opposed to social control. By the 1870s, many family and personal albums included more than portraits of family and friends. It was common to include or even devote albums to portraits of royalty, politicians, celebrities and clergy. In fact, another Quebec photography studio, the Livernois Studio, launched a publicity campaign in 1863 to promote the purchase of portraits picturing parish priests and other prominent figures in the Catholic Church.⁴² While there is still more research to be done on Notman’s clergy portraits, their restrictions may be accounted for by the fact that the Church ultimately decided it was in its interest to sell the photographic portraits of their popular clergy members to this avid collecting class, rather than having the profits for such sales go to photography studios. Quinlivan led significant fundraising efforts at the end of the nineteenth century to enhance the Basilica and to build a school. We have no details of how photography might have been used in these efforts, but it seems plausible that, after the Church secured the necessary prints through a bulk order at Notman’s, they or the clergy members may have cut off further sales through the studio. This would explain why one Notman portrait of a certain religious figure was restricted while others of the same subject carried no restrictions.

Two other subjects who posed at Notman’s studio in the late 1870s raise different questions about privacy and control. In 1877, a young girl in a dark dress posed in a dark studio space fitted with wooden and brocade furniture like the one Miss Stanton posed in (figure 7). The girl looks at the camera and seems to be holding up the hem of her dress in each hand. One would assume that by lifting her dress she revealed her legs, but we cannot be sure as the bottom third of the picture has been cut off at a slight angle. Two years after this young girl posed in Notman’s studio, another female subject posed for a full-height photograph frontally and in profile (figure 8). Where the young girl is contextualised within a more traditional studio setting, this second subject is afforded none of the trappings of a domestic interior that we expect to see in a professional portrait; in lieu of elegant rugs, fabrics and furniture, the woman has been posed in front of a plain wooden backdrop, its stand visible on the bottom left. She wears a dark fitted jacket with a white blouse underneath and a scarf at her neck, but the bottom half of her torso is covered only by bloomers, leaving her legs and feet bare and revealing one knee a bit higher than the other. This surprising lack of adherence to Victorian norms of propriety around female legs is explained by the identifying information attached to the photographs.⁴³ Both sets of photographs are identified only as a ‘Subject for Dr. Fenwick’.

Figure 7 William Notman, Subject for Dr. Fenwick, 1877. Page from Picture Book. II-46617 and II-46618, McCord Museum, Montreal.

Figure 8 William Notman, Subject for Dr. Fenwick, 1878. Page from Picture Book. II-49289.1 and #II-49290.1, McCord Museum, Montreal.

George Fenwick was an orthopaedic surgeon and McGill University professor who specialised in damage or malformations of the legs. Starting in the 1870s, he employed Notman’s studio to photograph a range of patients, to document medical conditions and sometimes to document the transformative impact of surgery. By the 1880s, the commissions for Fenwick and at least one other physician, Dr Henry, regularly carried restrictions about not being offered for sale and copies not being pasted in the Picture Book. The photographs of the little girl and the young woman in the elegant jacket listed no formal restrictions; however, at some point, studio staff used their own creative interventions to restrict the view of the photographs in the Picture Book. The traces of photographic paper below the remaining image of the little girl suggest that someone cut the bottom of the photograph after it had been pasted into the book. Similarly, according to curatorial records, staff had pasted a flap of paper over the photograph of the woman ‘for privacy reasons’.⁴⁴ Furthermore, most of the medical subjects were anonymised in the records so even if their faces and bodies were accessible in the Picture Books, those would not be linked to a name unless the sitters were known to staff or introduced themselves. However, the Notman images and records suggest various aspects of medical photography were very much under development at this time, including whether the patients were to be integrated into the usual studio setting, like the little girl, or photographed in a more sterile, scientific environment like the woman.⁴⁵ In 1881, Missie Annie Smith was photographed for Dr Fenwick to document her malformed knee (figure 9). Not only was little Annie posed on an elegant chair in the regular studio setting, but her name was listed in the Picture Book. Likely, she was named because her family were already regular Notman clients, placing the norms of bourgeois portraiture in tension with the emerging norms of the more sterile, scientific genre of medical photography.

Figure 9 William Notman, Missie Annie Smith, for Dr. Fenwick, Montreal, QC, 1881. Albumen print, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. II-62918.1, McCord Museum, Montreal.

The directives issued by some of Notman’s clients regarding the studio’s Picture Books and the interventions that staff made on select portraits found within their pages raise questions about how these books were used. The books were a tool used by staff to keep track of notes on production and to assist in processing orders. The messiness of the Picture Books suggest they were not routinely shared with clients, filled as they were with various notes for the printing and retouching staff such as ‘hide the big nose’. The books would have circulated extensively through the studio, viewed by both male and female staff. To order photographs, most clients would have been armed with proofs sent by the studio and/or negative numbers pulled from the invoice, which the staff could double-check against the books. However, it is possible that the books were used as a last resort to locate a specific photograph if a customer lacked the usual information necessary to track it down. Nora Hague, a former cataloguer for the Notman collection, imagined that in ordering reprints ‘if she really had to, [a staff member would] bring out the not-so-pretty Picture Book’.⁴⁶ The range of sitters who stipulated that pictures not be added to the Picture Book suggests they either had some experience and knowledge of the book, suggesting that it was shared, or that Notman staff made the suggestion in delicate situations, maybe even in anticipation of the potential misuse of the books. The last recorded restrictions on the sale or placement of portraits in Notman’s records appear in the early 1890s. While handheld cameras raised privacy fears for Warren and Brandeis, the availability of easy-to-use Kodak cameras surely offered others concerned with privacy to take the matter into their own hands – although film still had to be sent to Kodak for processing.

A final set of restrictions recorded in the Picture Books proves how effective simple obfuscations or omissions were in severing the connection between the physical image and the studio’s archival system. Near the beginning of her remarkable forty-five-year career as a cataloguer in the Notman archives, Nora Hague came across an unusual portrait. As seen in figure 10, the glass plate negative was of a young man dressed in fashionable women’s clothing – a fitted dress with a lace bib front, high neck with ribbon detail and a tall bonnet adorned with flowers. The subject of the photograph was not entirely uncommon. Notman often photographed sitters dressed for costume balls, theatrical performances and humorous photographs staged for fun. Within these contexts, plenty of men dressed up as women for the camera, but none of those portraits carried the directive ‘Not to be put in’. Unlike the exaggerated costumes of most of Notman’s male sitters posed in women’s clothing, this portrait featured gender-bending dress without the explanation of theatrical performance. Like the hundreds of thousands of glass negatives in the Notman archive, the plate was held in a paper envelope with handwritten identifying information. However, instead of a sitter’s name, this envelope read ‘Gentleman for Mrs. Austin’. Hague was intrigued but set the photograph back on the shelf and moved on with her cataloguing without, as she later lamented, noting the negative number. The circuit-breaking effort implemented by Notman’s staff was so effective that Hague recalled that she had been ‘looking for it for 40 years when it turned up accidentally’.⁴⁷ The portrait was one of four exposures taken in the session. Of these, three negatives survive, two seated full-body portraits and the single headshot. The fourth negative is no longer in the Notman archives. One additional way for clients to control the circulation of their images was to purchase the negative, which could then either be used to make prints in a controlled way or could be destroyed to prevent any further prints. The sale of a negative was usually recorded in the studio records, but that step may have been skipped in this case as a way of further obfuscating record of the sitting.

Figure 10 William Notman, A Gent for Mrs. Austin, 1889. Digital positive from glass plate negative. II-90238, McCord Museum, Montreal.

In the UK, cross-dressing in public had been deemed a crime; and even within the secluded, if not quite private, confines of a photography studio, it was not in keeping with Victorian propriety.⁴⁸ After Hague’s rediscovery, curator Hélène Samson scoured the records to try to identify the sitter and Mrs Austin. Using the Picture Books, Samson found a Mrs W. B. Austin who sat for Notman ten days before the Gentleman wearing the very same hat.⁴⁹ Born Ellen Lousia Bradlee Winchester to an affluent Boston family, she married Wyndam Bruce Austin, a British born Montrealer, and gave birth to five children who periodically sat for photographs at Notman’s studio. Samson deduced the youngest, William then aged twenty-seven, was likely the Gentleman pictured.⁵⁰ In 1888, a year before the mother and son portrait sessions at Notman’s, Mrs Austin had moved out of her family home and into an elegant hotel where she would reside for the next twenty-six years.⁵¹ Did she visit Notman’s studio to mark her own transition into a new life? Did she propose the plan for her son during her visit? The title suggests that she played a formative role in the session whether by conceiving, coordinating or paying for it, thereby offering an intriguing challenge to the normative bourgeois femininity of the era. We do not know who requested the restrictions, but in this case the why is more obvious. The trust placed in Notman and his staff is quite remarkable and, as the long-lost negatives attest, that trust seems to have been well placed.

Conclusion

Attending to client concerns in the Victorian studio addresses a fundamental imbalance in the history of photographic privacy. In their discussion of the Pollard case, Warren and Brandeis support Pollard’s position versus the Photographic Company while they also blame the victim for not taking steps to avoid the situation – and to a certain extent, being a woman. Since the technology available and in use at the studio meant ‘that one’s picture could seldom be taken without his consciously “sitting” for the purpose, the law of contract or of trust might afford the prudent man sufficient safeguards against the improper circulation of his portrait’.⁵² Perhaps a homosocial bond between the photographer and a ‘prudent man’ would indeed have offered some added protection. However, it is difficult to see how general prudence would have helped a young woman like Miss Pollard avoid having her image pilfered for an advertisement.

Victorian photography studios functioned on what media scholar danah boyd has termed ‘a widespread public-by-default, private-through-effort mentality’.⁵³ Highlighting continuities between the situation faced by Notman’s clients and contemporary social media users, boyd has argued that ‘controlling a social situation in order to achieve privacy is neither easy nor obvious. It requires power, knowledge, and skills’.⁵⁴ Not all of Notman’s sitters had the power and social skills to dictate how his business operated even in relation to their paid portraits and it is likely that many clients did not really understand how that business operated or how their images would be used. But it is notable that the restrictions discussed here were issued by two wealthy women, members of the clergy and a physician, all groups with social capital and knowledge in Victorian Montreal. In an evolving media landscape, it can be hard to grasp the systems and to imagine potential audiences. While modern histories of privacy have often centred on government surveillance and specific high-profile scandals, historian Sarah Igo argues that if we want to understand the social meaning of privacy then we need to attend to the ‘daily negotiations’ by citizens/consumers around privacy.⁵⁵ In short, navigating the boundary between public visibility and private life is an everyday practice as well as a key aspect of the modern condition. The privacy concerns expressed by Notman’s clients reflect this dualism. Their concerns were both individual and structural, shaped by a growing, if limited, understanding of the system in which portraits were made, stored and marketed.

In her history of privacy in America from the end of the nineteenth century, Igo observed that difficulty in defining the term ‘privacy’ is partly historical: ‘in certain eras, privacy debates focused more intently on incursions into private space; in other periods, on violations of individual bodies, psyches, data, or peace of mind’.⁵⁶ To this astute observation, we would add that privacy concerns also emerge in cycles. Anxieties about commercial management and potential profit from photographs of private citizens surfaced both in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and peaked again in the early twenty-first century. In turn, the domination of tech conglomerates like Facebook have helped us to see the privacy risks around photography outside, if not completely removed from, the risks posed by government archives and surveillance. Using these insights to guide future research can also help us better understand the history of privacy and its development in relation to photography, in particular the power of accumulated databases of images and related information over the long history of photography.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors would like to thank Hélène Samson and Nora Hague, both recently retired from the McCord Museum in Montreal, for generously sharing their expertise and deep experience of the Notman Archive.

Notes

1 – Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, ‘The Right to Privacy’, Harvard Law Review, 4, no. 5 (15 December 1890), 193–220 (195).

2 – On the history of privacy, see Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Jessica Lake, The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and Megan Richardson, The Right to Privacy: Origins and Influence of a Nineteenth-Century Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Visual culture scholars who discuss privacy follow this same timeline focusing on the late nineteenth century onwards; see Tom Gunning, ‘Embarrassing Evidence: The Detective Camera and the Documentary Impulse’, in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 46–64; and Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

3 – J. A. J[ameson], ‘The Legal Relations of Photographs’, American Law Register, 17, no. 1 (January 1869), 1–8; ‘Portrait Right’, Washington Law Reporter, 12 (1884), 353; and ‘Current Topics’, Solicitors Journal & Reporter, 24, no. 4 (October 18, 1879), 947.

4 – Brandeis and Warren, ‘Right to Privacy’, 208–09; and Charles Simon, ‘Torts – Invasion of Privacy – Unauthorized Use of Photograph’, DePaul Law Review, 16 (1966), 255–60.

5 – Brandeis and Warren, ‘Right to Privacy’, 197.

6 – On the historical importance of considering photography as a business, see Steve Edwards, ‘Why Pictures? From Art History to Business History and Back Again’, History of Photography, 44, no. 1 (2020), 3–15.

7 – Brandeis and Warren, ‘Right to Privacy’, 195.

8 – Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 7.

9 – Eden Osucha, ‘The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law’, Camera Obscura, 24, no. 1 (2009), 67–107 (79).

10 – See Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (1986), 3–64; Lily Cho, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021); and John Tagg, ‘The Archiving Machine; or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet’, Grey Room, 47 (2012), 24–37.

11 – Shirley Teresa Wajda, ‘The Commercial Photographic Parlor, 1839–1889’, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 6 (1997), 216–30 (218).

12 – Marcus Aurelias Root, ‘Some Thoughts on the Fitting Up of Daguerrean Rooms’, Photographic Art Journal, 5 (June 1853), 361–64 (363).

13 – Katherine C. Grier, Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 16.

14 – Montreal Business Sketches quoted in Stanley G. Triggs, William Notman’s Studio (Montreal: McCord Museum of Canadian History, 1992), 49.

15 – Marcus Aurelias Root, The Camera and The Pencil or the Heliographic Art, Its Theory and Practice in all its Various Branches (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1864), 47.

16 – Triggs, William Notman’s Studio, 51.

17 – Andrea Kaston Tange, ‘Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing the Victorian Middle Class Through Images of Home’, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 277–301 (279).

18 – Ibid., 283.

19 – Colleen Skidmore, ‘Women Workers in Notman’s Studio: Young Ladies of the Printing Room’, History of Photography, 20, no. 2 (1996), 122–28 (125).

20 – Ibid., 125.

21 – Wajda, ‘Commercial Photographic Parlor’, 223.

22 – Louis Daguerre, ‘Daguerreotype’ [c. 1838], Image: The Journal of the George Eastman House of Photography, 1 (1959), 32–36 (36).

23 – Rene Bache, ‘A Disreputable Business’, St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, 10, no. 6 (June 1892), 220–21 (220).

24 – Ibid., 220.

25 – ‘Letter from Mrs. Hawes to Mr. Southworth’, (Boston, MA: George Eastman House Archives, 24 August 1849), 7–54.

26 – ‘Caution to Photographic Artists’, Photographic News, 2, no. 31 (8 April 1859), 49–50.

27 – Nathalie Houle, ‘Chronology’, in Notman: Visionary Photographer, ed. by Hélène Samson and Suzanne Sauvage (Paris: McCord Museum, Montreal and Editions Hazan, 2016), 20–21.

28 – ‘Talk in the Studio: Canadian Photographer’, Photographic News, 5, no. 152 (4 August 1861), 370. Notman continued to send portraits to the editors; see ‘Photographic Portraits by William Notman of Montreal’, Photographic News, 7, no. 520 (21 August 1868), 399.

29 – See Nora Hague, ‘Notman’s Numbers’, in Notman, ed. by Samson and Sauvage, 224–29.

30 – Notman’s studio suffered a major fire in 1908, but only the negatives and records from that year were lost.

31 – See The Edward Reeves Archive Project, 〈http://www.reevesarchive.co.uk/〉. Hélène Samson notes that Notman’s ‘enduring reputation can be explained in part by the system that was used to classify and index the production of the Montreal studio’. See ‘Introduction’, in Notman, ed. by Samson and Sauvage, 24–27 (25).

32 – David J. Siepp, The Right to Privacy in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Program on Information Resources Policy, 1978), 56, 〈http://pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/seipp/seipp-p78-3.pdf〉. Simone Natale makes a related argument about interconnected media; see Simone Natale, ‘Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Photography, 36, no. 4 (2012), 451–56.

33 – Siepp, Right to Privacy, 58.

34 – Triggs, William Notman’s Studio, 57.

35 – J[ameson], ‘Legal Relations’, 8.

36 – A[ndrew] Wynter, ‘Cartes De Visite’, American Journal of Photography, 4, no. 21 (1 April 1862), 481–86 (485).

37 – Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Elizabeth Thompson and “Patsy” Cornwallis West as Carte-de-Visite Celebrities’, History of Photography, 35, no. 3 (2011), 240–49 (245).

38 – J[ameson], ‘Legal Relations’, 8.

39 – See Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype, 1839–1851’ [1989], in Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 3–25.

40 – J. J. Curran, ed., Golden Jubilee of St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum – The Work of Fathers Dowd, O’Brien and Quinlivan (Montreal: Printed by the Catholic Institution for Deaf Mutes, 1902), 86–89; see also Camille Harrigan, ‘Storied Stones: St. Patrick’s Basilica: History, Identity, and Memory in Irish Montréal, 1847-2017’ (unpublished MA thesis, Concordia University, 2018), 〈https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983849/1/Harrigan_MA_F2018.pdf〉.

41 – See Reverend Quinlivan, 1893, McCord Museum, Montreal, Quebec, accession number II99918.1.

42 – In July 1863, the Maison Livernois offered a Liste de portraits-cartes pour albums de membres du clergé; see Michel Lessard, The Livernois Photographers (Québec: Musée du Québec, 1987), 27.

43 – On norms around the display of women’s legs in the mid nineteenth century and the power of transgressing, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Legs of the Countess’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), 65–108.

44 – Staff left handwritten paper slips in the Picture Books; these are no longer extant but were catalogued in 1970–71 and later transcribed into the McCord database.

45 – For more on the American context, see Heidi Katherine Knoblauch, ‘Patients’ Posture: Medical Photography, Collecting, and Privacy, 1862–1962’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, Yale University, 2015), ProQuest Dissertations and Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: the Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

46 – Personal correspondence with Hélène Samson.

47 – Personal correspondence with Nora Hague.

48 – See Simon Joyce, ‘Two Women Walk into a Theatre Bathroom: The Fanny and Stella

Trials as Trans Narrative’, Victorian Review, 44, no. 1 (spring 2018), 83–98.

49 – Hélène Samson, ‘Not to be Put in: Looking Further into the Notman Collection’, unpublished lecture delivered at Concordia University, Montreal, 18 November 2016. Samson confirms that the hat pictured in the two portraits was not among the props Notman’s studio provided to sitters.

50 – Franny Winchester Hotchkiss, Winchester Notes (New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1912), 120.

51 – ‘Austin, Mrs. W.B, Windsor Hotel, Dominion Square’, in Lovell’s Montreal Directory (Montreal: J. Lovell, 1888), 294.

52 – Brandeis and Warren, ‘Right to Privacy’, 211.

53 – danah boyd, It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 62.

54 – Ibid., 60

55 – Igo, Known Citizen, 15.

56 – Ibid., 11.