Allan Appel Photo
Before these little tintypes ended up on Lisa Kereszi’s ears, they were produced in great quantity by scores of portrait photographers who clustered on Chapel Street in the second half of the 19th Century.
They’ve come back to life in a delicate and moving show of early portrait photography in New Haven that Kereszi has curated at the Institute Library, a location that was smack dab in the middle of all that glass plate photo action when the current building opened for business in 1878.
The show runs through May 11 in the third-floor gallery space.
It’s delicate not only because most of the subjects are anonymous and we wonder instantly who they were; but also because Kereszi, a practicing photographer and teacher at the Yale School of Art, has arranged each of the small photos, known as carte de visite and in their later and larger form cabinet cards, on white filaments that hang from the ceiling in two rows.
Not only does life hang by the proverbial thread, or filament. Memory does as well.
In brief remarks to a dozen people who attended the opening reception on Saturday, Kereszi said the virtual “street” the photos evoke is Chapel Street, right out the window, with the busy practitioners of the new technology arranged in geographical order based on her research of the studios’ addresses.
The popularity of the craft derived in part from the sense or hope that it defeated, or at least transcended, death, by leaving a photographic calling card afterwards at an affordable price.
The tintypes, negatives printed literally on thin pieces of tin, sold for about four for a quarter, she said.
The product of a suburban Philadelphia childhood, daughter to a mom who ran antique shops and dad a scrap business, Kereszi prowls flea markets, photo fairs, and ebay. She calls herself a “scavenger by birth.”
The little ghosts are all from her private and growing collection, as she tries to get samples from the approximately 90 portrait photographers who worked on Chapel between roughly 1860 to 1899. She’s up to about 50. [They were on other streets in town, but Chapel was ground zero for photo portraiture.]
A 19th Century Facebook
“These were carte de visite. When you went to visit you left one, and then you collected them in an album, not just family, but friends. I don’t think we’ve changed [all that much.] People [today] use Facebook. [There] you collect all your friends,” she said.
In addition to the carte de visite of individuals, couples, and families, the early photographers specialized in theatrical poses, red letter events, shots of members of societies, and, in one particularly moving and eerie genre that the Victorians seemed obsessed by, post-mortem images of dead children.
Kereszi with a cabinet card hanging in foreground, and a glass plate negative behind.
Major Moulthrop, whose studio was in the Phoenix Building, on the site of ArtSpace‘s current Lot, did this image of an identified child.
“You’d have it made as if they were sleeping” said Keresezi. These types of photos are called “sleeping beauties.”
Kereszi tracked down Moulthrop’s own obituary. She found it intriguing that when he died in 1890, at age 85, he was cited as the city’s most venerable portraitist and longest in the business of any man alive in town.
“A lot of photographers did die young because of the chemistry,” she said.
In Moulthrop’s case he was old enough to have learned photography’s earliest format, daguerreotype, which involved making a negative on a metal plate using poisonous mercury.
On a recent foray to a photo fair in New York, Kereszi picked up work by the Pach Brothers, F.D. Bradley, and Moulthrop. That brings her representation of the city’s photographers to well over 50 of the photographers who practiced — and sometimes painted or added pastel to your photo — along Chapel between 1860 at the end of the century.
When she nabs all 90, she said, she will donate the entire collection to the New Haven Museum. In the meantime, these ghosts are very much worth encountering, during Institute Library hours.
