11.1. Huckleberry Charlie at Pine Camp, New York, ca. 1908. Photo by Henry Beach.
Conclusion
Just a Beginning
In this book, I have shown you amusement world freak photographs, beggars’ cards, poster children, asylum representations, art photography, advertisements, clinical photographs, movie stills, ordinary family and citizen photography, and more. I have discussed and demonstrated an approach to analyzing pictures of people with disabilities that places the images in the context of the times and places of those who produced those images. As I have emphasized, the producers operated with a set of assumptions that were part of the organizations and institutions to which they belonged. The images were an outgrowth of their social location.
My goal was not to cover every genre of disability photography or all the permutations within the genres discussed. I have only started the job of systematically scrutinizing the wide range of historical photographs of people with disabilities. As I did the research for and wrote this book, other genres of disability photographs that I had overlooked became apparent. Either I did not have enough images to explore these topics, or in my judgment they were not important enough to warrant a full chapter. Before I close, I introduce some of these genres to you. In addition, there are images that I came across that were too complex to place in genres. I discuss some of these and warn readers to be cautious in analyzing how people with disabilities are pictured.
TOWN CHARACTER PORTRAITS
I came across images that at first glance looked like begging cards. The subjects of these images did not strike poses that evoke pity as those pictured in begging cards would do. On closer inspection, they suggest another genre of disability photography, “town characters.” The people in the images I am referring to were considered peculiar by others in their community. Although today they would likely be referred to as “disabled,” they were not seen that way when the pictures were taken. In most cases, they did not use the images to solicit money; rather, the photographers who took the portraits most likely sold them for their own profit.
The people I am referring to were quasi-celebrities in their communities. They could be seen about town. Some had personalities that drew attention. Some lacked the basic skills needed to function fully as ordinary community members. Although they were viewed as peculiar and in most cases as inferior, they were embraced as “one of us.” They were protected from those who might do them harm and had a special role and position in the town’s hierarchy.
Most embraced the role of local character, but some seemed to be oblivious of their status. The photo portraits taken of them by local photographers were sold to tourists as souvenirs and to local citizens as keepsakes.11 More integrated into local communities than freaks, more financially independent than beggars, but not exactly fully normal community members, town characters deserve to be singled out for study.
I came across a number of portraits of “local characters” featured on photographic postcards who would be labeled mentally ill today. One such person was an upstate New Yorker who was the subject of a number of real photo postcards, Huckleberry Charlie (Bogdan 2003, 184). Charlie was a common sight in the northern reaches of New York State’s Adirondack region (illus. 11.1). His full name was Charles R. Sherman, and he was the son of wealthy parents. Locals were sympathetic to his condition, amused by his antics, and appreciative of the goods he sold. Charlie was a local eccentric who, in addition to his family inheritance, supported himself by selling newspapers and local products such as sauerkraut, horseradish, and, when in season, huckleberries. He was known for his nonsensical, riddlelike talk and for his unconventional dress and song. Locals held mixed opinions about whether he was crazy, intellectually disabled, or just wildly eccentric. In spite of his oddities, he was part of the community. He spent much of his time hanging around Pine Camp, a military training camp that is now the US Army’s Fort Drum.
Another town character, a person who likely had psychiatric problems, was a man whom a photo postcard identifies as “Horace” (illus. 11.2). His portrait is an engrossing studio shot of a person who apparently lived on the streets of a small town in the Midwest. The message on the back of the card suggests that Horace was a regular part of community life, but because of some unknown trangression he became “unwelcome everywhere.” The message goes on to describe Horace as “one of God’s poor under normal creatures” and hopes that the Supreme Power will look after him.
Dan McCuin lived with his brother near Plymouth, Vermont, the town in which President Coolidge was born and raised. McCuin seemed to embrace the title “the Smallest Man in New England.” From descriptions and pictures, it appears that McCuin’s small size was probably caused by an underactive thyroid gland, a condition often associated with developmental disabilities. Individual portraits of him exist, but the most widely circulated images were of McCuin posing with President Coolidge (as in illus. 11.3). The picture here was published in newspapers throughout Vermont, some captioning the shot, “The Biggest Man in the Country Shaking Hands with the Smallest.” The postcards of McCuin with the President were produced by a local photographer and sold by him as well as retailed through stores (Greene 1997, 31).22
A town celebrity of a different sort was “Captain M. V. Bates.” Rather than being small in stature, he was extremely tall—in circus terminology, a giant (Bogdan 1988, 206). Bates’s status as a town celebrity was not just a function of his extreme height. His life as a sideshow exhibit contributed to his local fame. Bates appeared in the sideshows of the most well-known circuses of the time in his preretirement life. He married Ann Swann, another sideshow giant, and they were exhibited as the tallest couple in the world. In the late 1800s, they went in search of a community in which to settle. They bought a farm and became citizens of Seville, Ohio, where they were integrated into the local community. After his wife died, Bates married a daughter of the Seville Baptist Church pastor. Bates is shown in illustration 11.4 attending the fair at Seville a few years before his death in 1919 at eighty-one years of age.
“Town character” Mike Shanahan (illus. 11.5) was a sightless upstate New York regional celebrity who was the subject of at least four different photo postcard views (Bogdan 2003, 50). In each, he is pictured with a guide dog, animals that Shanahan must have trained himself, given that the formal instruction for such animals did not start until World War I. (In the four pictures of him I have seen, two show a black dog, and the other two have a white dog.) In the photo postcard shown here, Shanahan is selling newspapers at the small Benson Mines town railroad station. As he sold papers, he engaged people in small talk. His paper selling was as much a way of socializing around town as it was a way of supporting himself.33 He hung out mainly at the town depot waiting for trains to arrive. The railroad coincides with his biography. Prior to being blinded in a railroad accident, he had worked for the railroad. According to what I could find out, although Shanahan sold newspapers, he himself did not sell his photo postcard portraits. They were available on postcard racks at retails stores in and around the town of Benson Mines.
I have provided only a few examples of local characters here but have not discussed the photography involved. This genre of photography is an example of an unexpected topic emerging from my research. These photographs of “town characters” introduce the important role that people with disabilities played in some communities. The topic is almost absent in discussions of the history of disability.44 These characters provide an interesting example of inclusion, albeit a form that might not be appealing to current advocates of inclusion of people with disabilities into community life (Bogdan 1992).
RELIGION AS A GENRE
A number of chapters in this book touched on religious themes. For example, beggars often framed their appeals with religious arguments, as did some charity campaigns. I have not pursued photos with religious themes or produced by religious organizations as a major genre of disability photography, but the religious mode of presenting people with disability deserves further attention.
The need to explore religious themes was made evident not only in begging and charity photographs, but also in other images I came across. The photo in illustration 11.6 was obviously taken in a home during the Christmas season. The child is in front of a holiday tree with his gifts displayed. It appears to be a standard family holiday view, but in this case the child with a disability, cerebral palsy, is awkwardly sitting in a stiff wooden chair that does not accommodate the contours of his body. His awkward, uncomfortable, unsmiling pose does not correspond with normal family photographic conventions. There is another aspect of the picture that is incongruent with a typical portrait. In addition to gifts, there is a prominently displayed statue of the Virgin Mary standing with the adult Jesus. I have examined many images of typical children in front of the Christmas tree, and I have never seen religious statues such as this one other than in nativity scenes. Were the child’s parents seeking religious comfort, a blessing, by including the statue in the scene? Was its presence linked to the son’s disability? Perhaps the difficulty in assessing the picture is that it may better fit a genre as yet not developed—picturing disability from a religious perspective.
FOREIGN VIEWS
In this book, I have dealt almost exclusively with picturing disability in the United States. By examining a limited number of images produced in Europe, however, I could see that there are differences both in subject matter and in the approach to photographing people with disabilities. What was particularly striking to me was the number of photographs related to disabled veterans injured in World War I.
I have also seen many foreign postcards showing indigenous people from colonized areas of the world. Westerners’ might describe some of the subjects as having disabilities. These postcard views were almost exclusively produced by Western expatriates as souvenirs to send home. Studied now, they might be an important source for understanding how colonized people with disabilities were represented by their colonizers.
One of the most heralded expatriate photographers who worked in Central Africa was Casimir Zagourski (Bassani and Loos 2001; Geary 2002). In addition to photographing people with disabling conditions, he photographed people who because of tribal custom altered their children’s bodies to meet their culture’s beauty standards. In the 1930s, he extensively documented the Mangebetu people of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The canon of beauty for the Mangebetu at the time was elongated skulls. The heads of infants were compressed by means of wrapping thin ropes of raffia around the skull to produce the ideal look in adulthood. The freak show presentations of people with microcephaly, as shown in chapter 2, were derived from stories of the head-binding practices in Africa—for instance, by the Mangebetu. The juxtaposition of these images and the image of the Mangebetu woman in illustration 11.7 provides a vivid contrast of photographic depictions and cultural interpretations of head binding.
Studying the global dimensions of disability photography would help us put American representation of disability in a larger comparative context.
DISABLED VETERANS
I did not purposely seek out images of US disabled war veterans, nor did I come across many in my research. I briefly discussed and exhibited images of World War I veterans in chapter 3 on begging cards and in chapter 4 on charity campaigns.
Chapter 4 also showed US presidents and their wives pictured with soldiers who had been injured during war. These photographs suggest another area of study, however—government publicists’ use of disability photography to promote patriotism during times of war as well as photojournalists’ picturing of soldiers with disabilities.
Illustration 11.8 is of a government-issued printed postcard. It shows men working in an artificial-limb shop in a government hospital toward the end of World War I. The government production of war images that bring attention to soldiers with disabilities is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, such images may evoke patriotic sentiments by graphically showing the government’s efforts to support veterans. On the other hand, they can dramatically show the suffering caused by war and raise questions in people’s minds about war policy.55
Other military images that came to my attention were of Civil War veterans. In some cases, they were participating in Grand Army of the Republic reunions or were residents in old-age homes that served the veterans. Illustration 11.9 shows the interior of such a facility. These images are different from other institution pictures in a number of ways. As you see in the illustration, the men are dressed in their military uniforms. Their identity as soldiers outweighs their status as institution residents. In addition, the picture is not dominated by institution staff or routines of institutional life. There is no attempt to show off the facility, as in other institutional pictures reviewed in chapter 5.
The photo shown in illustration 11.10 was taken outside a Veterans Home. Note the patriotic display of flags. Most of the men in the picture are wearing clothing that relates to their military service. One aspect of this picture that was surprising to me was the integration—both Caucasian and African American men are pictured.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND OTHER NON-CAUCASIAN SUBJECTS
Illustration 11.10 brings up another important topic not addressed in this book—images of African Americans and other non-Caucasian Americans with disabilities. Non-Caucasian Americans are underrepresented in this book and in the images I surveyed. When they do appear, they are in group photos. Illustration 10.37 of the African American mail carrier is the only image in the ordinary photo genre where a non-Caucasian person is the main subject. The only individual portrait of an African American person I came across is shown in illustration 11.11. Pictured is an old man with crutches who appears to be poor. One of his legs has been amputated and the other disabled. To the man’s right is a small garden pick. Because there is no caption or writing on the message side of this photo postcard, it is impossible to determine the context in which it was produced. It is most likely a family portrait.
I do not know why I found so few photographs of non-Caucasian people who have disabilities. Was it the result of the way I searched or where I searched, or were not that many images of non-Caucasians with disabilities produced? Starting early in the twentieth century, photography was widely available to a range of people in the United States. Many portraits of African Americans and other non-Caucasians are available on the antique photograph marketplace, but few of them include people with disabilities. This puzzle needs exploration. Knowing who was and who was not photographed and why is an important aspect of studying photographic images.
There are other genres that need exploration. In the chapter on art photography, documentary photographers were mentioned several times. Their work needs more exploration. In the clinical photo chapter, mug shots were mentioned, and they, too, might be explored. I have also not treated newspaper photographs, specifically those accompanying news stories that feature people with disabilities.
VISUAL CONUNDRUMS: EXPANDING THE ANALYSIS
Most pictures are easy to place into one specific genre or another of disability photography discussed in this book, but others contain peculiarities or visual conundrums. I share some of these more complicated images with you to suggest that the analysis of photographs is complex and to add a cautionary note to those who would develop quick classification schemes and automatically place particular disability images in specific categories. These images also suggest other dimensions of disability photography yet to be explored.
At first glance, illustration 11.12 appears to be of the type we looked at in the chapter about citizen and family. A second look, however, causes reason to question that judgment. There is no caption or writing on the back of the photo postcard to help us put the picture in context. What are we to make of the people in the picture? One is a lanky, disheveled man in dirty, ripped clothing, with sloping shoulders and an expressionless face. Next to him is a well-dressed, somber man sitting in an elaborate wicker chair. Is the standing man mentally disabled? What is the relationship between the two men? Are they relatives? Brothers? Friends? Does the standing man work for the other? Or perhaps the picture is staged—that is, the two were in a theater production and came to a photographer’s studio in costume. The way the disheveled man’s overalls are ripped seems to be too excessive to be natural. But look at his hands. They are working man’s hands, with one finger adorned by a dirty bandage, not the hands of an actor. If we speculate that the two are relatives and the tall man is mentally disabled, how would the photo fit with our discussion of conventions for photographing where disability is trumped by normality?
In illustration 11.13, we see a picture that is difficult to place in any of the schemes presented. Perhaps this image fits best in the genre of local character, but perhaps not. “Blind Willie’s” role as a gospel preacher is apparently central to his status, but the fact that he is blind is highlighted in the presentation of his name. Although not a local character in the sense of the others discussed earlier in this chapter, he was nevertheless a local celebrity beyond his role as an evangelist. I came across a number of images of people with disabilities who were musicians. Perhaps the realm of performers with disabilities deserves further exploration and even a separate genre.
The family portrait in illustration 11.14 provides another puzzle. The composition resembles that of a typical family studio portrait, with the father in the middle sitting in a wheelchair surrounded by children and wife. The children on the right affectionately touch his chair. But at least two aspects of the picture bring into question whether we are looking at a standard family portrait or at one using those conventions for begging. The uniformly glum faces resemble the pity poses seen in the begging cards. The caption reinforces this impression: “Henry Novak—Frozen in Storm of Jan-29-09.” That caption would never appear on a photo taken for personal use or to share with intimates. That caption would be used only if the picture’s purpose was to solicit contributions. The photograph was probably composed using family conventions as a strategy for eliciting sympathy in a begging strategy. Perhaps it belongs in another category that I have not developed, or it might be classified as a mixed-genre photo.
SEVERE AND PROFOUNDLY DISABLED PEOPLE
Although a few of the images in this book are of people who might be classified as having severe impairments, most do not. The reason is simply that I did not find many aside from images in medical textbooks. The only others I have come across are shown in illustrations 11.15 and 11.16. Both appear to fit into the family photograph category, pictures taken of a family member to have as a keepsake or to be placed in a family album. But they are not easy to interpret.
Illustration 11.15 is of a child with very visible hydrocephaly. He appears in the backyard of his home dressed for the photographic occasion with long stockings and an attractive jacket. His hair has been carefully combed, his hands are intertwined, and his small chair is covered with a brightly printed, flowered fabric that fits with the natural foliage surrounding the child. When I first saw the picture, it caught me off guard—I was taken aback and reluctant to engage with it. I had never seen a family photo of a child with such a demonstrable disability. The child’s large head dominated my attention. After I looked at the photo over time, the child’s disability became less dominate. I came to see it as a picture of a child who might never measure up to the common standards of a lovely looking person, but who was loved. It is difficult to interpret the caption “Master Handsome,” but I came to see it as a family member’s sincere expression of both what he or she hoped the boy would be and how he or she saw him. Although his profound disability might grab our eye and dominate our viewing, seeing a photo like this one over time diminishes the salience of the person’s impairment. The changing meaning of the photograph suggests that the context in which the photo is viewed as well as the individual viewer’s evolving relationship with both the subject and the image need to be taken into account in analyzing disability photographs.
I was also reluctant to confront the photo in illustration 11.16, yet I was drawn to it. It is difficult to understand the meaning of this photo postcard to those who took it and kept it. The image is of a person with a profound disability, a fragile young man with emaciated body. He is with a woman much older than he, his mother or a caretaker. Note the body language. She sits close to him, with her arm touching his head. For me, the photograph illustrates the power of an image to pose an unsolvable mystery while at the same time drawing the viewer into an attempt to get to the bottom of understanding the human condition. It demonstrates how photographs can capture the subject as well as the viewer.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My goal for this book was to present disability photographs from the 1860s to the early 1970s in a way that showed how they fit into the lives of those who produced them. I have accomplished this objective in part. Each chapter looks at depictions of disability in terms of the context that generated them, but the analysis has stayed closer to the photos and their producers than some might like. The larger social forces that shaped these images have not been examined. The evolution of human services and capitalism in the United States and the relationship between the private sector’s and the public sector’s responsibilities to people with disabilities needs to be examined to understand the disability charity images as well as other depictions reviewed. The history of the human-service professions in the United States has to be studied in order to understand the production of the images discussed in the chapters on charity, clinical depictions, and asylum photographs. Industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of the urban middle class have to be taken into account to understand the family’s inclusion of people with disabilities in their pictures. Racism, sexism, anti-immigration, and other negative social isms must be examined to understand image production. Development of the advertisement and entertainment industries needs to be understood to grasp what was behind the production of advertising that used people with disabilities and of freak show photographs. Last, how the change in photographic technology influenced the kinds of pictures taken of people with disabilities needs to be explored.
This book has focused on the past. All the images reviewed were in tune with the culture in which they were produced and were a product of the times and transformations taking place then. By analyzing old photographs, my colleagues and I hoped to develop a deeper understanding of the historical experiences of people, both those pictured and the picture takers.
Patterns of representation are easier to identify by looking backward than by looking at present-day representations. Nonetheless, an approach similar to the one used here might be taken in analyzing the images of disability being produced today. Such images would include depictions created by people who are involved in the disability rights movement, in advertising, by various professional organizations, by press photography, and in the personal photographs that grow out of family and other close relationships.
1. In my collecting, I overlooked the range of photos that might fit into a “local characters” genre because I dismissed them as irrelevant to what I considered appropriate for the book. Rethinking these photographs, I see now that local characters were pervasive throughout the United States, especially in small towns and perhaps even in urban areas.
2. McCuin did not seem to use his cards as beggars used their pictures. He lived as part of the community, did odd jobs, and helped his brother around the house.
3. Shanahan received a pension from the railroad company he worked for.
4. The following are exceptions: Groce 1986 and Langness and Levine 1986.
5. See Beth Linker’s fine book War’s Waste (2011) for a discussion of the government’s role in the rehabilitation of World War I veterans, the controversies surrounding its role, and its use of disabled veterans in propaganda.
