Picturing Rooms: Interior Photography 1870-1900

This study examines the meanings of late-nineteenth-century interior photography, a widespread but critically ignored practice. Drawing on collections in the USA, it considers three types of domestic interior photographs: house books or bound series of photographs taken by professional photographers to document the homes of middle- or upper-class families; photographs taken by the inhabitants of homes to document their own interiors; and photographs of college dormitory rooms. Consideration of the role narrative, aesthetics and biography play in the creation and preservation of interior photographs complicates the presumption that interior photography may offer a transparent view of the private spaces of nineteenth-century Americans. Rather, in the context of nineteenth-century cultures that appreciated both the analytical and metonymic values of photographs, views of interiors may be understood as specific kinds of visual rhetoric employed to make sense of domestic spaces over time.