Pre-Pixel Portraits

An exhibition of College class albums

James M. Freeman wrote in his diary about having his picture taken in 1859
A group portrait of the College housekeepers, then known as “goodies”
Aaron Molyneaux Hewlett from an album image, with gear, was an instructor and curator of the Harvard Gymnasium, 1859-1871, and thus one of the first African-American faculty members.
Gore Hall, the new library built in 1844

Long before selfies, Harvard graduates had a powerful instinct to preserve their class identities in portraiture: 85 of the 88 members of the College class of 1852 traveled to Boston to sit for daguerreotypes, unique images captured on silvered copper plates, collected in a wooden chest (see “Class Act,” Treasure, May-June 1999). That first class “album” and successor albums of paper-based salt prints, through 1864, and the 1865 images using a new technology, are explored in “We Carry with Us Precious Memorials,” on display in Pusey Library through June 29. (The title derives from the heartfelt sentiments of Charles Carroll Tower, A.B. 1855, reflecting on “college associations.”)

Although meant to preserve cherished moments, the albums also reflect a period of dynamic change. The year after the inaugural daguerreotypes, photographer John Adams Whipple improved upon fibrous salt prints (which enabled multiple copies of an image) by coating glass-plate negatives with albumen, from hens’ eggs, and honey: the “crystalotype.”

At once, the album morphed to paper form: small notebooks, initially, that expanded quickly to massive tomes, finely bound, embossed, with marbled endpapers and gilt edges, to which classmates added successor images later in life. They were also embellished with prints of Harvard buildings like Gore Hall, the new library built in 1844 (shown left); professors (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes); and such figures as the “goodies,” as housekeepers were then known (above). Happily, the Harvard Archives, created in 1851, was there to receive the first albums.

Harvard itself boomed, with Gore Hall and other new buildings like the College Observatory—the fruits of that era’s philanthropy. Entrepreneurship blossomed, too, as George Kendall Warren, the commercial photographer who made the portraits from 1861 on, distributed order forms for customizable albums, and peddled his services to Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Yale.

The albums show the College also attracting students from beyond New England—and the world, in turn, intruding on Cambridge. Alongside the baby-faced William Yates Gholson, of Cincinnati, in the 1861 album, a later correspondent wrote, “killed at Hartsville Tenn. 7th Dec 1862 aged 21,” leading a Union infantry unit.

Beyond its human interest, the exhibition, produced by the Archives and the Weissman Preservation Center, documents photographic technology evolving, and is part of the center’s effort to preserve and enhance Harvard’s holdings of salt prints.

The class of 2015 will be amazed not only by the albumen, but also by the pervasive treacle, as in this Senior Dinner Poem, cited from the Harvard Advocate of January 14, 1889: “Just hand me my album, the class one, my dear, It’s a long time since I’ve seen the old faces, I fear. My honest old class-mates, dispersed far and wide, Drifting ever apart on eternity’s tide.” Pixel self-portraitists may not match what the exhibition organizers call the “remarkable detail and tonal rendition” of these formal 1800s images—but can surely improve upon the poetry.

Click here for the May-June 2015 issue table of contents

Read more articles by John S. Rosenberg

You might also like

We Were Students Once...

Young love: the poem, plus enduring lessons from a public-health pioneer

Alice Hamilton

Brief life of a public-health pioneer and reformer: 1869-1970

The Unruly Academy

President emeritus Neil L. Rudenstine on changes in the academy and society that made universities more contentious—and diminished support for humane learning

Most popular

Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?

How to reform capitalism to confront climate change and extreme inequality, with economist and McArthur University Professor Rebecca Henderson

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Explore More From Current Issue

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Discipline and Financial Aid

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences discusses classroom conversations, boosts aid, addresses discipline—and faces austerity

Chinese Immigrants in Early America

Michael Luo ’98 on the first great wave of immigration—and of nativist anti-immigrant reaction

Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams at the Peabody Essex Museum

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum