Veiling the Mechanical Eye: Antoine Claudet and the Spectacle of Photography in Victorian London

In 1851, the French photographic journal La Lumière published a lengthy article under the headline ̳Heliography on Metal Plates: A Visit to Mr. Claudet‘. 1 In a detailed description of the daguerreotype technique as practiced by Antoine François Jean Claudet, London correspondent F. A. de La Rivière hailed the professional longevity of this French-born portrait photographer and inventor who had immigrated to Britain in 1827. Claudet had just opened his third and final studio, at the height of his career, on Regent Street in the British capital. ̳Throughout the twelve years that he‘s made his art the occupation of his days and nights,‘ La Rivière exulted, ̳[Claudet] has maintained all the fervour of the first day‘. 2

From nuanced advertising and product packaging to high-profile locations and elaborate interior decoration, Claudet's tactics commingled contemporary trends in artistic practice, popular entertainment and high-end retailing for manufactured goods. Ironically, in consistently maintaining close contact with London sites of technological entertainment, his studios inscribed the photograph more profoundly within the wider culture of the machine precisely to deflect the client's attention from photography's own mechanics. His navigation of London's competing spectaclesscientific, aesthetic and consumeristand his ultimate professional success underscore the difficulties and rewards of balancing art and technology in the increasingly consumer-driven urban societies of mid-nineteenth-century Europe.
A comparison with the marketing tactics of portrait painting throws Claudet's precarious situation into sharper relief. As Julie Codell stresses in her study of Victorian artistic practices, in the studios of successful portrait painters ‗the artist's exertion was displayed in the studio's piles of works, not on the artist's body, making studios sites of the exchange of material, cultural and social capital'. 5 . 2). As the daguerreotype is a unique object, these portraits often would be converted into engravings for wider distribution. 6 Photography's mechanisation also minimised the photographer's exertion more pronouncedly than the painter's, yet the necessary presence of the camera and other equipment risked implying a concomitant reduction in creative human intervention.
Indeed, the common designation of photographers at that time as ‗operators' reflected and contributed to such a perception.
Because the limits between artist and machine were hard to discern, the relationship between photographer and client was more complex than that of painter and sitter. The photographer's eventual exertion (e.g. buffing, sensitising and developing plates) could be construed as labour servile to the camera apparatus. Claudet's studio presentation eventually minimised the client's awareness both of this labour and of the camera, surrounding them with visual references to the other arts, their practice and their history. In Claudet's business, the act of photographylike that of society paintingbecame secondary to its attendant spectacle, but here the spectacle grew more and more dependent on paintings, sculpture and architecture to frame not only social relations but the act of imagemaking itself. 7 Additionally, while painters relocated to the suburbs after midcentury and ‗plowed their incomes into fine houses and studios to impress clients, especially upper-class sitters', Claudet and his rivals remained in the retail heart of the city. 8 If painters sought to distance their products from the trades and wares of the urban marketplace, photographers like Claudet realised the benefits of closely associating their businesses with the rising interest in entertainment, consumer goods and the culture of city shopping. Even while constructing a discourse of exclusivity and aesthetic quality, Claudet seems to have understood the lure of impulse in shopping, as well as the attraction of photography as an exercise inand In particular, many considered its accuracy of detail an insurmountable flaw, given the machine's inability to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. The daguerreotype was therefore ontologically devoid of the aesthetic potential of painting, as an  posturing. 18 While the Adelaide Gallery's fame and popularity (it regularly appeared in guides to the capital) may have offered Claudet early publicity for his studio, its emphasis on technological process and scientific entertainment jeopardised any aesthetic pretensions for the photograph. While Claudet's business soon adopted the elaborately painted backdrops and hand-tinting found in miniature portraiture, in 1841 his studio was just one of the many curiosities at the Adelaide Gallery.
Advertising in the Athenaeum a few weeks after opening, the studio announced ‗taking portraits and groups of figures at this Institution' by Claudet's ‗improved plan' and ‗new application', yet the listing included the Adelaide Gallery's other attractionsfrom the microscope to the steam gun and the electric eeland concluded with the Adelaide's opening hours and admission prices. 19 Claudet's  4). 28  Amidst these developments, Claudet opened a second, more spacious studio The imposing neo-classical Colosseum opened in 1829 as a gathering place for the well-to-do (see fig. 5). Intended to offer ‗the advantages of a club-house in town with the attractions of a rural villa', 33 it was a moneymaking venture best known for its enormous panorama of the London skyline. 34 The attendant four acres of  and drapery below were works for sale ‗from the chisels of some of the most eminent foreign and British sculptors'. 36 The Cyclorama was similarly decorated, with paintings copying some of the best known classical subjects. 37 The artificial ruins outside and the ever-popular panorama completed the visit.
The Colosseum's attractions surrounded Claudet's studio with elements meant to engage nineteenth-century ideas of beauty and the sublime through elaborate illusionistic techniques. These necessarily relied on technological advances and mechanical principles but, unlike the Adelaide, the mechanisms were hidden away, allowing only ‗the action of invisible machinery' to surface in effects of lighting, sound and movement. 38 The centre of the experience was the dizzying panorama, which on first impact was meant to ‗perplex and confuse the eye and mind'. 39  If the Colosseum made claims to the ‗surprising, original, and astonishing' just as the Adelaide Gallery had, it eschewed scientific or even pedagogical emphasis in order to encourage those sensorial immersions that lent themselves to aesthetic contemplation. 41 It radically transformed the terms of the aesthetic, finding it not only in its contrivances of Nature, but even more potently in the surrounding metropolis. As the Colosseum's 1829 guide declared: The ocean viewed from the summit of a high cliffa boundless expanse of country, when seen from the apex of a lofty mountain, are unquestionably objects of grandeur and sublimity; but both are dull and vacant, when compared with the astounding view of London from the top of St. Paul's. This exhibits to the eye and mind, the dwellings of nearly a million and a half of human beings [...] and the manifold pursuits, occupations and powers of its ever-active, ever-changing inhabitants. 42 In substituting the nearly unfathomable urban sprawl of the British capital for atmosphere of that locality being free from smoke will greatly facilitate the photographic operations', his reference to photography served to suggest more agreeable surroundings and respite from the city's air pollution. 46 Claudet's Colosseum studio helped deflect attention from the production of the photograph by making the client appear the centre of the spectacle from the moment he or she walked through the door. Whether it was the width of the staircase or the size of the rooms, the setting allowed more opportunity for viewing and being viewed while creating a sentient experience, from the easy climb to the clean air.
‗The whole has been calculated for the greatest convenience of visitors', his advertisements insisted, placing emphasis on the clientand the client's body -rather than production, much in the way that society painters had at that time. 47 The specific details of Claudet's Colosseum advertisingreaching beyond the more general terms of ‗convenient', ‗comfortable' and ‗elegant' that he employed to promote his Adelaide Gallery addresssuggested this studio was a Athens, Rome, Paris and London. 57 Upon entering from the street, the gallery's right wall bore a mural of the is also worth considering'. 63 In this environment, the photographer could mimic the society painter. Image production became a social visit, steeped in ideas of pleasure and beauty while seemingly detached from labour and commerce.
Claudet also situated his darkrooms at the remote edge of the building, enclosing processing equipment in shuttered cabinets with slots for manipulating the plates during development and fixing. 64 These modifications were primarily safety measures, yet they also demonstrate to what extent those operations that were once highlighted as the essential rituals of photography in the lecture rooms of the Adelaide Gallery (or gleaned from a visit to the small rooftop studio there) were hereafter thoroughly expunged from the public's experience. The client's arrival in front of the concealed camera was the final step of a visual progression that so thoroughly intertwined photography and painting as to suggest they were one and the same. Understanding photography now meant situating it within wider traditions of image-making rather than appreciating the specificity of its production. The heavy reliance on concealment and illusion, drawn in part from Claudet's Colosseum stay and far removed from the Adelaide Gallery's efforts to lay technology bare, suggests Claudet understood that the process of spectacle, rather than the spectacle of process, was critical to the photographic portrait's viability as an aesthetic object.
By these actions, Claudet not only strove to situate the photograph within a wider artistic tradition, but to evoke nothing short of an aura for the photographic object. 65 He replaced any understanding of mechanical process with a revisionist narrative of artistic ritual embedded within the fine arts while nonetheless appealing to rising commodity desires. In overlapping the photographic object and the client's body at the centre of a spectacle of luxury that began with the window displays of Regent Street and continued into the studio's upper rooms, Claudet's tactics reveal an understanding that the desirability of the object could be enhanced by underplaying its mechanical aspects and reducing awareness of the machine at the centre of the event. Passing from the daguerreotype to paper print formats as they became the norm in the late-1850s, Claudet's Regent Street studio had supplanted the awkward public positioning of photography as technological process with the perhaps more precarious placement of the photograph as somewhere between art and commodity. Its principal process was now social, multiplying the object's uses and meanings in the cultural sphere. The photograph no longer simply denoted the photographic process, but became an object with complex connotations in societal discourse, as one spectacle effectively replaced another.