“Look Pleasant, Please” Captures a Metropolis Studying to See Itself

Before there was photograph, there was paint. So “Look Pleasant, Please: Early Portrait Photography in New Bedford,” the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s present exhibition, begins with an oil portray. It’s Rembrandt Peale’s 1828 portrait of William Rotch Jr., a New Bedford whaling magnate whose wealth was sufficient to afford this rendition in three-quarter profile. Each brushstroke is a alternative, and Peale selected (or possibly fairly was instructed?) to assemble Rotch’s character by wizened strains of wrinkles, folds of ironed cloth, and a dot of twinkling white to enliven every eye. 

The New Bedford whaling business, which Rotch captained, fairly actually stored the lights on for nineteenth-century Americans, however because the century progressed and new applied sciences crossed the Atlantic, Americans shortly grew to become enamored with the enterprise of capturing mild as an alternative of simply creating it. By 1841, the daguerreotype arrived in New Bedford from France, and a brand new picture of the world and the individuals inhabiting it appeared. Pulling from the museum’s assortment of over 200,000 photographic objects, “Look Pleasant, Please” presents the historical past of American portrait images from 1839 to 1900, tracing the event of photographic expertise alongside the event of the American particular person and what it means to look nice.

Just earlier than Peale’s portrait of Rotch hold three smaller portraits of the famed abolitionist, photographic theorist, and (on the time in 1894) essentially the most photographed man in America, Frederick Douglass. Douglass’s portrait was shot by James E. Reed, a Black photographer who ran a studio in New Bedford alongside Phineas C. Headley. Instead of the time consuming, stroke-by-stroke building by Peale, Reed’s photograph captures Douglass in a precise immediate. Framed by a cloud of white hair, eyes glancing off to the correct of the digicam, Douglass is proven in the identical model as Rotch: a three-quarter profile buttoned as much as the collar. But on this case, fairly than presenting the portrait as a collection of decisions made by the artist’s hand, Douglass is captured as he may seem in the true world—that actual world bypassing the visible tradition of stereotype and caricature imposed on Blackness within the nineteenth century. The {photograph} each cheapens and clarifies the method of picture creation; now Douglass can seem to us as he did in that actual second, a second the place, simply so subtly, he begins to smile. 

Because of their growing availability and accessibility, pictures quickly got here to be recognized not simply as pictures however as objects to be purchased, gifted, and shared. One instance is Portrait of Richard Tobias Greene (ca. 1845/46), which Greene gave to his shipmate Herman Melville after they disembarked the Acushnet as a memento of their time collectively. Printed on a silver-polished copper plate, the daguerreotype shimmers with element, capturing the dear realism of sight. These portrait pictures and the supplies which comprise them did such a very good job of recreating actuality, they have been typically handled as stand-ins for the bodily presence of the sitters. Post-mortem images grew to become widespread observe, leaving households with a picture to mourn after its sitter had gone. Portrait of a Deceased Child (ca. 1850) reveals a toddler shortly after her loss of life, eyes solemnly closed. A splash of rosy blush colours her face, artificially added afterward as a haunting try and protect not her life itself, however what it regarded wish to the remainder of the world.

What “Look Pleasant, Please” does so nicely is discover the lengths New Bedford residents went by to assemble this picture of life. And although the act of images inherently freezes life at a given second, there are hints on the squirmy, unstoppable length of life all through the gallery. One part of the present includes a studio chair, a lab coat, and backdrops all utilized by Reed in his theatrical recreations of life. Among these is Reed Family Portrait (1897), wherein Reed and his spouse sit with two kids perched on their knees. Two negatives are proven as a diptych: The left picture is that of a formally posed household, kids wanting docile and fogeys wanting affected person, all with stern, sealed lips and their finest Sunday garments. They actually look nice; you’ll be able to think about the tense, silent second whereas the photograph was taken, life dashing to a halt in order that it may very well be caught within the damaging. But on the correct, life slips by: Fidgety kids schmear throughout the body, the dad and mom’ endurance blurring into what should’ve been a repeated reprimand. The fastidiously calibrated pictures of 4 figures dissolve into the joyful, rambunctious, tolerant dynamics of a younger household simply making an attempt to sit down properly for a photograph, please! In presenting what may’ve been thought-about on the time a waste of movie, “Look Pleasant, Please” reveals not simply portraits, however the meticulous work that goes into creating a picture of the self. Work which, regardless of the century, feels enduringly human.

Soon sufficient, everybody within the metropolis had their image taken, and the event of cheaper alternate options meant most individuals might afford it. For a rich port metropolis like New Bedford within the late nineteenth century, the inflow of immigrants to assist the rising textile business meant an inflow of recent topics to {photograph}. Carte-de-visites and cupboard playing cards, which have been printed on paper as an alternative of treasured metallic plates, grew in recognition alongside this rising immigrant group. The Goulart brothers arrived from the island of Faial within the Portuguese Azores, arrange a images studio in New Bedford, and gave immigrants the chance to share a glimpse of life throughout the ocean. Photography couldn’t shrink the gap, but it surely might present an alternate. Like stereoscopy—an early try at digital actuality—examples of that are on view within the exhibition alongside photographs of distant landscapes that collectively engulf the viewer, it manufactures a glimpse of house.

It’s within the cupboard playing cards by Reed that a few of the compelling pictures of nineteenth-century New Bedford seem. The present options his window shows, which collage numerous cupboard playing cards to persuade potential shoppers (and one-hundred-and-fifty years later, gallery guests) of his dexterous talents as a photographer. Prefaced by the squirming, youthful pleasure of Reed’s household photographs, these window shows teem with life. That life appears to be like like infants smiling, infants crawling, standing, pouting, and laughing; newlyweds posed elbow to elbow; altar boys wanting up from a missal; dollops of perfumed hair and curved necks; communion robes and cheek-to-cheek portraits with grandmothers; arms round a rolled diploma; many obedient canines and extra obedient mustaches; elders bespectacled and bonneted; beards hanging to bellybuttons; and eyes mounted, inflexible with the stress of wanting nice, into the lens of the digicam. 

By 1888, Kodak launched the field digicam which allowed anybody to shoot a roll of movie and ship it off for improvement. Now, images strikes from the well-calibrated lights and lenses of the studio to the keen arms of amateurs. The remaining room of the present sends images off into the world, the place the strict formulation of portraiture breaks away to the candid, erratic activity of capturing life. Photo of a person Running (undated) by New Bedford photographer Henry Dudley Prescott catches the acceleration of life into the 20th century. A person veers throughout the composition, pitched ahead in a brisk tempo, the body of the photograph showing to slip together with him. And in his arms, a field digicam, dashing to {photograph} no matter waits past the body.

“Look Pleasant, Please: Early Portrait Photography in New Bedford” is on view by September 7, 2026, on the New Bedford Whaling Museum, 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, MA