2013
Erin K. Pauwels
- Doctoral Candidate
- Indiana University Bloomington
![Picture of Erin K. Pauwels](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/C40AAF94-3AB3-E211-B90D-000C29A3451A.jpg)
Abstract
This dissertation explores the photographer Napoleon Sarony’s largely overlooked role in shaping American visual culture from the late 1860s to 1900, and proposes the concept of ‘living pictures’ as a framework for understanding the complex fusion of art and performance that constituted a central strand of artistic production in the late nineteenth-century United States. During this time, living pictures connoted a number of vivid modes of representation, including dramatic portraiture, tableaux vivants, and the display of motion pictures. This study further employs the term to describe the mannered mode of self-performance characteristic of Gilded Age American artists, and the eager acceptance of theater’s comingling of fact and fiction that informed contemporary viewing practices.