Americana Anonymous

A student-curated exhibition puts the focus on the working poor at the turn of the 20th century.

By Melissa Babcock Johnson, adapted from the Labors of Love exhibition catalog

picture is worth a thousand words, as the old adage goes. But that doesn’t mean it won’t leave you wanting thousands more.

Who are the two men posing together in front of a painted backdrop more than a century ago? Or the young women with the matching ringlets, dresses and boots? How are they related? What happened just after the photo was taken? Just before? What became of them?

“The thing with these pictures is that they’re wonderful [just] as pictures,” says photography historian Lucy Sante, an award-winning author and chronicler of early 20th-century America.

“They’re also teasers on the narrative of what is pictured. You wish you had the novel that accompanies it, the memoir, the text of the life that leads up to this moment and away from it again.”

The photos, printed on a postcard paper stock sometime in the 1910s, are part of the vast personal collection of Natalie M. Curley, a prominent social historian and internationally recognized collector and dealer of vintage amateur photography. This fall, Curley and Sante were the inaugural participants in the Krane Art History Guest Residency Program, supported by a gift from Connecticut College Trustee Jonathan A. Krane ’90. As part of the residency, they worked with students in Professor Christopher B. Steiner’s art history class, “Perspectives on Photography,” to study, interpret and curate American vernacular photographs from Curley’s collection.

Because those photographs have been scattered over time … the stories are difficult to recover and often require speculation and a willingness to dig deeply into American social and cultural history.

Professor Christopher B. Steiner

The result was a student-curated exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century portraits and associated ephemera from Curley’s collection titled Labors of Love: Work, Family and Play in American Folk Photography. The project was on display in the Charles E. Shain Library lobby Nov. 8 through Dec. 15.

“In the late 19th century, somewhere between the invention of the tintype and the invention of roll film, with the cost of equipment and materials consistently dropping, photography finally became a true popular medium, available to all. What had been a difficult, laborious and expensive process was now quick, cheap and easy, so photography became a worldwide craze and everybody had to get in on it, on one side of the camera or the other,” Sante explains.

“Every face could now be photographed, so every face now had to be. Many opportunities for being photographically depicted arose in the course of daily life, and almost everyone seems to have jumped in.”

For the past two decades, Curley has aided museums and archives in rewriting a more inclusive American history by consulting and supplying such images, which capture the unique lived experiences of the working poor—including women, immigrants, and Black and Indigenous people—at a time when industrialization and migration were driving rapid change in the United States.

World War I soldier in uniform and infantry puttees poses with spouse in studio. Real photo postcard. 1910s. Collection of Natalie M. Curley.

“I aim to document the forgotten millions who stood defiant against the duplicitous American Dream, confident in their own worth,” she says. “Many of my images are products of itinerant or traveling photographers, a short-lived class of semi-professionals who either scaled back a studio living or taught themselves the trade with a cheap new camera and an on-the-road lifestyle. Riding by car or by rail, they would carry their equipment from town to town and shoot the whole town’s portraits in a few days by door knocking.”

For a few cents, anyone could have their portrait developed on postcard paper stock, which could be sent through the mail to keep in touch with loved ones.

“With the advent of the photo postcard, one could afford to be seen,” Curley says.

Yet many of the postcards in Curley’s collection—amassed through flea markets, photo shows, estate sales and resale websites like eBay—were never sent or inscribed, suggesting that even a few cents might have been too much to spare.

I aim to document the forgotten millions who stood defiant against the duplicitous American Dream, confident in their own worth.

Natalie M. Curley

Steiner, the Lucy C. McDannel ’22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology and the director of the Museum Studies Certificate Program at Conn, credits Curley with “saving these orphaned images from obscurity and bringing greater inclusivity to the visual record” of the past.

“Photographs of the underprivileged and downtrodden are, of course, not unheard of in the history of photography,” Steiner says, citing famous works like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives and collections from Farm Security Administration photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. But, he explains, none of those photographers were members of the communities they photographed. “As such, their images sometimes assume a kind of voyeuristic gaze—products of unequal encounters captured by outsiders looking into an alien world. By contrast, most of the photographs in [the exhibition] were taken by people not terribly unlike those positioned in front of the camera’s lens.”

Curley adds that museums largely feature donations that come from wealthy families and document the lives of the elite.

Left: Men posing on a studio prop balustrade in front of a painted backdrop of the United States Capitol Building. Washington, D.C. Real photo postcard, 910s. Right: Young women with matching ringlets and dresses made from the same fabric. Real photo postcard, 1910s. Both collection of Natalie M. Curley.

“For centuries, that has grossly skewed the public’s narratives of history in general and the history of art and photography in particular,” she says. “I am more interested in bringing to the surface the biography of all those anonymous lives used to stoke their profits.”

That was the challenge Steiner, Curley and Sante posed to the “Perspectives on Photography” students: Resituate Curley’s photographs in their original context to unravel their rich history and tell their diverse stories.

“Because those photographs have been scattered over time … [those] stories are difficult to recover and often require speculation and a willingness to dig deeply into American social and cultural history from the turn of the last century,” Steiner says.

Curley is saving these orphaned images from obscurity and bringing greater inclusivity to the visual record.

Professor Christopher B. Steiner

“The students’ remarkable efforts produced, in a relatively short period of time, a compelling historical narrative that embraces the intimacy of the images, understands their meaning and significance, and envisions the reach of the photographs across time and history.

“Ultimately, this extraordinary exhibition brings to life the experiences of real people and gives voice to their stories—the condition of their lives; their talents and vocations; their dignity and pride; and the hopes and aspirations they may have held as they faced the camera, sometimes for the very first time.”

Left: Civil War veteran (J.C. Morton), Union Army Second Corps, posing in uniform, with cavalry saber and tame rabbit. Gelatin silver print, 1910s. Right: Man posing on novelty paper moon studio prop with Summit Beach Park (Akron, Ohio) pennant. The painted backdrop shows an airship or dirigible balloon. Image is reversed because it was made as a direct positive print, 1920s. Both collection of Natalie M. Curley.

Below: Getting Perspective

Bianca Falcone ’25, a psychology and studio art double major from Wellesley, Massachusetts, said she was surprised by the amount of editing, revising and collaborative discussion involved in creating the text panels that accompanied the images in the Labors of Love exhibition.

“I now find myself thinking about for whom a piece of work is intended and how that changes the reading and appreciation for the piece,” she said. “I have learned to appreciate and question the voices and stories shown in pieces capturing and preserving informational material.”

View the Labors of Love catalog here.

Photo by Sean D. Elliot