Tuesday, June 7, 2022

monog EES L1

1897-1955

Photo-multigraphs

Show off your good side. And every other side.

by Christopher B. Steiner

1897

Frederic and Francis Almy (twins). O.A. Taft Studio, Buffalo, New York.

Image: collection of Christopher B. Steiner

These photographs, collected by Connecticut College art history and anthropology professor Christopher B. Steiner, were created using a photo-multigraph or “trick mirror” technique.

Invented by James B. Shaw in Atlantic City, New Jersey during the early 1890s, a photo-multigraph is created by placing the sitter between two mirrors which are angled to produce four reflections of the subject.

By exposing a person’s face from every angle, the photo-multigraph was touted as a system which would enable “us to see ourselves as others see us.”

c. 1905

Dittrich Studio, Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Image: collection of Christopher B. Steiner

It will be impossible to make our faces appear to the most advantage by a clever pose, for the latest innovation in photography, the multiphotograph, which is destined to become the photographic portrait of the future, will reveal all our defects and crudities.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, OCT. 6, 1894

By the 1920s the photo-multigraph was a common novelty attraction at seaside, arcade, and boardwalk photo studios throughout America and Europe. As one author noted in 1931: “People on holiday will readily part with a dollar and a half or two dollars for a half dozen of these unusual five-in-one portraits.”

The practice had all but vanished by the 1950s. What is left are thousands of multi-photographs commissioned by portrait-sitters long gone whose images continue to serve as objects of reflection.