Nostalgia seems to be the flavour of the season. Everyone is suddenly an 80s film star. Oversized sunglasses, denim jackets, and hairstyles that look as though a hurricane swept through them just yesterday have been flooding social media. Using recent portrait photographs, people are travelling back in time, aided by AI tools that transform them into their 80s avatars.
But what brought this on, just when we had barely moved past the Studio Ghibli trend? In a world obsessed with perfection and photographs that often look clearer than reality itself, perhaps there is something refreshingly appealing about inserting oneself into an era that was oblivious to digital filters. Yet long before AI or the internet, photography had its own trends that captured the public imagination. Here are a few of them.
IMMORTALISING MORTALITY
As morbid as this may sound, photographing the dead became hugely popular between the 1840s and 1910s. In those days, death permeated every household. Epidemics were rampant, and the loss of loved ones was a grim reality. Before photography came into its own in the 19th century, the only way a family could possess a visual image of the deceased was to have a portrait painted. For most, however, this was hardly an option, given the costs involved. Photography changed that. A photograph of the deceased became affordable compared to a commissioned painting. The practice came to be known as Memento Mori Photography, and soon, postmortem portraits became part of the rituals of mourning. Photographers would make the dead appear alive by propping them up on sofas, painting pink-tinted cheeks and occasionally altering negatives to make closed eyes appear open, creating the illusion that the departed had simply paused for a portrait. As cameras became cheaper and photographers abundant by the early 20th century, families increasingly had photographs taken while their loved ones were still alive, thus delivering the final deathblow to the postmortem portrait.
THE VIRAL VISITING CARD
Dubbed Cardomania, this had nothing to do with the modern visiting card, complete with addresses and phone numbers exchanged with the hope of future contact. These were Cartes de Visite, a format of small photographic portraits, about 4 1⁄2 x 2 1⁄2 inches each, patented in 1854 by French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. It took a few years for the craze to catch on. Then, in 1859, Disdéri photographed Emperor Napoleon III in this format, and Cardomania took off almost overnight. The miniature portraits became hugely fashionable and soon travelled across continents, becoming prized possessions in households. By the late 1850s, the phenomenon had reached Indian shores and was quickly embraced by the wealthy in cities such as Bombay. Collecting portraits had, quite literally, become a fashionable calling card.
PHOTOGRAPHING THE SPIRIT
Spirit Photography was a fascinating 19th-century trend that claimed to capture images of ghosts. When the Spiritualism movement swept across the world in the mid-19th century, the belief that spirits existed and could communicate with the living, gained a following. This was also a period when civil wars had left hordes of grieving people, desperate for some form of connection with those they had lost. It was perhaps coincidental then, that around this time, photographer William H. Mumler stumbled upon a technique that appeared to offer just that.
While developing a self-portrait, he noticed a translucent figure hovering over his image. The ghostly apparition was the result of a double exposure caused by a partially cleaned glass-plate negative. Mumler soon realised that what looked like a photographic accident could be turned into a profitable business. He began claiming that he could bring back the spirits of the dead from the afterlife onto photographs. He even made a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, with the apparition of her late husband, President Abraham Lincoln, standing behind her.
Given the climate of mourning, people flocked to have their portraits taken with a blurred, transparent ghost beside them, although the ghost existed only in the photograph and could never be seen with the naked eye. The craze grew so widespread that even prominent figures such as writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and scientist Alfred Russel Wallace endorsed the possibility of spirit photography. The argument had a certain scientific-sounding logic: if a microscope could reveal invisible micro-organisms, why couldn’t a camera reveal invisible spirits?
The spirits eventually lost their photographic appeal by the 1920s, when the growing popularity of mass-market cameras such as the Kodak Brownie made photography accessible to ordinary people, who were increasingly able to understand how such ghostly effects could be created. Mumler himself was arrested and put on trial for fraud.
INVISIBLE WOMEN
All of us know what an impossible task it is to make an infant sit still beyond a few seconds. Now imagine attempting to photograph one in an era when taking a picture required the subject to remain completely motionless for several minutes. A nightmare indeed! Photographers soon came up with an ingenious solution. Mothers were asked to sit with their babies and hold them still, but there was one catch: they were not supposed to appear in the photograph. So, mothers were draped in heavy, dark fabrics or curtains, sometimes concealed so completely that only the child remained visible in the final image. In some cases, the mothers were even painted over after the photograph was developed. The practice came to be known as Hidden Mother Photography and remained in vogue until the 1920s, when faster cameras made it possible to capture children without requiring them to remain frozen in position.
PAINTING A PHOTOGRAPH
In the late 19th century, another style caught the public imagination. Called Pictorialism, it was almost a counter-rebellion against the deluge of realistic photographs being produced by amateurs, now that owning a camera was no longer an expensive affair. Fine-art photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz began creating dreamlike images by manually altering negatives and treating prints with chemicals. Surfaces were scratched and brushstrokes added to create photographs that could easily be mistaken for paintings. The movement was clearly an attempt to establish photography as an art form and something more than the mechanical process. But the First World War changed the visual vocabulary of the times. When the world was confronted with the starkness of reality, dreamlike softness began to seem out of place. Sharp focus and an unembellished view of the world became more relevant, sounding the death knell for Pictorialism.
AN INSTANT OBSESSION
Back in the day, actually seeing the photographs one had clicked involved days of waiting for a photo-processing lab to develop the film roll. When the Polaroid SX-70 arrived, capable of ejecting a print that developed before one’s eyes, it is hardly surprising that the instant-photography mania became a societal obsession. It may be difficult to imagine in the instant world we inhabit today, but Polaroids satisfied the human desire for immediate gratification long before smartphones discovered it. But technology, as always, had another trick up its sleeve. The arrival of smartphones, with smarter cameras, gradually shifted our attention from physical prints to digital images that could be viewed, edited, and shared at the click of a button, and the Polaroid’s little square print was eventually relegated to the realm of nostalgia.