Homoeroticism of the Victorian Era: Male Intimacy in Photographs from the 1850s–1890s from the Herbert Mitchell Collection

The photographs below are mostly amateur studio portraits from the second half of the 19th century, roughly from the 1850s to the 1890s. In them, men pose in close physical contact: embracing, holding hands, placing a hand on a shoulder or on a knee.

These images are part of the collection of Reeves Herbert Mitchell (1924–2008), an American librarian and collector who worked for many years at the Avery Library at Columbia University. In 2007, a significant portion of his photographic collection entered the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After Mitchell’s death in 2008, the museum received many more items from his collection through his bequest.

Gallery

A tintype is an early and inexpensive form of photography. The image was produced on a thin metal plate, usually iron, coated with black lacquer.

This selection shows men from various social backgrounds and occupations: laborers, soldiers, teachers, craftsmen, and professionals. Almost nothing is known about most of the individuals depicted. Their names have not survived, their biographies cannot be traced, and the context of the photographs has been lost. As a result, the nature of their relationships remains open to interpretation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests seeing these photographs primarily as traces of a “natural and unselfconscious intimacy and physical contact” common among men in the pre-Freudian era, rather than straightforward “portraits of lovers in each other’s arms.” In the Victorian period, men could indeed embrace, hold hands, and pose very close together, and this was not necessarily perceived as a sexual signal.

A daguerreotype is one of the earliest forms of photography: the image was produced on a silver-plated metal plate.

A contemporary viewer may read such images as evidence of hidden homosexuality. In some cases this is possible, but it is not the only interpretation. The men pictured may have been close friends, brothers, or fellow soldiers. The social context of the 19th century is also important: men and women largely lived in separate, homosocial worlds and began close cross-gender interaction mainly after marriage.

In the 20th century, norms of male friendship changed considerably. Culture gradually shifted away from open sentimentality — affectionate language, embraces, and physical closeness — toward greater restraint. Men increasingly avoided overt emotional involvement and gestures that might seem “too intimate.”

A backdrop was a painted cloth or panel in a photo studio — a “window,” a “street,” “columns,” or a “garden.” This kind of set decoration made the portrait look richer or more romantic.

A stereograph consists of two nearly identical photographs of the same scene, taken from slightly different angles. When viewed through a special device called a stereoscope, they produce an illusion of depth.

An ambrotype is a photograph on glass. The negative on the glass plate was made in such a way that against a dark background it appeared as a positive — that is, as a normal image. Ambrotypes were usually placed in a case to protect the glass from breaking.

About Herbert Mitchell

Reeves Herbert Mitchell was an American librarian, bibliographer, and collector who lived from 1924 to 2008.

He was born on November 18, 1924, in Bangor, Maine, USA. He died in late October 2008 in Manhattan, New York. The cause of death was complications of Parkinson’s disease, as reported by his attorney. Mitchell was 83 years old. Among his closest relatives, documents and publications most often mention his sister, Dorothy Mitchell, who lived in Seattle.

Mitchell received a humanities and library science education. In 1946, he graduated from the University of Maine with a bachelor’s degree. In 1949, he completed the School of Library Service at Columbia University and received a Bachelor of Library Science degree. He then worked for a time at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Cornell University. This experience with art and scholarly collections preceded his return to Columbia University, where his main professional career would unfold.

From 1960 to 1991, Mitchell worked at the Avery Library — the architecture and fine arts library at Columbia University. He was primarily a bibliographer and for many years was responsible for developing the collections. University publications also describe him as the chief indexer of the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals — a reference system that helps researchers find architecture articles in journals and collected volumes; his work was of great importance for architectural scholarship.

Mitchell’s approach to building the library’s holdings was extraordinarily proactive. Early in his career, he realized that the library often missed unique materials that did not look rare or prestigious but had great historical value. A turning point came with the estate sale of theatrical artist and designer Randolph Gunter. It became clear that such materials could vanish from the scholarly record forever. After that, Mitchell began to seek out rare publications deliberately, working with used-book sellers and antiquarian dealers.

He regularly traveled to book markets and fairs in European cities including London, Paris, Milan, and Rome, as well as across the United States — visiting fairs in New York, Boston, and other cities. According to university sources, it was thanks to his efforts that the Avery Library assembled one of the world’s most comprehensive bodies of printed and photographic evidence of the American built — that is, urban — environment: materials related to cities, buildings, streets, and interiors from the late 19th century to the present.

Mitchell became especially well known among librarians and researchers for his attention to so-called ephemera — printed materials not originally intended for long-term preservation: advertising brochures, prospectuses, and catalogs. Mitchell collected not only classic architectural rarities such as old treatises and drawings, but also trade catalogs of building materials, decorative elements, paints, wallpapers, and plumbing fixtures. These seemingly ordinary publications became an essential resource for researchers of historic interiors and for restorers. Thanks to Mitchell, Avery assembled the world’s largest collection of catalogs from the American building trades.

Important exhibition projects are also associated with his name. In 1990, for the centennial of the Avery Library, he and architectural historian Adolf Placzek curated the exhibition “Avery’s Choice: Five Centuries of Architectural Books.” In 1991, upon his retirement, an exhibition titled “Mitchell’s Choice” was held in the rotunda of the Low Memorial Library. It featured about fifty items he had acquired for Avery over the years — from early architectural treatises to builders’ catalogs and so-called “city view books,” illustrated publications with images of city panoramas.

Over his thirty-year career, Mitchell also assembled a collection of American view booklets and albums known as the “American View Book Collection.” He deliberately sought out such publications at yard sales, flea markets, and through used-book sellers. As a result, the collection grew to about 4,800 illustrated publications devoted to U.S. cities and regions.

As a private collector, Mitchell gathered a wide variety of objects. His personal collection included stereographs, daguerreotypes, majolica ceramics, porcelain figurines made of so-called Parian ware, cabinets of 19th-century architectural books, and a large quantity of small-format printed ephemera. Colleagues also noted his openness: when a research topic overlapped with his interests, he readily made his materials available for books and exhibitions.

A special place in his legacy belongs to his connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2007, the museum’s Department of Photographs received a major “Herbert Mitchell Collection” that included 3,885 stereographs dating roughly from 1850 to 1920. The collection was registered as a separate acquisition and clearly shows the scale of his holdings. After Mitchell’s death in 2008, the museum received through his bequest a great many items across multiple departments: photographs in various techniques, architectural drawings, albums, scrapbooks, and cut-paper works. Judging by the inventory numbers, these items number in the hundreds and thousands.

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