Copied, reissued, misattributed

Photographs in this period were commodities before they were documents. A negative was property; it could be sold, inherited, borrowed or copied, and the name on the card was the name of whoever was selling it that year.

Four ways a name goes missing

<b>The publisher’s imprint.</b> A stereograph of Institute Hall in the Library of Congress carries the imprint of Quinby & Co. at 261 King Street. The photograph is attributed to Osborn & Durbec, on Harvey Teal’s authority. The card tells you where it was bought, not where it was made.

<b>The later reissue.</b> Another card in the same collection carries the imprint of Jesse A. Bolles at the corner of King and Market streets, and the Library dates the printing between 1873 and 1877. The negative underneath is an Osborn & Durbec view of about 1860. The Library could only attribute it because it holds another copy of the same photograph elsewhere in its collections.

<b>The northern distributor.</b> The Charleston views of April 1861 reached the public on mounts printed for Edward Anthony of New York. Anthony published them. Somebody else made them, and the mount is often silent about who.

<b>The catalog gap.</b> Of the April 1865 Fort Sumter negatives in the Library of Congress’s LOT 4166-C, one is credited to George N. Barnard and one to Samuel A. Cooley. The rest carry no creator at all — including the negative that shows Cooley himself standing beside his camera.

What follows for a reader

Treat a name on a mount as a claim about commerce until something else makes it a claim about authorship. Ask what the holding institution actually says, and in what words. And be suspicious of any account, including this one, that gives a clean answer where the records give a messy one.