Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 [Hardcover]

David Deitcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2001

“A persuasive and startling look at friendship between men in the 19th century.” —Edmund White “Certainly one of the most interesting and provocative studies of American photography to have appeared in years.” —Linda Nochlin “Invaluable and deeply affecting. . . . A sophisticated analysis of a previously little-understood aspect of the history of male-male relationships.”—Martin Duberman

This groundbreaking book presents rarely seen photographs that provide an entirely fresh perspective on male friendship in the 19th century. The poignant images in more than 100 early photographs, drawn from public and private collections, suggest a surprisingly broad-minded attitude toward physical intimacy between men, challenging the conventional view of the Victorian era as more inhibited than our own. Deitcher’s provocative text—combining history, social observation, pictorial analysis, and personal reflection—explores the nature of that same-sex affection and the meaning such pictures can hold for us today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 collects more than 100 portraits--from daguerreotypes to cartes des visites and early photographic postcards--depicting affectionate male friendships whose precise nature, whether platonic or sexual, will never be known. Editor David Deitcher, who teaches art and critical theory at the Cooper Union, reflects on the history of these images and their possible significance. In the late Victorian period, he notes, men commonly established intimate, passionate friendships with other men, and often "posed for photographers holding hands, entwining limbs, or resting in the shelter of each other's accommodating bodies, innocent of the suspicion that such behavior would later arouse." These photographs have long been collected by gay men, for whom they are vehicles of longing "for the self-validation that comes from having a history to refer to; longing for a comforting sense of connection with others--past as well as present--whose experience mirrors one's own." Nevertheless, Deitcher reminds readers, because almost all the subjects of these photographs are anonymous, "they are powerless to communicate anything more than the following: This is how these men looked on that day when they sat for the photographer." But what these photographs prove is ultimately far less interesting or engaging than what they are: tender, funny, strange relics of a time when public expressions of love between men were freer and more natural than they are in our own ostensibly more liberated age. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

Nineteenth- and early-20th-century photographs often reveal a surprising physical intimacy and affection between men, observes art historian and critic David Deitcher (editor, The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America Since Stonewall) in Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918. In many of these crisply detailed daguerreotypes and portraits, men strike romantic poses: one man unabashedly drapes a leg over his companion; another fetching pair share an umbrella and a coy gaze. The mystery of the subjects' actual relationships to each other is part of the book's teasing, understated allure.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: ABRAMS; 1st ed edition (March 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810957124
• ISBN-13: 978-0810957121
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #610,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful..., May 14, 2001

By 

Charlie Perkins (Lexington, KY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Hardcover)

This is the sweetest book. The photographs are magnificent, and though there is lots of interesting text, the pictures "speak" for themselves. I found them to be so innocent and moving.

I have a friend who served in WWII and he once told me the story of young men and boys waiting in line to eat at Boot Camp --- HOLDING HANDS, with NO-ONE giving it a second thought. (Do that today and see how long you're standing in THAT line!) Not all of the photographs in this book are as innocent and pure as that, but most are.

DEAR FRIENDS was featured recently in a Richard Rodriguez segment of the NEWS HOUR on PBS. If you saw that segment --- you still need to read this book for your own personal closer look. Innocence has such a beautiful face!

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Concept, Awkwardly Executed, December 19, 2005

By 

Louis "K." (Palm Springs, CA USA) - See all my reviews

If this were just a book of "photographs of men together" without the heavy-handed, ponderous stretches of the author's awkward, long-winded prose between photos, it would be an enormous improvement. Deitcher's text reads like a proposal for selling the book to a publisher - I lost count how many times he states things like, "this book is..." and then describes the book you are holding in your hand.

Newsflash: We're already reading the book. Stop describing what you intend to accomplish with it and just do it, already.

I liked when he used quotes and excerpts that were contemporary to the times the photos were taken, which give the reader a better idea of what life and society was like then. But there was too little of this, and too much conjecture on his part, and, yes, I know it's his book, but too much personalizing. I wasn't interested in knowing that the author, as a young man, fantasized about the photos of swimmers he saw in American Red Cross "Junior Lifesaving" manuals (page 50). Rather, I was a little creeped out, and unsure why this very personal anecdote is included in his book.

Here's a passage that kind of sums up my problem with his writing - also from page 50:

"Today we can swim in seas of homoerotica and X-rated porn. It should not be taken as a detraction from the pleasures of porn to underscore the guilelessness and ingenuity with which image-starved gay men and lesbians once perused everyday representations for sexual excitement; nor to admit to mourning the passage of such creative strategies for (homo)sexual survival as one of the costs we have had to pay for replacing gay subcultural ingenuity with gay culture, tout court. There are, of course, other related trade-offs in which one thing is lost at the price of another being gained. Ultimately, this book provides evidence of a parallel trade-off that results from the historical transformation of the social meaning of same-sex affection from a nineteenth-century tradition of romantic friendship and comradely love, and its physical expression among men who posed for photographers holding hands, entwining limbs, or resting in the shelter of each other's accomodating bodies, innocent of the suspicion that such behavior would later arouse."

And he goes ON like this! I defy anyone to get any sort of cognizable meaning out of all this academic double-talk. I'm left wondering if the photos came up short and he had a larger page-count to fill because he says basically the same thing over and over throughout the course of the book, and it never gets any more straight-forward or lucid than what you just read above.

So - in short: Liked the concept, loved the photos, was NOT a fan of the text.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars If only, October 5, 2008

By 

Ron L. Caldwell "azureyes" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Hardcover)

In a spirit of full disclosure: I am a member of the target audience for this book - a gay man interested in photography, history, and critical theory.

I'm also a skeptic, and know that 19th- and early-20th-century American photography was not the outlet of homosociality the author suggests. Among the reasons I find his program suspicious:

-Many of the men in specific photographs bear striking FAMILY resemblances to each other.

-Given the long exposure times required for studio photography of the era, practitioners had to find ways to keep the subjects as still as possible. For individuals, photographers would often use a kind of iron armature to keep the subject from swaying (which would blur the photo). A clever solution to the problem with multiple subjects: have them touch, rest on each other, and general overlap to steady themselves. This is a conventional method of overcoming the limitations of the medium, not necessarily the expression of physical attraction among the subjects.

-Given the fact that the poses for obvious family members do not differ from those of men who do NOT resemble each other, the author would have to retrospectively assume that the photos convey public acknowledgement of incest, if one is to take his arguments to their logical conclusion.

-Humor and irony are not always visible to every observer. The author reads the photos with a kind of literalness that seduce him into back-projection. He doesn't approach the images with (an admittedly ephemeral) objectivity, because he wants these often beautiful and overwhelmingly interesting pictures to express what they cannot.

-Same-sex couples involved in sexual relationships may very well appear in some of these photographs; given what little the author knows about their provenance, it is unlikely we'll ever know which.