Bio/Description Elizabeth McCauley In the introduction to her groundbreaking study, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (Yale University Press, 1994), Elizabeth “Anne” McCauley, the David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art and professor of art and archaeology, explains that her book explores “not only how photography was transformed from a novel curiosity to an accepted and vital part of the urban environment but also why its appeal was so powerful and its applications so diverse.” This succinct statement of purpose aptly characterizes the originality, richness, depth, and scope of Anne’s scholarship overall and the substantial contributions her work has made to shaping and sustaining the history of photography as a field. In her many publications and in her teaching and advising at Princeton and elsewhere, Anne has explored the origins of photography as a modern medium as well as the varied motivations of its makers and consumers within the complex conditions of modernity. Her work illuminates the world-changing impact of the invention of photography across multiple spheres, from commercial photo studios, upper class parlors, and early cinema to avant-garde art galleries, the world of high fashion, and World War I. Her research also spans many chronologies, from republican France to the post-war United States. Throughout her research and writing, Anne makes clear how closely tied the history of photography is to the trajectories of other media such as painting and printmaking and the decisive role played by photography in the history and development of the fine arts and modern visual culture more broadly. Many scholars in the history of art recall encountering Anne’s first book, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (Yale University Press), when it appeared in 1985 or thereafter and finding it revelatory for its account of early photography as a medium of mass circulation and communication, a luxury commodity, a form of sociability, and the locus of elaborate social networks. Many of the concepts now essential to inquiry in the field of art history—physiognomy, relationality, intersubjectivity, materiality, intermedia, circulation, the mobility of objects—Anne explored in this early study. Subsequent research and publications built on the originality and insight of the Disdéri book, which set the tone for her work to come: extensive, in-depth archival research across media and disciplines (for the Disdéri book she examined thousands of images in Paris archives) combined with big-picture ideas about the nature and capacity of photography, its social contexts, its relationship to other media, and its influence on significant artists like Manet, Degas, Monet, and Renoir. Industrial Madness, which considers two crucial decades in the history of photography beginning in the late 1840s during which the medium took firm hold in the cultural, social, and political realm, focuses on Paris and presents a fine-grained and fascinating account of the commercial side of photography, including extensive quantitative analysis of photography studios and their operations, while also illuminating the larger relationship of photography to commerce, modernization, and the French nation. Subsequent publications addressed subjects as varied as fashion photography, comics and caricature, the history of museums, the genre of portraiture, Ananda Coomaraswamy and American fascination with India, pictorialism, spiritualism, the female nude, artists’ models, amateurism, photographic abstraction, photography and antiquity, racial prejudice in images of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the historiography of photography as a field, and figures such as Thomas Eakins, Henri Matisse, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Aubry, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Minor White, Paul Kelpe, Raymond Jonson, and Catherine Wagner. In a book co-authored with the photographer Jason Francisco, The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (University of California Press, 2012), Anne trained her attention on Stieglitz’s iconic 1907 photograph of passengers on a ship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, bound for Europe. In her essay for the volume, she considers the image in relation to Stieglitz’s account of its creation and ultimately characterizes the picture as its own complex origin story, spun by Stieglitz and bound up with his version of the American dream. If Anne’s first two books offered a panoramic view of photography in Paris in the nineteenth century, her essay on Stieglitz zooms in to present a thick description of one photograph and the motivations of its maker, while still making clear how that photograph reflected and refracted the social and historical fabrics of which it was a part. Anne grew up in Burlington, North Carolina, in the Piedmont region, where her father’s family had lived since the 1770s. Anne owes at least some of her interest in art history and photography to her father, who enlisted in the Navy during World War II and served as an aerial photographer surveying terrain in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to Burlington, married Anne’s mother, and began working as a newspaper photographer for the Burlington Daily Times-News. To earn extra money, he sold art supplies out of his office and partnered with a co-worker to offer framing services. After Anne left home to attend Wellesley College, he and Anne’s mom opened a small business called Ed McCauley Art Supply. At Wellesley, Anne planned to major in the natural sciences, but a course with the Harvard-trained Eugenia Parry Janis on nineteenth century French painting steered her towards an art history concentration and, eventually, a senior thesis on the book illustrations of the French symbolist artist Odilon Redon. After graduating from Wellesley in 1972, Anne headed to Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. under the advisement of the eminent historian of French art Robert Herbert. Her dissertation research took her to France, where in addition to research in museums, libraries, and archives, she attended courses at the École des Beaux-Arts and donned a white lab coat to sift through decades worth of École records and ephemera. After Yale, Anne taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and served as the assistant director of UNM’s art museum; the museum was short on staff so Anne organized around ten shows a year, an experience that fortified her already strong interest in museum and exhibition work, which she pursued throughout her career, including in the form of a wonderful exhibition at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston about Gardner’s time in Venice. At UNM she also immersed herself in learning photographic techniques, and she remains a fierce advocate for a hands-on approach to art-historical research. She left New Mexico for the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 and, in 1988, she relocated to the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she stayed until 2002, the year she came to Princeton. Anne met her husband, Thomas Ferguson, Princeton Class of 1981, while in Texas, and they relocated to Boston together, as both were offered tenured positions at UMB, Tom in the political science department (he is now emeritus). Their first child, Louisa, was born in 1990, and their second daughter, Chloe, was born in 1991. Both Chloe and Louisa attended Princeton, Class of 2012 and 2013 respectively. At Princeton, Anne taught a wide range of courses, emphasizing in each of them the importance of studying works of art first-hand and cultivating familiarity with artistic processes and techniques. She offered survey courses in the history of photography and the history of modern art as well as more specialized classes on topics such as caricature; fashion photography; photography and colonialism; the Pre-Raphaelite movement; the art of the print; the history, theory, and practice of museums and museum display; the nude in photography; photography and World War I; photographic abstraction; and the amateur. She served for several years as the director of undergraduate studies, stewarding art and archaeology majors through the program and advising a host of juniors and seniors on their independent work. She also advised a good number of Ph.D. students and continues to work with several as they pursue completion of their dissertation projects. Anne also led several course-related trips to England and France. For many years, she was a faculty fellow at Rockefeller College. At Princeton, Anne began research on Clarence H. White, a leading photographer within the American Pictorialist movement. Her work culminated in a major and widely praised exhibition and publication, Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925, that offered a bold rethinking of the conventional historical narrative of the development of fine art photography in the United States. Anne drew on the Princeton University Art Museum’s extensive White archive in creating the exhibition and its catalog, making it accessible to the public for the first time, and she worked closely with Museum personnel to facilitate the project. She also worked extensively with the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage on the technical analysis of many of White’s prints to identify which processes he used to make them. Described by a reviewer as a “landmark exhibition,” the project’s twinning of attention to White’s aesthetic investments and his preoccupation with the materiality of the photographic print were especially compelling and well-received. Equally revelatory was Anne’s account of how White’s socialism, rather than a political aside, served as a key framework for his photographic practice. Anne may be retired, but she has not slowed down—projects on Minor White, the pedagogy of photography, and fashion photography are ongoing. She writes about new things because she wants to learn about them, and this will undoubtedly continue to be the case. Anne is an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society, and her research has been supported by grants and fellowships awarded by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Smithsonian, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. During her time in the department, Anne built on the work of her predecessor, Peter Bunnell, the inaugural McAlpin Professor, to make Princeton an essential destination for the study of the history of photography. The Department of Art and Archaeology and the field at large are in her debt. Written by members of the Department of Art and Archaeology faculty.
