ABSTRACT
Born in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne was thirty-five years old when the daguerreotype was invented in 1839. When he died in 1864, he had spent half his life with the photograph and half without it. A person in the twentyfirst century, unable to conceive of a world where one would not see hundreds of advertisements, photographs, and commercials in a single day, can only imagine the incredible ruction and the shifting of world perspective that accompanied the advent of photography. In this century, we have become accustomed to participating in the versions of history presented by a work such as Robert Zemeckis’s immensely successful Forrest Gump (1994). In this modern-day paradigm, distinctions between individual and private histories, between important past moments and insignificant present experiences, collapse (Sobchack, “History” 3). Tom Hanks is pasted into frames containing Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy, and the viewer is impressed with the ease with which our visual culture presents versions of history that are endlessly fluid and able to be re-configured. Although the uses of video and digital photography fall outside the purview of my analysis here, this study argues that the advent of photography in the nineteenth century forced writers, readers, and photographers to negotiate a new conception of history. An analysis of the nineteenth century can, in other words, help the modern reader to see how the intersection of visual culture and history that comes to fruition in Forrest Gump first became possible.
