Dare to Stare: 19th-Century Circus and Sideshow Portraits

In the 19th century, enormous crowds engaged in bold looking at circuses and sideshows. Thrilled by colorful spectacles, death-defying acts, exotic cultures, wild animals, rousing music, and amusing clowns, audiences savored both watching dynamic performances in person and sustained, private gazing at performers in buying their carte-de-visite and cabinet card portraits. Among these portraits were bearded ladies, conjoined twins, snake charmers, albinos, contortionists, fire breathers, little people, and sword swallowers.

By examining choices that sitters and photographers made regarding clothing, jewelry, hairstyle, pose, and gesture, as well as autographs and inscriptions on card mounts, this exhibition shifts the historical focus of such photographs from spectacle and curiosity to empathy and a deeper understanding of self-presentation and performativity. This interrogation asks why such portraits were so popular, what they expressed about visual culture in the United States, and how consumers viewed, shared, and displayed their souvenirs. The intention is to analyze such photographs in terms of the sitters’ agency, dignity, and autonomy. While some performers developed highly specific skills to achieve notoriety, others transformed circumstances of birth with physical anomalies to make a living by captivating audiences with their distinctive appearances. Disabilities Studies demand that we consider the achievements of differing bodies from the past as vital to all Americans today.

Artists: Lorenzo Marvin Baker, Edward Bierstadt, Abraham Bogardus, Mathew Brady, Elmer Chickering, Gertrude Davis, Charles Eisenmann, Margaret N. Foster, James Goins, Charles Lincoln Lentz, August Wilhelm Obermüller, Bransby Cooper Pentz, Napoleon Sarony, George Albert and William H. Swords, Minnie K. Wachtman, Frank Wendt