First representations made by humans of their surroundings and of themselves are lost across the mist of time. On the walls of caves, even in areas where torchlight was required to “paint”, humans first left prints of their hands, later rupestrian paintings of animals they hunted and, finally, paintings of their peers.
Almost simultaneously, using ductile materials such as clay and wood, our ancestors began to create small sculptures. Over time, with the experience and skills acquired and transmitted, the mastery of fire and the possibility of using and creating new materials, those sculptures grew in size and diversity, and started resembling the human body. After surviving the destruction caused by European colonization, the legacy of pre-Columbian Americas still shows objects in which, despite ethnic diversity, we may find common motifs such as fertility, agriculture or the moon. In the Antilles, particularly in La Hispaniola and in Cuba, less developed than the countries of the continent, small nude deities have been found, carved in bone, clay and wood.
In the course of successive periods and movements of the history of art, painters and sculptors and, to a lesser extent, engravers, accomplished works that today we admire in their entire splendor. Magnificent representations of the naked human body, particularly the female body, are treasured in each country with the trace of their respective cultures and also of their prejudices and taboos. For instance, in the illustrations of the process of conquest aborigines are naked, symbolizing barbarism and sin.
In the mid 19th century, photography contributed to realism in European fine arts which were already showing the exhaustion of romanticism and academicism, and painting resumed the nude theme with a new approach.
Daguerre’s invention and its arrival in Cuba
On January 7, 1839, Louis Jaques Mandé Daguerre’s (1789-1851) procedure for fixing images was presented to the Academy of Sciences in France. Less than three months later, on March 28, the translation of an article by H. Gaucheraud published in the Gazette de France describing the process, was published on the front page of Diario de la Habana with the title ‘Fixing Images in the Camera Obscura’. On April 5, 1840, Havana’s newspaper Noticioso y Lucero reported about the introduction of the first device based on the designs of Niepce and Daguerre:
…His Excellency Mr. Pedro Tellez Giron, son of our honorable General Captain […] had a Daguerreotype brought from Paris. The illustrious young man immediately had the pleasure of the very happy success of his first test, copying through the Daguerreotype the view of a part of the Plaza de Armas, which represents the Intendencia building, part of the La Fuerza quarters, some trees of the centre of the Square, and the hill at the East of the Bay which contributes to the shape of the Port of Havana, all with a perfection in the details that is truly admirable…
Within a month the author of this first daguerreotype had already left aside the somewhat complicated “toy”, but others had calculated very well its commercial potential: between May and November 1840 it was announced in the Diario de La Habana that the store El Buen Gusto de París (Good Taste from Paris) offers «…daguerreotypes of various sizes and prices» and «…a daguerreotype machine and loose plates…»; likewise, a succinct explanation of the novelty is provided: «…a kind of camera obscura invented by Mr. Daguerre in which, through the reflection of light, objects get painted by themselves…».
George Washington Halsey, who had spent three years in the city teaching calligraphy and drawing, returned to Havana in December 1840, equipped with a brand new mirror camera by Alexander Wolcott and the chemical process developed by John William Draper. Along with his equipment, Halsey brought the experience of working in various North American cities, having confirmed, in situ, the instant success of daguerreotype miniatures in New York. Since he was familiar with the ground he was standing on, he was aware of the big opportunity of making portraits for the rich Havana society.
The clever American man was granted permission to announce the benefits of his machine for landscapes and portraits. So, on January 3, 1841, he opened the doors of his studio on the roof terrace of the Royal College of Useful Knowledge (Real Colegio de Conocimientos Útiles), at Obispo St. 26, today site of the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Cuba became the second country in the world (after the USA) to have this kind of business.
Adventurous Halsey was followed by several daguerreotypers as R. W. Hoit, Antonio Rezzonico, James Hardbottle and Osbert Burr Loomis, all from the USA, and later by the first Cuban, Esteban Arteaga, who had studied at the M. Queslin Gallery in Paris. From November 1st 1844 the Faro Industrial de La Habana started announcing Arteaga, who settled at Lamparilla St. 71 in Old Havana, where he offered his service as portraitist, along with sale of cameras and chemical products and the latest novelty: teaching “that incomparable art in four days”. The first portraits sold were daguerreotypes, preserved in beautiful cases of the most varied designs to protect them.
Nude in Photography
French photographers Bellocq, BerthierandBaquelaisare recognized as the first nude photographers, all of them coming from painting or lithography. Some authors suggest that the first nude model was photographed between 1844 and 1849, a laborious task considering the long exposure times required for making a daguerreotype.
Progress in equipment and chemical processes enabled to noticeably shorten completion times and, very importantly, to reproduce the original shot many times. In the first half of the 1850s, the daguerreotype was replaced by wet collodion plates; this allowed obtaining a negative from which reproductions on paper could be made. Around the same period, various procedures such as ambrotype, tintype, carbon photography and albumin prints were introduced in Cuba with varying success.
In that same decade, images printed on paper were shown in albums and in the, then very famous, cartes-de-visite patented in Paris by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. Years later the processes improved and the formats grew in size. The success of reproducing photographs cheaply was immediate and the “industry of sin” took advantage of it: between 1850 and 1875 the number of erotic or clearly pornographic photographs confiscated by the London police rose from 60 to 130,000.
Susini’s small cards
The carte-de-visite was introduced in Cuba by Samuel Alexander Cohnerin 1856 and soon turned out to be very popular. Since then, printing on paper became widespread, making the photographic process much faster and cheaper. In Havana Yearbook and Directory of 1859, the 15 photo studies registered to that date are listed; most of them located at O’Reilly and Obispo Streets.
Luis Susini, a cigarette manufacturer in Havana who was always attentive to the latest news and technological developments, had the idea of printing small photographic images of the most diverse subjects on the cover of the cigarette packets. Newspaper El Siglo, welcomed the initiative in its December 31, 1865 edition:
Good thing! Mr. Susini’s endless resourcefulness is a constant threat to all other cigarette shop owners who are not as fast as he is, to always see the benefits for industry and for his numerous customers. Now he “has invented” to put photographs of famous men in the cigarette packs and even photographic portraits of non-famous people. Juan has a friend to whom he wishes to gift an ounce of cigarettes and, to make his gift more valuable he goes to Susini with a photograph of his friend and says: I want an ounce of cigarette packs with this man’s portrait. Shortly after doing this, he may go to the factory with a cart and collect the cigarettes, packed and with photographs. Well, at that pace, factory La Honradez will eventually be a set of things to which all imaginable industries will come to serve as stimulus to smokers.
Portrait of Captain General Francisco Lersundi Hormaechea was the first of these series of photos for packaging labels. It was followed by photographs of other Cuban and foreign personalities. Several dozens of Susini´s validated series titled Photographic Gallery of Royal Factory La Honradez, in addition to a few from other companies such as the Photographic Collection of Escalpet brand, are preserved in the National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España) and in Cuban collections.
The use of portraits on cigarette packets dates back to 1863, but then they were lithographed in colors, for La Charanga de Villergas, factory of González y Llaguno, by L. Lemus, who worked faces and busts of Cuban and Spanish personalities for the Literary Gallery series. Their pictures were framed in accordance with their artistic, literary or scientific work. Now, ordinary people who wished to see themselves on the packs just had to go to La Honradez and have their picture taken by Jose Mestre, photographer from Havana. Another option was to carry a picture and get it printed on the cigarette packs of their choice. La Honradez made the photographic portraits in sepia over thin paper that was later pasted on the template of the validated image, printed in monochrome or in colors.
Shortly after, following the example of packages of soaps, chocolates and other products from Europe and the United States, Susini had the idea of introducing "postalitas" or "laminitas" (little cards or little pictures), as Cubans called them, on cigarette packs of La Honradez factory. The first ones that were made with photographs showed views of the main buildings and places in Havana and other cities of the country.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, with the arrival in Havana of erotic cards from France, which were very popular in the Old Continent, factories like Gener, El Cuño, Aguilitas, Nacionales, Eva and Trinidad y Hno. decided to introduce on cigarette packs this type of images, copies of the French ones and later, produced by Cuban photographers, in the European style. Hundreds of cards showing half naked women in provocative poses were printed. In the mid 1920s there was a boom of collections of such pictures.
Renowned high society Cuban photographers such as Joaquin Blez and Segovia contributed their art to these creations. Their involvement notably raised the quality of the images, which were even printed in larger formats for albums of special collections.
It is interesting, and also a reflection of the prejudices of the time, that there are no Afro-descendant models in the images, in a country where large part of the population was black or crossbreed, product of slavery.
Men carried cigarette packs in their pockets and in these, a small hidden treasure that they could enjoy at any time and share it with their friends. Perhaps some jealous wife came to know about it and wanted her husband to carry her naked image only for his eyes. The truth is that Blez, who had started taking pictures of nude French prostitutes and later of Cuban women, began to photograph bourgeois ladies who posed in private sessions at the "Estudio Blez, the High Society Photographer."
Today these pictures induce a smile, given their naivety, the somewhat forced poses and the decorations in the studios, with which the artists tried to capture the interest of smokers and collectors.
Sources:
1. Lapique Becali Zoila and Julio A. Larramendi, La Habana. Imagen de una ciudad colonial. Ediciones Polymita, 2013
2. Acosta de Arriba Rafael, The Allure of a glaze. Body Photography in Cuba (1840-2013), Ediciones Polymita, 2014
Lapique Becali Zoila and Julio A. Larramendi, Habanos y cigarrillos. La magia de sus etiquetas. Los orígenes. Unpublished.