The Photography Collection has recently acquired a rare brass locket containing twelve miniature albumen prints of the famous couple made shortly after their wedding. The locket includes portraits by Mathew Brady and a popular image of Mrs. Thumb with a baby, one that was borrowed for the photo shoot to convey domestic success (she was in fact childless). The albumen prints are miniature, folding into the locket that measures only one inch on each side. Since jewelry bearing photographic portraits of loved ones was popular at the time, we can assume that this locket might actually have been worn. The locket itself is shaped like a suitcase and inscribed with “Somebody’s Luggage” on its front—likely a reference to the Charles Dickens story of that title about a waiter who publishes the stories he finds inside lost luggage, without knowing who wrote them. The extremely lightweight and portable format maximized the sharing potential of these celebrity images as it moved them into a physical proximity usually reserved for relatives, not strangers. The locket is one example of how photographs blurred the lines between familiar and unfamiliar, private and public as they gave innumerable afterlives to one-time events.
The Tom Thumb locket and other examples of memorabilia will be on view in Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography (December 12, 2014-September 5, 2015), in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Gottesman Exhibition Hall.
Further readingBluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Phineas T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, Or, Forty Years’ Recollection. Hartford: J.B. Burr, 1869.
Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
