Photograph courtesy of the St. Charles County Historical Society
Kodak introduced the Brownie Camera in 1900; it sold for $1. It was brown—basically a cardboard box outfitted with a meniscus lens—but the name derives from Palmer Cox's cartoon characters, based on stories of Celtic household gods told to him by his Scottish grandmother. Even the tagline, "You push the button, we do the rest," implied the presence of invisible hands, though surely not in the original sense. (Cox noted in an 1892 Ladies' Home Journal article that brownies "for a dish of cream perform lustily any piece of work that might remain to be done.") During the late Victorian era, spirit photography was horribly fashionable. Reputable photographers offered cabinet cards featuring the sitter overlaid with disembodied, gauze-swaddled hands or heads; fainting mediums writing mysterious messages on a slate or barfing ectoplasm became a mainstay of the nickelodeon postcard carousel. But 1900 was the year that Max Planck introduced quantum theory, and W.E. Woodbury's classic treatise on trick photography hit wide circulation. Which is why, when this young wife sat on her scuffed porch in St. Charles for a still life with tin bucket and ti-bon-ange, it was hard for her to keep that winky, in-joke look off the face of her transparent twin, though both trunks rise perfectly from the trumpet flower of her imperfectly pressed skirt.
