An Insistent Subject: The Countess de Castiglione Facing the Lens.

Abstract

An Italian aristocrat renowned for her spectacular beauty, the Countess de Castiglione (1837-1899) arrived in Paris in 1855 and became a short-lived star in Napoleon III’s fête impériale. For a considerably longer period, between 1856 and 1895, she staged more than four hundred portraits of herself in collaboration with the commercial photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913), creating an elaborate and anomalous corpus in the context of the history of photography. This dissertation examines how at the hands of Castiglione photography became a productive means for the figuring of the feminine subject in nineteenth-century France. The study argues that Castiglione’s consistent and considered relationship with the medium of photography has much to offer in terms of expanding our understanding of how photography provided particular inroads for women’s authorship and agency in the period. The medium of photography and the early photographic portrait have been understood to objectify photographic sitters and Castiglione’s corpus has historically been interpreted to represent vivid proof of this process. Rather than focusing on the objectifying function of the camera, it is suggested that photography’s status as an autogenic medium—one in which the subject inscribes itself in the image—provides a compelling metaphor for Castiglione’s creative practice. By attending to a series of significant trials involving Pierson’s firm that sought to define photography as art under French law, this study analyzes how photography’s indeterminate status as an art or an industry enabled Castiglione to mobilize the medium for her own ends. As a subject who figured prominently in the popular press, Castiglione employed photography as an autobiographical means through which to formulate counter-narratives about herself. While the corpus is usually described as a private collection of images that she compulsively created to satisfy her narcissistic desires, three series of costume portraits that had important public purchase are examined. This dissertation proposes a correspondence between Castiglione’s photographic practice and memoir culture in Second Empire France (1852-1870). It argues that Castiglione’s photographic strategies and practices bear witness to an artistic agency and urgency for self-expression that reconfigure our understanding of female subjectivity in the context of nineteenth-century French photography.