Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

This book showcases a collection of late-19th-century photographs of
“human freaks” taken by Charles Eisenmann. The subjects, who
appeared in contemporary dime museums or travelling circuses, display
various physical abnormalities, from dwarfism and morbid obesity to
phocomelia (seal limbs) and Congenital Hypertrichosis Lanuginosa (a
genetic anomaly in which nearly the entire body is covered with thick
hair). Mitchell accompanies the photographs with detailed commentary on
the technical demands of early photography, brief biographies of some of
the more famous individuals involved in the production and selling of
the photographs, and an often trenchant analysis of the cultural
conditions that shaped and sustained the industry.

One must, of course, feel some moral discomfort when perusing a work of
this kind. The misfortune of the subjects can seem compounded by their
exploitation as lurid entertainment, an inevitability that this book’s
title, Monsters, does nothing to assuage. In a prefatory essay, Mitchell
seems to anticipate and defend himself against such criticism by
justifying curiosity as a necessary element of tolerance: “We now
prize a kind of conventional beauty so much that we fail to comprehend
and tolerate human physical diversity. In the nineteenth century,
freaks—or monsters as they were then called—could become rich and
famous just being themselves.” That claim has, needless to say, a
self-serving timbre: the profitability of publicizing human deformities
is hardly evidence enough of broad social comprehension and acceptance.
However, Mitchell seems correct in implying that a stubborn dignity is
claimed by the subjects, who often stare back with what looks like
defiant, indomitable pride. The photographs can be heart-rending in
their depiction of men, women, and children who must have suffered
greatly because of their abnormalities, but the achromatic, slightly
misty quality of the images produces a distancing effect that somehow
mitigates, or at least complicates, any sense of callous spectatorship.

Those with an interest in further exploring the 19th-century “freak
industry,” as well as the history of early photography, will
appreciate this book’s impressively extensive bibliography.