Ten Dollar Faces: On Photographic Portraiture and Paper Money in the 1860s

Abstract

Paper photography and paper money share a common history, especially in the context of the USA in the 1860s, a commonality explored by this article. The interconnection of the two media was first addressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s metaphorical description of cartes de visite as ‘sentimental “green-backs” of civilization’. This article focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s public image as presidential candidate, one that was heavily influenced by the new craze for cartes de visite. At the same time, the advent of modern paper money as we know it is marked by the introduction of Demand Notes or so-called greenbacks, of which the ten-dollar denomination showed Lincoln’s portrait after a photograph. Medial intersections between paper money and photography are taken into consideration in more theoretical terms, before a concluding section sets out the wider context of photography’s involvement in the emergence and early turbulences of early national paper currencies in the Civil War era.