Elizabeth A. Fay. Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press; Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2010. ISBN 978-1-58465-778-1 (cloth). Price: US$55.00

Early in Camera Lucida (1981), his lyrical meditation on photography, Roland Barthes describes his squeamishness at having his picture taken. Unable “to work upon [his] skin from within,” Barthes determines Seen from the vantage-point of our current Facebook moment, Barthes’s discomfort (“I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image”) seems almost quaint (11). Nowadays there is nothing secret or even particularly embarrassing about the practice of virtual self-fashioning; we know our own faces only too well. To find a trace of innocence in the photographic portrait, one must look to photography’s earliest years, before the snapshot became a part of everyday life. “The first people to be reproduced entered the visual space of photography with their innocence intact,” writes Walter Benjamin; “The human countenance had a silence about it in which the gaze rested” (512). This silence was a salutary artlessness, the absence of a self-consciousness that would turn the body “in advance into an image.” Photography’s earliest subjects hardly knew what to expect from the photographic ritual, and for a fleeting moment at the birth of the new technology, they seemed liberated from the pressure to fashion themselves for public presentation. So unfamiliar was the process of having one’s picture taken that a daguerreotypist in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) tells of duping numerous customers into accepting strangers' photos as their own. One young woman, in too much of a hurry to wait for her photograph to develop, is given a picture of a widow as she is pushed out the shop-door. Before exiting, she looks at the image, aghast: “This isn’t me; it’s got a widow’s cap, and I was never married in all my life!” The narrator’s street-smart business partner responds with the deftness of an entrepreneurial con-man: “‘Oh, miss! why it’s a beautiful picture, and a correct likeness,’— and so it was, and no lies, but it wasn’t of her.—Jim talked to her, and says he, ‘Why this ain’t a cap, it’s the shadow of the hair,— for she had ringlets,—and she positively took it away believing that such was the case.” In conclusion, the daguerreotypist/narrator offers a startling insight: “The fact is, people don’t know their own faces,” he says; “directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own” (208-9). I thought of this story a lot while reading Fashioning Faces, Elizabeth Fay’s impressive new book about the reflexivity of individuals living in the half-century or so before the invention of photography. Fay effectively excavates the Romantic origins of that Barthesian scene in which it is impossible to stand innocently before the camera, finding in the self-presentational strategies of these years something like a prequel to our present-day habits. Romanticism, she argues, was defined by reflexivity, as people “obsessively … looked for themselves to be reflected back, to be portrayed by the world of things” (1-2). Indeed, after reading this book, it seems almost impossible to believe in the innocence of early photographic portraiture – until, that is, one considers the rapidity with which that innocence evaporated. For the ease with which people acclimated to photographic conventions was no doubt conditioned by what Fay calls the “reflexive culture” of the British Romantic period, when “the rise of modern self-conception” took root (13). The portraitive mode, as Fay explains it, is freighted with profound implications for the understanding of modern subjectivity. A compelling claim drives her study: “The overwhelming popularity of portraits and of portraitive objects and practices during the Romantic period has precisely to do with …