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Co.C,27th Va.Inf.Regt.-CSA
Born in 1841, photographer Michael Miley captured some of the most memorable images of the aging Robert E. Lee. In addition, his work as a commercial portrait photographer survives as a vivid catalog of the people of Lexington and Rockbridge County, Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps most suprising, though, is the fact that this small-town photographer was also an early innovator of color photography.
The story that Miley, "General Lee's photographer" (no matter that Lee posed for Mathew Brady and for numerous others during the same period), had "discovered and developed color photography"' was already...
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Co.C,27th Va.Inf.Regt.-CSA
Born in 1841, photographer Michael Miley captured some of the most memorable images of the aging Robert E. Lee. In addition, his work as a commercial portrait photographer survives as a vivid catalog of the people of Lexington and Rockbridge County, Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps most suprising, though, is the fact that this small-town photographer was also an early innovator of color photography.
The story that Miley, "General Lee's photographer" (no matter that Lee posed for Mathew Brady and for numerous others during the same period), had "discovered and developed color photography"' was already popular by the time his obituary was written in 1918. Not wholly true; but not entirely untrue, either.
Michael Miley was born July 19, 1841, in Rockingham County, Virginia. While he was still young, the family moved south to Rockbridge County, to a farm about three miles from Fairfield. At the age of nineteen, Miley went to war, serving in Gen. Thomas J. Jackson's "Stonewall Brigade."
When he returned to Lexington is not known for certain. It is certain that he began his photographic career after Appomattox, in Staunton, where he worked about a year with a Mr. Burdett. There, presumably, he learned to print positive images from collodion wet-plate glass negatives onto albumen-coated paper. He introduced this then-recently developed technique to Rockbridge County when he came to work for Adam Plecker, a traveling photographer from Lynchburg.
Many "country photographers" at the time were experiencing difficulty with the process, but the number and quality of the surviving Miley prints from this period suggest that he mastered it quickly. The new method required that plates be sensitized, exposed, and developed while wet. In contrast to daguerreotypes and tintypes, the new "wet" process made it possible to print any number of pictures from a single plate.
Plecker's was a transient operation; the two photographers, with all their equipment, a room for sittings, and a darkroom, traveled in his boxcar wagon. Miley's association with Plecker seems to have been brief, but it included at least one session-- probably Miley's first-- photographing Robert E. Lee, on Traveller, at Rockbridge Baths.
Late in 1866, Miley formed a partnership with Captain John C. Boude of Lexington; hence the stamp, "Boude and Miley," on early prints. The photography itself is attributable to Miley alone, however, since Boude is not known to have had any knowledge of or skill in photography; he was, instead, a business partner whose backing permitted Miley to open a studio and gallery on the corner of Main and Nelson Streets, upstairs in the Hopkins Building. In 1870,just prior to his marriage, Michael Miley bought out Boude's share in the business.
The studio was called The Stonewall Art Gallery, and, as the Rockbridge County News reported, "it became one of the sights of Lexington. Here were portraits of General Robert E. Lee and his family, to the third generation; of President Jefferson Davis, John C. Breckenridge, General Beauregard, Jubal Early, Commodore Maury, John Randolph Tucker, of all the professors in the University and Institute faculties ... and many other notable men and women. All of these pictures were from sittings and a large portion were life size."'
Portraiture comprised the majority of Michael Miley's work. His famous images of Robert E. Lee were as popular then as they are now. In one of our primary sources about Miley's career, 22 pages of oral recollections transcribed in 194 1, his son Henry commented that the picture of "General Lee on Traveller was the most salable photograph that Father made of him from direct life."' Lee himself requested that the photograph be made; he posed-- in uniform for the first time-- in the back garden of his home on the Washington College campus.
For many years, Miley had the annual assignment of documenting the classes and athletic teams at Washington and Lee University and at Virginia Military Institute. And so it was, though artist or subject could not have known it in 1901, that Miley photographed a cadet who was to become a great general, George C. Marshall.
In addition to his commercial work photographing brides, babies, and family groups, Michael Miley was intrigued with portraying beautiful women. Highly stylized poses were popular in such idealistic photography, and Miley's provided no exception. In his 1941 reminiscences, Henry Miley recalled more than a dozen "beautiful young ladies" from as far away as Kentucky who posed for his father's camera. "He made a lot of photographs in his studio just because he considered the subject beautiful in some way and not because they came to have their pictures taken. One particular picture, the picture of a nun, was taken because he thought it would be outstanding. Another one was the picture of the girl with the basket of fruit on her head. These pictures were about 20-by-24 inches large."
These negatives, on glass plates, were made with an enormous view camera. Despite its cumbersomeness and the auxiliary equipment needed to operate such a precision instrument, Miley did not hesitate to use it outside the studio as well as in. "He would always look out for any special picture," Henry Miley recalled. "He would get the carriage ready in a hurry if he saw that there was going to be a pretty cloud effect and rush down to the bend in North River before the cloud would leave. He wouldn't waste any time getting set up, either."'
In 1907, tragedy struck the Miley firm when the studio and gallery were almost completely destroyed by fire. Negatives from 1885 on were lost; the early, more valuable negatives and most of the equipment, however, were saved. Several retail stores and the offices of the Rockbridge County News were also damaged severely by the fire. An acknowledgment of how dearly The Stonewall Art Gallery was cherished is evident in the newspaper's comment that "the loss of M. Miley & Son will appeal personally to more people than any other."
The enterprise was far from lost, however. Two weeks later, a notice appeared in the paper that "our newly fitted up gallery … opposite the courthouse is now ready for business."
Michael Miley pursued all his interests with enthusiasm. On Sundays, he attended services at the Lexington Presbyterian Church twice, though he never joined the congregation. Toward the end of his life, he went to the movies almost every night to study the lighting effects.
But his house on White Street and his family were at the center of his affections. In 1870, he had married Martha Mackey, and they had three sons, Henry, Herbert, and Edwin. His niece, Frances Isabel Mackey Huffman, remembers that the Miley house was always full of people, and that there were flowers all year 'round. There were a greenhouse for exotic plants and a vegetable garden. "Uncle Miley-- Mrs. Miley would not have him called 'Uncle Mike' because it sounded too Irish-- gardened very scientifically."
"He used to get up early in the morning to go out and watch everything grow. Sometimes he would sit up nearly all night tending the fire to keep the greenhouse warm and things growing. We burned as much coal in the greenhouse as in the house," Henry recounted.
Experimentation, whether in the greenhouse or in the darkroom, was always a challenge for Michael Miley. Though he traveled regularly to photographic conventions, he often did not wait for others' solutions to problems he was experiencing. Halation-- fogging in negatives of high contrast-- was a difficulty encountered by many photographers who used the new dry-plate process after 1880. Miley discovered the cause and began making his own plates with modifications to eliminate the troublesome reflections. Ten years later, plates similar to those devised by Miley were on the market.
In 1895, after graduation from Washington and Lee, Henry Miley joined his father as a partner in the business. About that time, Michael Miley became interested in carbon printing, a very difficult and time-consuming process. The technique, if properly carried out, results in a permanent print in any one color. Henry did much of the day-to-day commercial work, leaving his father free to work on his experiments.
The carbon process was enjoying a revival of interest in photographic circles with the introduction of a better carbon tissue, available in fifteen colors or shades." Henry recalled in 1941: "It's such a difficult process that very few photographers ever undertook it. Carbon paper was not manufactured in the United States at that time, and not even today. It has to be gotten from London, England, so we ordered some from the Autotype Company, one roll each of red-chalk, sea-green, sepia, and black, and the transfer paper, with several 20-by-24-inch sheets of white celluloid, and started to learn the process of carbon printing. We undertook to make the first carbon print when the paper came in, and like everything Father did, he wanted to do it in a big way. He sensitized a 20-by-24 sheet of sepia carbon for our first print, in the darkroom, and tacked it on the back of the door. The paper pulled away from the door and fell to the floor, which was not very clean. We hung it up again, thinking it was spoiled, and when it was dry, we brushed the dust off and proceeded to make the print. Much to our surprise, the print turned out very good, and it was interesting to see the picture develop when that slimy brown mass was washed from the celluloid. We soon found out that the carbon printing was no easy process."
Gradually, father and son began to consider the possibility of making full-color prints by superimposing the carbon images, using a primary color for each. It took them years to perfect the procedure. Finding materials of the proper quality and tone was difficult, since there was so little commercial demand for them.
"We wrote to the Autotype Company stating iust how we would like to have the tri-color paper prepared, but they were not willing to undertake it at first as it was very expensive and there was no demand for it. We tried to make our own paper but were not successful. The Autotype Company must have gotten interested finally, for [in] the summer of 1900 they sent us one roll of each color, red, yellow, and blue.... We soon found it was delicate, uncertain, and hard work. Sometimes the pictures were very good and then again the colors would not be quite true to the original picture. It seemed to be impossible to get a color, as pure red or green, to photograph as it should. We felt there was a mistake somewhere."
They persevered, however, and in 1902 were issued a patent on the process. In 1905, the Franklin Institute awarded Michael and Henry Miley a medal of merit. Quite probably, they had produced the first colored photographic prints in the United States.
In all, Michael and Henry Miley produced about five hundred color prints. Their subjects were mostly still lifes and copies of paintings, since these could be controlled and the color checked accurately. One of the most popular was of Charles Willson Peale's portrait of George Washington, in the Custis Lee Collection of Washington and Lee University. Miley photographed all the paintings in the collection, as well as the then-just-completed mural of the Battle of New Market, in Jackson Hall at Virginia Military Institute. These color prints have retained their strong, deep tones even to today, and seem to be less subject to fading than modern color prints.
Yet despite the significance of his color experiments, and despite popular belief, Michael Miley is almost unknown in the annals of photography. The reason may have been suggested in his obituary: "In his experiments Mr. Miley made remarkable discoveries in the art of applying color to photography and made many exquisite pictures in color. His discovery was patented but he looked upon the process as too slow and costly for commercial purposes and made no effort to have it brought into general use."
In this exhibition, then, which brings together for the first time prints that show the development of his talent, his diversity, his artistry, and his technical achievement, Washington and Lee University hopes to help right the balance and place the name of Michael Miley more securely in the history of American photography.
---Mame Warren
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