button pressers

On the relationship between enthusiasm and the fad:

"Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. Those seriously interested in its advancement do not look upon this state of affairs as a misfortune, but as a disguised blessing, inasmuch as photography had been classed as a sport by nearly all of those who deserted its ranks and fled to the present idol, the bicycle. The only persons who seem to look upon this turn of affairs as entirely unwelcome are those engaged in manufacturing and selling photographic goods. It was, undoubtedly, due to the hand camera that photography became so generally popular a few years ago. Every Tom, Dick and Harry could, without trouble, learn how to get something or other on a sensitive plate, and this is what the public wanted-no work and lots of fun. Thanks to the efforts of these persons hand camera and bad work became synonymous. The climax was reached when an enterprising firm flooded the market with a very ingenious hand camera and the announcement, 'You press the button, and we do the rest.' This was the beginning of the 'photographing-by-the-yard' era, and the ranks of enthusiastic Button Pressers were enlarged to enormous dimensions. The hand camera ruled supreme."

Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera--Its Present Importance" (1897)

"The fad is that embodiment of historicity that most pressures the self-determining individual, producing instead a subject that is fully public and fully historical. What I mean is simply this: if we ascribe someone's interests or actions to a fad for that activity, we imply that those actions derive purely from inhabiting a particular moment in time. That moment was 'the time when everyone was doing x'; we might indeed say that any given moment becomes legible as a moment through the category of the fad. This is not to suggest, however, that the fad's relation to the writing of history is a straightforward one. In fact, I claim the opposite, that the fad often operates as the limit of historical knowledge."

Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004).

[note how the commercialization of photography archives the landscape, and particular the female artist/author, as residual forms]