Portret van Jeremiah Behm before 1871

Edric L. Eaton made this photograph of Jeremiah Behm sometime in the late 19th century. It comes to us not as a portrait in isolation, but as one side of an open book, a sort of biographical album. Looking at this image, we might consider the proliferation of photographic portraits alongside the growth of print culture in the United States at this time. The mention of the “Central Union Agriculturist, Omaha, Nebraska” under Behm’s name is perhaps a clue. This book might be a kind of marketing material produced by that organization, or a way of celebrating and promoting its members. By the late 19th century, photography was no longer solely in the hands of the artistic elite, and this image and its framing as part of a biographical collection speaks to the growth of a new kind of popular visual culture. To understand this image further, we might look into Eaton's other work and the histories of the agricultural unions cropping up across the American Midwest. We can think of this portrait, then, as a document of institutional history.