For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking of are Vera Lutter: Museum in a Camera and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, both of which have been on view in the Resnick Pavilion. Both will be up until the fall (Lutter’s exhibition closes on September 12 and the cabinet-card show on November 7). Both exhibitions are also worth a visit, and the one on 19^th– century cabinet cards that opened August 8 is what I want to call attention to here.

Since the 20^th century, discussions of the history of photography have usually been focused on auteurs, which is to say, individual geniuses with unique photographic styles. But the cabinet-card exhibition Acting Out goes in the opposite direction. It is host to scores of 19^th-century photographers who were forgotten professionals working out of store-front studios open to the public. These practitioners chosen for the exhibition exemplify those who got into the comic spirit of things like the image of a child holding on to a dog twice her size or the dancer Helena Luy seeming to fly through the air with the greatest of ease.

Ivorette, Guiffui Studio, Scranton

It isn’t just a coincidence that the two examples I’ve chosen are photographs of female subjects. Women, especially, are subjects who stand out because they took advantage of the opportunity their portraits provided to mock their prescribed place in Victorian society as compliant, even passive human beings. And the male photographers of the day accommodated them because they recognized that by acting out a bit, female subjects were securing a place in history not only for themselves, but for any photographers who got in on the joke by making their portraits.