About the Author: Erin Pauwels is an historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas with special interest in photography, Indigenous Studies, and ecocritical approaches to visual culture, and currently an Associate Professor of Art History and Undergraduate Advisor Art History at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Pauwels explores the politics of portraiture and placemaking, technologies of image dissemination, and intersections between theater and the visual arts. Her first book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York was published by the Penn State University Press in 2024. It reconstructs the lost legacy of a once-famous nineteenth-century artist to reveal how the emergence of mass media reshaped definitions of artistic authorship along with the global reach and material character of art objects. Other recent publications include essays on photography as a site of Native resistance; the hybrid media operations of painted studio backdrops; and the ambiguous potency of photographic truth claims in the context of digital and social media. Her published work appears in the journals American Art, Panorama, History & Technology, as well as edited volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1800-1950 (Routledge, 2025), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020). Pauwels’s research has earned support from prominent funding institutions including the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Houghton Library of Harvard University, Harry Ransom Center, Huntington Library, American Antiquarian Society, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. Pauwels is a proud member of the Association of Historians of American Art, the Photography Network, and recently was elected to the Print Council of America. In the 2024-25 academic year she served as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford. 

About the Book: Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer’s signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony’s story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. In her new book Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures, Pauwels documents Sarony’s career as New York City’s premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art. Sarony’s larger-than-life public image was crucial to demonstrating photography’s creative potential. At a time when photographers were commonly regarded as straitlaced entrepreneurs or technicians, Sarony circulated self-portraits in outlandish costumes to assert himself as a flamboyantly eccentric artist. These photographic performances forged an authoritative link between the so-called father of artistic photography in America and the stylish celebrity portraits that emerged from his studio by the tens of thousands. Reconstructing Sarony’s biography and bringing to light never-before-published portraits, Erin Pauwels provides an illuminating view of how one artist’s quest for creative recognition fueled the rise of celebrity culture and artistic photography in the United States. This book will appeal to historians of photography and nineteenth-century American visual culture, as well as anyone interested in this master of the medium of photography and his celebrity subjects.

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