Cori Winrock at the Paris Review:
For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.
One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses.
more here.
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