Page - 91 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

The Absent Empress 91 separate photographs constrained the composition. Everything the artist drew around the heads of the imperial couple, their cloth- ing, props, and architectural space, had to conform to the dis- tinct sizes of the original photo- graphs. Photographic illusion in a doctored image was possible, as evidenced by the clarity of the combination print Fading Away produced by the British photog- rapher Henry Peach Robinson in 1858. In his celebrated pho- tograph, Robinson compiled five deliberately staged negatives to create a convincing scene of a grieving family. As Robinson’s work was familiar across Eu- rope27, it is likely that artists rec- ognized the comparatively slap- dash nature of their creations. Which begs the question, why photography? Artists could have produced similarly didactic portraits using lithogra- phy alone, and yet every example uses montage to integrate photographic likenesses. The use of photography in spite of its clumsiness suggests that the medium was an essential ingredient for the success of the portrait. Perhaps its necessity lies in its evocation of Elisabeth’s absent body, or what Roland Barthes called the noeme of photography, its capacity to point to something that-has-been.28 The photomon- tages utilized portraits of Elisabeth taken only months before her 1860 flight from Vienna, photographs that were popular perhaps because of her subsequent absence from the empire. At a time when Elisabeth’s body was allegedly wracked with pul- monary disease, referencing the healthy body photographed before her diagnosis was especially valuable. This physicality aligns with Walter Benjamin’s discussions of the photography’s early history. While Benjamin argued that photography could destroy aura, or “the unique appearance of a distance” between an object and viewer29, he conceded that portrait photography of the mid-nineteenth century retained aura, Figure 8: Anonymous, Elisabeth and Franz Joseph, published by Joseph Bermann Kunsthandlung, c. 1863, photomontage.