The motif of a photographer’s power: variations of the plot (based on English-language prose of the second half of the 19th century)

The research aims to identify how the motif of the power of a photographer character, which determines the plot variations in English-language prose of the second half of the 19th century, is realized. The paper provides a socio-cultural digression that allows us to identify the prerequisites for creating images of the first photographers possessing power over people. The research is original in that it is the first one in Russian literary studies to examine the motif of the photographer’s power and the influence of the cultural and aesthetic paradigm on the formation of its representative features. For example, in N. Hawthorne’s novel “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), thanks to the daguerreotypist, the descendants of the two clans are freed from the burden of the past that has been weighing on them for several centuries. In the story of an unknown author, “The Magnetic Daguerreotypes”, the power of a photographer who possesses copies of photo portraits of lovers hinders their happiness. E. D. Fenton, in the story “The Lovers and the Photographer” (1872), creates an image of a photographer who has the power to create copies of photographs without the knowledge of the referent. The results showed that the ambivalent perception of photographers, as well as their influence on those photographed in the second half of the 19th century, caused the variability of plot collisions.