Charles Eisenmann Artist
Charles Eisenmann (October 5, 1855 – December 8, 1927) was a famous New York photographer during the late 1880s who worked in the Bowery district.The address was 229 Bowery, which now is the home of a ministry and recently underwent a 3 million dollar renovation. At the time the Bowery district was an eclectic mix of artists, transient people and prostitutes. The depiction of this area in the movie Gangs of New York is judged by experts to be fairly accurate. The fallout of the New York City draft riots would have made for an era in New York that was unbridled and experimental: an ideal setting for photography that was unusual and cutting edge.Eisenmann's photography was sold in the form of Cabinet cards, popular in this era, available to the middle class. Eisenmann also supplied Duke Tobacco Company with cheesecake photography to stuff in their tobacco cans. The book Victorian Cartes-de-Visite credits Eisenmann with being the most prolific and well known photographer when it comes to Cabinet cards.His work was the subject of a 1979 monograph, Monsters of the Gilded Age, focusing on his work on human oddities from the Barnum and Bailey circus, with a notable widely circulated picture of Jojo the Dog-faced Boy. Although a number of his photographs were of obvious fakes (called "gaffed freaks"), many others were genuinely anomalous, including the giant Ruth Goshen, the four-legged girl Myrtle Corbin, and the Siamese twins Chang and Eng and Millie and Christine.
