Lifestyle

Taking pictures of cats started long before LOLCats

Think our fascination with quirky pictures of cats began with the Internet? In their new book, “The Photographed Cat,” authors Arnold Arluke and Lauren Rolfe show how we’ve been embarrassing our furry friends since the birth of photography.

Arluke, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University who specializes in animal-human interaction, was expecting to find mostly pictures of working cats — barn mousers and the like — from the turn of last century. Instead, he found a surprising number of intimate portraits.

“Were it not for the period dress and furniture styles, they look like many of the pictures we have of our cats on our cellphones,” Arluke says. “While many more people today than a century ago have cats as pets and regard their cats as members of the family, we certainly weren’t the first to have such a relationship.”

In fact, some portrait photographers ended up specializing in pet pictures, and cats appeared on many of the mass-produced postcards of the day.

Cats even were used to make a political point. When women in prison went on hunger strikes for the right to vote, England passed a law that allowed for them to be released — then re-arrested as soon as they got better. The “cat and mouse law” led to the suffragettes adopting the cat as one of their symbols, as shown at right.

While the book puts together an impressive collection of Gilded Age-era cats, there were limitations, he notes.

“There were far fewer cat photographs, compared to dog photographs,” Arluke says. Photographs took longer to take back then, and the cats often ended up blurry.

Because just as our love of cats hasn’t changed, neither has their unwillingness to cooperate.