Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression by Cara A. Finnegan (review)

What people actually thought of photographs is a constant concern in historical studies of photography. In this volume, Cara Finnegan explores key moments of photographic engagement as a way of unpacking the work of photographs in public culture and seeing how Americans constituted and reconstituted themselves as agents of photographic interpretation. She explores the multiple visual translations and performances of photographs across media and presents writer and reader responses. She does so through a close reading of the photographs, their textual entanglements, and their cultural and political rhetorics. Contemporary written commentary is used throughout to illuminate viewer subjectivities.

The argument is articulated through four case studies from four different but formative moments in U.S. history: the American Civil War, a daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln newly discovered in the 1890s, photographic campaigns around the question of child labor, and responses to an exhibition of Farm Security Administration photography of the Great Depression. Many of the images discussed are now well known and have generated their own critical discourses, to the point that at times this accumulated discourse has come to stand in for the photographs. Thus it is intriguing and salutary to peel back the critical layers to examine contemporary responses to the images as they were absorbed into contemporary concerns about nationhood, morality, and identity.

Much of the discussion deals, understandably, with modes and patterns of circulation and the embeddedness of photography. This approach is very much in the spirit of recent historiography of photography, where the analytical focus is not on the content or style of the images, but their work in social contexts. Finnegan reconnects photographic narratives which have become disconnected, through chapters on Civil War and spirit photography, portraiture and the moral science of phrenology, and the like. She does have a tendency to take her categories for granted too often, as in, for instance, her close analysis of the daguerreotype of the young Lincoln as a trace of his character and incipient greatness. This image also revealed a great deal about what the American public wanted photographic portraits to do, how recognizability functioned, both generally and in the case of "great Americans": the physiognomy of Lincoln had already become the physiognomy of the nation.

Likewise, through a detailed excavation of Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr.'s 1912 anti–child labor laws tract The Child that Toileth Not, questions of child labor and child health were tied to the character not only of childhood but of the nation itself. Here the argument takes on a new pace, from singularity to series and from textual rhetoric that entangles images to the reverse relationship, the polemic of the image itself. The final case study is the exhibition of FSA photographs at the 1938 International Photographic Exhibition. The analysis is based on several hundred comment cards left by the public over the few days of the exhibition. Strangely overlooked by the massive literature on the FSA, they provide rich insight into how a general public of the Great Depression negotiated the magnitude and weight of photographs at the intersection of aesthetics, documentation, politics, and affect. Finnegan offers a convincing analysis of this humble source from which she extrapolates a sense of the "ontological realism" that the photographs communicated. Throughout the book, the author maintains a satisfying pace between the material itself, the contemporary voice, and rich analytical commentary.

There is a major focus on the contemporary voice in Making Photography Matter. Similar arguments about viewership and spectatorship have been made before, but as generic arguments. Likewise, many of the sources will be familiar to those working in nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography. What enriches this important book is the close attention to the historical voices and its call to the space of imagination, to reveal not theoretically assumed positions but positions demonstrated through an analytical and empirical granularity. Along the way, Finnegan engages with...