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

Photographic technology has been around for over a century and a half, but serious academic study of photography came into its own only in the second half of the twentieth century. As the field of photography studies matured, scholars began to ponder not only the technological and artistic aspects of the photographic medium but also its cultural and political uses. A turn toward historical and cultural contexts in which photographs circulate has produced greater awareness of how photographs are received and interpreted by their historical audiences. Still, scholarly insights into the historical nature of spectatorship have seldom relied on close analysis of actual viewers' responses. More often than not, photography's capacity to engage audiences has been theorized rather than demonstrated.

It is precisely this gap that Cara A. Finnegan's groundbreaking new book aspires to fill by focusing on rhetorical activities of historically concrete audiences. Finnegan foregrounds viewers' agency, defined after Karlyn Kohrs Campbell as the "capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one's community" (7). She locates this agency in the available traces of American viewers' engagement with photographs in four different historical contexts from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Throughout the case studies, Finnegan models a historically situated approach to viewers' agency, arguing that what viewers see and how they interpret what they see depends on their social knowledge and their membership in particular interpretive communities. While this may be a fairly established theoretical premise, the case studies vividly illustrate the variety and cultural specificity of discourses and practices that underlie viewers' judgments about photographs. Chapter 1 explores how audiences regarded images of those who died in the Civil War (disseminated as photographs but more commonly as engravings in print periodicals) and the so-called "spirit photography" (which claimed to represent departed loved ones as present next to a photographed person). The author explores published essays on photography by such enthusiasts as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as well as anonymous reporters to show how audiences formed impressions of war photography (to which they had limited access because of the limitations of print technology at the time) through verbal translations of others. Through these verbal accounts, viewers were tutored in ways of looking for and appreciating the quality of "presence" even in the absence of actual visual details. Motivated to reconcile photography's depiction of the horrors of war with their culturally ingrained value of "the Good Death," viewers sought to "communicate with one another about war, grief, loss, and trauma" (32). Finnegan's analysis of responses to spirit photography shows how its critics "mobilized presence to articulate an ethic of viewership" (39) in a time of postwar trauma and grief and how its defenders asserted viewers' prerogative to use "experience, imagination, and 'fancy'" (48) in their interaction with images.

Chapter 2 addresses readers' responses to McClure's 1985 reproduction of a previously unknown daguerreotype portrait of Abraham Lincoln "as a thirty-something, well-groomed, middle-class gentleman" (51). Letter writers saw the image not only as evidence of Lincoln's moral character but also as a superb representation of an ideal American type. The author contextualizes these arguments by revealing the sources of their unspoken premises. These include then-current discourses regarding portraiture, physiognomy, and phrenology, as well as elite anxieties over immigration and minorities. The discussion of Lincoln's character thus doubled as a forum for airing "racial and class anxieties about the changing character of American identity at the end of the nineteenth century" (74).

Chapter 3 demonstrates how discourses informing the ways viewers read photographs can be subject to appropriation, as in the case of the little-known 490-page report called The Child That Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation by Thomas Robinson...