City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture by Justin T. Clark, and: Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Amy K. DeFalco Lippert (review)

Around the turning of the millennium, a new set of methods culled from literary analysis, continental philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, social history, and, of course, art history, began to carve out its niche in the American academy. Scholars met the advent of visual studies with a mixture of bewilderment, resentment, enthusiasm, and messianic fervor, as an exhaustive questionnaire in the prestigious journal October demonstrated.¹ More than two decades on, the discipline has not only survived, but thrived, its methods finding favor with scholars from a number of fields. It perhaps suffices now simply to add "visual culture" to a book's subtitle, throw in some images, and announce that one has produced a transdisciplinary work of scholarship. This is emphatically not the case with two recent studies of nineteenth-century American cities by Justin T. Clark and Amy K. DeFalco Lippert, whose work represents the best of what can result when visual studies methods are combined with rigorous historical research. Two quintessentially American cities, each associated with an opposite coast, are the stars of these books: Boston the stuffy, exclusive Brahmin enclave and San Francisco the polyglot, raucous Gold Rush town. Each city has a hold over our imagination, over what we think we know about its inhabitants, mores, and institutions. Yet, through Clark's and Lippert's intense scrutiny, we view these twinned metropolises through new eyes, as complex sites for the making, viewing, and distribution of images. Not merely histories with images, but histories of and through images, both City of Second Sight and Consuming Identities uncover "the manifold ways in which the verbal and visual intersected and informed one another in contextually specific ways" (Lippert 18).

Beginning with the incorporation of Boston in 1822 and concluding with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the combined chronological span of these volumes encompasses nearly a century. Within these years, the numbers of visual images the average American might encounter multiplied, driven by the advent of new technologies such as photography, lithography, and the illustrated press, and by social and cultural changes in the use, meaning, and distribution of said images. Clark and Lippert both build on the work of scholars of visual culture such as W. J. T. Mitchell and Jonathan Crary, who posit that the nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of new forms of visual media but also greater attention to the act of seeing itself. Combining this theme with a careful interrogation of the ways culture can operate to shape society, Clark and Lippert focus in depth on their chosen cities in order to establish "how urban spectatorship helped forge new local and national public cultures" (Clark 5).

At stake for each author is the necessary challenge of determining why their chosen city is both unique and representative. Clark begins by addressing Boston's Puritan heritage and its proscription on images as a means to understanding the ethos of the city's Brahmins in the 1820s through 1840s. In these years, elite tastes guided urban visual experiences that served as educational and moralizing campaigns designed to instruct the working classes in proper forms of behavior and observation. While acknowledging that Boston's wealthiest residents shared this impulse with their peers in other major cities such as New York and Philadelphia, Clark argues that the city's history of religious and moral conservatism impacted the types of visual experiences the elite selected as worthy of promotion. A "fantasy of public order," with the sights, smells, and sounds of the city excised, led to lithographed streetscapes empty of human presence, grand mausoleum-like Greek Revival monuments, and urban renewal projects that broadened, lightened...