The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America by Peter John Brownlee (review)

In The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America, Peter John Brownlee illuminates the mutually reinforcing systems that, as he argues, redefined the meaning of vision in the Antebellum United States. Brownlee brings together an astonishing variety of sources to illustrate both "the shifting status of observing subjects" and "the contours and experience of vision itself" (p. 12). Brownlee's facility with these sources—whether they are clerks' diaries, medical treatises, typographic design, literature, painting, printmaking, or advertising—elucidates why, in order to understand what vision meant, we need to trace the optical culture that connected ophthalmologists and genre painters, authors and clerks.

Brownlee persuasively argues that the only framework through which we can understand how all these forms, objects, and discourses of vision came together is the market economy. The fluid paths in Brownlee's argument show precisely how "the mechanics of vision became integrated with the machinery of commodity production and the daily rhythms of a nascent industrial capitalism" (p. 13). By tracing these practices and objects, Brownlee can show the mutually constitutive feedback loops that emerged. New medical theories that abandoned "the dematerialized model of vision" (p. 4) epitomized by the camera obscura, "a print culture premised on mobility" (p. 2), and urbanization all bolstered "'correct' vision" as something that was simultaneously a "commodity available on the open market" (p. 19) and also as a necessary condition for fully participating in that market.

The first chapters provide Brownlee's strongest examples of this period's "characteristically self-reflexive mode of seeing" (p. 13). Drawing on clerks' diaries and medical treatises from early ophthalmologists, the first chapter focuses on the fundamental paradox that runs through the meaning of vision as Brownlee describes it. The broadsides, newspapers, and handbills made possible by new printing technology "simultaneously increased visual aptitudes and appetites while attenuating the vision of those who suffered from 'weakness' of sight'" (p. 18). With more things to read, eyes suffered. As a result, ophthalmologists stepped in to establish a market for glasses that you need to participate in the market. Brown-lee's second chapter focuses on Philadelphia where he can trace the personal and epistemological connections between the city's most famous opticians—the McAllister firm—and the interest in glasses and refraction in their most famous painters—the Peale family, especially Rembrandt Peale. The excitement and persuasiveness of Brownlee's argument comes in how well he can guide us through the circuit of people, objects, and ideas that together redefined the experience of vision more completely than any of them could have individually.

At its best, The Commerce of Vision straightforwardly lays out complex networks of people and things that all reinforce this new way of seeing. The third chapter, for instance, connects the figure of the "attentive yet mobile viewer" (p. 82) in the increasingly dense urban center to the development of wood type to the scientists and doctors who sought more rigor in measurement of "correct" vision. These latter two come together when Herman Snellen used new wood type to develop his eye-chart, which "quickly became the institutional standard" (p. 107) for normalizing visual experience. The final chapters, however, are more narrowly focused. The fifth chapter, for instance, provides intricate accounts of the paintings of Richard Caton Woodville as "fram[ing] a view of embodied perception modified by the mediation of telegraphic newspapers" (p. 173); but this chapter does not attend to actual newspapers with the same attention that chapter three gives to broadsides. The argument is still compelling, but not as full as it could have been.

In probing how economic, medical, cultural, and philosophical changes redefined the meaning of vision, Brownlee's analysis is actively in dialogue with Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer and Wendy Bellion's Citizen Spectator as well as Lorainne Daston and Peter Gallison's Objectivity...