Photography's Materialities: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Geoff Bender and Rasmus R. Simonsen (review)

Photography's Materialities is a significant publication, bringing together scholars working in discrete fields of photographic analysis as well as researchers outside art history and media disciplines who draw on photographic sources. The diverse chapters are concerned with photographs' engagement with the broader worlds of their creation and consumption. To this end, Bruno Latour's "actor-network theory," which considers technologies' activated uses within systems of trade and knowledge exchange, has inspired all contributors.

Maura Coughlin's, Jacob W. Lewis's, and Mary Marchard's chapters examine the intersections between photographic processes and content. Coughlin interrogates the organic and thematic links between Paul Géniaux's c. 1900 gelatin-silver photographs of northern French salt fields and salt's role as a key ingredient in their printing process. Lewis picks up on the synergy between photographic subject and material, examining Charles Nègre's photogravure prints used to illustrate Voyage d'exploration à la mer Morte (1874). Lewis compares how the petroleum derivative bitumen has a discrete presence in the photogravure process while also being concealed in the landscape around the Dead Sea. Marchard analyzes photographic processes through the manipulation of camera technologies rather than raw materials. She ponders the evolution of French homicide crime scene photography, where the camera was positioned at an extreme height to communicate a sense of disembodied, objective sight. Marchard assesses the influence of domestic homicide photography on the fiction of American writer Edith Wharton, rewardingly showing the influence of camera technologies' panoptic vision in and beyond the imagining of police work.

Rasmus R. Simonsen's, Christa Holm Vogelius's, and Kris Belden-Adams's chapters continue the discussion of photographic composition, situating their analysis in both historic and intermedia contexts. Simonsen considers the arrangement of the nude male as enigmatic subject and object of desire in the photographs and paintings of anatomist Thomas Eakins. Vogelius continues this conversation about the arrangement of the subject within the photographic frame, focusing on the migrant bodies in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) and following their manipulation and reinterpretation in later engraved uses. Belden-Adams considers translation not across media but in terms of an amalgamation of photographic portraits. Her astute chapter investigates the photographic image Composita, which was a composite portrait aggregated from the photographs of the female graduating class of Smith College in 1886. Belden-Adams recreates (and illustrates) the composite technique, showing how portraits like Composita are not a simple homogenization of individual photographs but fashioned to create a particular image.

Geoff Bender's, Zachary Talvin's, and David LaRocca's chapters consider the photographic process from the perspective or proximity of the pictured subject. Bender examines the bodies of African American men in an arresting variety of mid-to-late-nineteenth-century ethnographic, anthropometric, and lynching portraits. Through his presented examples, he argues that the subject intervenes in the photograph's intended use by, for example, averting their gaze or closing their eyes. Talvin considers the contradiction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit photography, where camera technologies, revered for capturing the real, were employed to picture the supernatural. Talvin asks us to look past this contradiction and appreciate how constructed forms, such as ectoplasm, become "real," or take on a definable form, when registering photographically. LaRocca concludes the collection by assessing cyanotypes' relationship with digital media. Historically used to make contact prints of botany, cyanotypes forge a representation of their subject mediated, in part, by the subject itself. LaRocca compares this to modern equivalents, executed around or in spite of human actors, such as computer-generated imagery and machine-crafted photographic renderings.

This collection will be of interest to scholars and students working on the specific photographic technologies and processes covered in its wideranging chapters. It will also be valuable to those looking for more sophisticated avenues into thinking about photographic materiality. However, as the volume...