Photography on the South Texas Frontier: Images from the Witte Museum Collection by Bruce M. Shackleford (review)

and the distillation of form” in O’Sullivan’s photographs enhanced their political and promotional prowess and that the federal bureaucracy enthusiastically displayed and published them, while those that might have been inspired by his more hardscrabble background were left in the archives for historians to discover decades later. Kelsey makes a similar distinction with regard to Jones’s photographs. Jones, he says, was attempting to illustrate “seismic disturbance” in his photographs of the 1886 Charleston earthquake by showing “frontal planes, repetitive structure, orthogonal order, and inconspicuous or diagrammatic signs of damage,” rather than by showing outright destruction, such as the collapsed walls and façades that other photographers showed. Jones arranged his scenes as geometric shapes so that the viewer would realize that the slightly askew vertical line, where the corner of the house does not align with the foundation, particularly noticeable because of the regularity that Jones has introduced into his composition, documented earthquake damage. Kelsey is dealing with tricky and fuzzy concepts, but he succeeds in showing the influence that society, aesthetics, and individual taste and talent, among other things, had on what might have otherwise been “the dry soil of government work.” Amon Carter Museum Ron Tyler Photography on the South Texas Frontier: Images from the Witte Museum Collection. By Bruce M. Shackleford. (San Antonio: Maverick Publishing, 2007. Pp. 112. Color and black-and-white plates, illustrations. ISBN 978-1-89327-145-6. $38.95, cloth.) For a historian, referring to something as a “coffee table book” is as much an accusation as a description. It connotes a glossy and oversized, but ultimately superficial, book meant to add to a publisher’s bottom line rather than serve as a useful addition to the literature. From its outward appearance, Bruce Shackelford’s Photography on the South Texas Frontier seems to be just another coffee table book, meant to accompany the 2007 “Lens on South Texas” photographic exhibit at the Witte Museum in San Antonio. Instead, this book collects a fascinating assortment of photographs of South Texas and provides a unique visual history of the “parallel evolution of photography and of the region” (p. vii). The first chapter provides a brief history of photographic technology, from the daguerreotypes of the early nineteenth century to the development of affordable personal cameras by George Eastman in the early twentieth century. Chapter two focuses on the production of picture postcards that were sold to tourists and travelers passing through San Antonio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An 1887 image of the Chili Queens and other vendors in San Antonio’s bustling Military Plaza, a photo of three small children standing in front of a decrepit jacal in the South Texas countryside in the 1880s, pictures of Native Americans (including Geronimo while imprisoned at Fort Sam Houston in 1886), and an image of a small girl standing behind a barbed-wire 306 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 306 fence in a refugee camp along the border during the Mexican Revolution, among several examples, provided visual artifacts of the exoticism of South Texas for those passing through the region. The most interesting images in the book appear in the third chapter, which features South Texans at work. A tamale vendor from the 1880s, troops and Texas Rangers stationed along the border during the Mexican Revolution, firewood vendors with horse-drawn carts, and the operator of a power loom in 1921 (in the building that currently houses the San Antonio Museum of Art) provide visual evidence of the region’s laborers. Also interesting are the photos in the book’s final chapter, all taken by photographer Jack Specht. A 1925 picture of chili stands in San Antonio’s Hay Market Plaza, with three young Mexican children smiling at the camera in the foreground while their mother serves food to two Anglo men behind them, provides a beautiful image of San Antonio in the early twentieth century. This book certainly does not provide any profound historiographical innovations , and Shackelford’s use of terminology can be maddening. The word “frontier ,” for instance, is never defined and seems to serve as an imprecise catch-all term...