Making Culture Visible: Photography and Its Diplay at Industrial Fairs, International Exhibitions, and Institutional Exhibitions in the U.S., 1847-1900 (review)

Within the fifty-year time span examined by this book, the purpose of photographic displays evolved from promoting recent technological innovations to featuring photographs as cultural artifacts or sources of information. In Making Culture Visible, Julie Brown uses specific events from each decade of the last half of the nineteenth century, such as the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and the 1888 Ohio Exposition, to examine the changing role of photographs, the public's expectations of exhibitions, and the organizers' visions of how and what photographs should be displayed. Brown builds on her earlier work, Contesting Images: Photography and the World's Columbian Exposition (1994), which examined similar issues while focusing on a single venue, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

As early as 1840, photographic displays were included among the dazzling array of goods exhibited at industrial fairs. "Photographs, like other commercial commodities shown at these events," writes Brown, "were merged within the dominant ethos of invention, commerce and industry." Industrial fairs, suspended during the Civil War, returned with renewed vigor to cities across the country in the postwar years. Photographic representation in these industrial fairs, however, declined with the growth of professional photographic trade exhibitions, in which photographers could not only display their work but also exchange information about new products and business practices. These trade exhibitions, by their nature, excluded those who were not part of the profession.

But the general public flocked to international expositions, where displays celebrating national progress utilized photographs in new ways that reflected changing attitudes toward the medium. At the Centennial, Photographic Hall housed both photographic equipment and finished works, and highlighted current technical and business practices. In contrast, the photographs incorporated in government displays "demonstrated the potential of photographs to record, illustrate, inform, and persuade" (p. 116). Photography was used, for example, to illustrate America's leading role in world exploration and scientific discovery.

At the end of the nineteenth century, institutional exhibitions of photographs promoted learning as their main objective. The United States National Museum, the collecting arm of the Smithsonian Institution, gathered "materials from government and commercial sources to show the complete cultural practice of photography and its history" (p. 144). Libraries used photographs in their exhibitions as sources of information or as a way to disperse visual culture through reproductions of great works of art, rather than as examples of the quality of a particular photographer's work or the work of a particular country or government agency.

This is a thoroughly researched book, one that makes use of a wide variety of published and unpublished sources. The inclusion of contemporary quotations at the beginning of each chapter and throughout the narrative adds life to the text. Brown has also mined visual resources as thoroughly as textual ones. Photographic reproductions do not merely supplement but instead form an integral part of the text. The extensive bibliography will be of great help to future researchers.

Making Culture Visible would, however, have benefited from more careful editing. Names of sites, people, and businesses are misspelled. There are typographical errors. One chapter is mistitled in its running head. The text sometimes makes references to nonexistent illustrations or to the wrong illustrations. Although the large size of illustrations allows readers to see the details Brown painstakingly illuminates in both captions and narrative, sloppy cropping mars their presentation. An occasional factual error also creeps into the text: Tintypes are photographic images on blackened iron, not on tin, as stated in the appendix. Nor were daguerreotypes the "only type of photograph made in 1847" (p. 6).

Despite the poor editing, this book makes a worthwhile contribution toward understanding photography in the context of public displays. Volume 8 in the series Documenting...