Since mid-20th century, students of art, literature, and education have been taught something that for a very long time would have seemed counter-intuitive, that the books and images that make up the subject of their studies have no embedded meaning. The reading of texts and images is conceived as a process of construction, of an interaction between the creator and consumer, with the culture, or perhaps cultures, acting as mediator. Texts are understood to have particular meanings to particular readers in particular contexts at particular times. What Cara Finnegan (an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois) sets out to do in this book, and seems to achieve quite ably, is to demonstrate the particulars of how this process played out in the reading of photographs within four historical contexts in the late 19th and early 20th century United States.
