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.
The project grew out of a previous book (Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photograph) on the Farm Security Administration, producers of some of the USA’s most iconic images of the 20th century. An important debate of the period involved charges of staging, of photographers arranging elements to produce more dramatic images. While reading these debates, Finnegan began to pay attention to implicit assumptions, which suggested to her the the value in examining the rhetoric of viewership. That is, she became interested in documenting “how photography animated particular ways of seeing and habits of response among viewers.” She conducts her investigation through what might be thought of as case studies: Civil War era imagery of the dead; a late century, previously unpublished image of President Lincoln; industrial era images of child labor; and images of depression era poverty. Her source material is newspaper and magazine articles, letters, journals, court records, and other contemporary documents that provide insight into how the public received and reacted to photographs.
Her first case study on Civil War imagery relates a somewhat peculiar fact: the public did not see the actual photographs about which there as so much discussion. New York residents with the money for admission may have visited Matthew Brady's gallery to view albumen prints, but there was then still no technology for the mass production of photographs. Newspapers and magazines instead used engravings, or line drawings, copied from photographs. Much of the rhetoric of Civil War era photography is therefore based either on engravings or on text descriptions of photographs. The latter were a regular feature in newspaper and magazine accounts of the latest images brought back from the front. Common among them were expressions of surprise or awe at the evocative power of photographs, their ability to erase time and place and give the viewer a feeling of being transported to the battlefield. Writers spoke frequently of details to be discerned through a magnifying glass, something no etching could possibly reveal. It was the first time in history that so many images of war, and most especially corpses, had been produced and widely circulated. In seeking to understand how Americans dealt with photographs depicting death, Finnegan is lead to an examination of a practice concurrent to the war, something called Spirit Photography, portraits made by photographically enabled mediums in which ghost-like spirits appear, usually thought to be long-lost relatives. Given the huge numbers of war casualties and the daily reminder of death, it is perhaps not surprising that some who suffered loss sought solace in such products. One photographer gained a national reputation for his spirit photography and was, a few years after the war, arrested and brought to trial for fraud. The case was dismissed by a judge who felt the prosecutor could not demonstrate trickery and that there was nothing to be done about the gullibility of consumers who bought such photographs. What bears noting here is the public’s general lack of understanding of the photographic process and the general perception, evidenced by war imagery, of photography to capture and reproduce reality.
In the next case study we jump ahead thirty years to 1895 and the publication of a previously unseen portrait of a young Abraham Lincoln. There is no question to its authenticity as it came from the collection of the former president’s only surviving child. It appeared as an illustration in a new Lincoln biography serialized in McClure’s magazine and was the scoop of the season, resulting in more than doubling the magazine’s circulation. Finnegan’s subject material is the letters written in response to this image, seven pages published across two issues in December 1895 and January 1896. Peculiar to this time and place was an interest in phrenology and physiognomy, “sciences” of the measurement and description of physical features that were believed to reveal moral character. Underlying these sciences was the assumption that the exterior reflects the interior. Not unexpectedly, the letter writers read into the Lincoln portrait their already clearly formed ideas about Lincoln’s character, and by extension the character of Americans as a group of people distinct from its European forebearers. Finnegan believes the editor, in fact, stacked the deck by soliciting letters from social and political elites to offer approved interpretations for consumption by the reading public.
Where the previous two case studies are based on texts from many writers, the next deals with just one, a book challenging the introduction of child labor laws. Histories of photography typically include mention of Louis Hine’s work documenting child labor in American factories at the turn of the century and its powerful impact in helping shape laws limiting child labor. Thomas Robinson Dawley, Jr. was a freelance journalist and photographer (whose connections to the cotton industry remain unclear) who produced a 500-page tome (The Child That Toileth Not, 1912) arguing that child labor was in fact of great benefit to many children from poor parts of the United States, most specifically those working at southern cotton mills. Finnegan’s main interest here is Dawley’s rhetorical strategies, which borrowed heavily from materials used by those campaigning to restrict child labor, such as first-person reporting, dramatic prose, and a reliance on photographic evidence. While photographs were still generally treated as irrefutable copies of reality, Dawley thought otherwise. In his book, he presented not only images made himself to demonstrate the benefits of child labor, he also reproduced photos used by child-protection advocates to which he added his own captions so as to reframe them within a child-labor friendly context, or in other cases to show how such photos had been manipulated to produce deceptive meanings. Here we see the beginnings of discourse in which the truthfulness of photographs is called into question, in which the public is called on to weigh what the photo might not show and how it has been presented to lead the viewer. In the wake of child labor legislation, Dawley’s book has been largely forgotten, though interested readers may find a digital copy on the Internet Archive.
Finnegan’s last case study looks at a set of 500 comment cards left at a 1938 FSA (Farm Security Administration) exhibit in New York City. The exhibit was part of a larger event, The First International Photographic Exposition, featuring over 3000 photographs spanning a number of genres. In addition to photographic lectures and exhibits, the event was populated by sponsors promoting and selling wares and had about it, according to reviewers, a distinct commercial air. In the midst of this was the FSA’s presentation of 75 black-and-white images of poverty in the rural South and West. By many accounts, it was the most noteworthy exhibit at the expo. Included at its conclusion was an invitation for viewers to leave comments: a stack of 3x5 index cards, writing instruments, and a box into which the cards could be deposited. More than 500 comment cards were collected and serve here as Finnegan’s source material. She finds that commenters were overwhelmed with the imagery, producing what might be described as cognitive dissonance. Viewers responded in one or more of four ways: they tried to understand their affective experience by describing how “real” the images appeared; they expressed disbelief that such poverty existed within their own country; they called on the government to alleviate such conditions; and they suggested this collection of images should be more widely circulated (so as to make more people aware and perhaps act as catalyst to action).
In conclusion, Finnegan hopes that she has demonstrated that careful historical work on viewership will reveal the absence of a typical viewer. Rhetorical responses to images may in fact be quite varied depending on personal, historical, and cultural contingencies. While this book is packed with some of the usual academic fluffery, it was nevertheless an accessible and mostly interesting read. It includes a sufficient number of illustrations, forty-eight pages of notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.
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