Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Since the production of the first negative by William Henry Fox Talbot in Wiltshire's Lacock Abbey in 1835, English photography has played a central role in revolutionizing the production of images, yet it has largely evaded critical attention. The Making of English Photography investigates this new enterprise--and specifically how professional photographers shaped a strange aesthetic for their practice.

The Making of English Photography examines the development of English photography as an industrial, commercial, and (most problematically) artistic enterprise. Concentrating on the first decades of photography's history, Edwards tracks the pivotal distinction between art and document as it emerged in the writings of the "men of science" and professional photographers, suggesting that this key opposition is rooted in social fantasies of the worker. Through a close reading of the photographic press in the 1860s, he both reconstructs the ideological world of photographers and employs the unstable category of photography to cast light on art, class, and industrial knowledge.

Bringing together an array of early photographs, recent historical and theoretical scholarship, and extensive archival sources, The Making of English Photography sheds new light on the prevailing discourses of photography as well as the antinomies of art and work in a world shaped by social division.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Photography, Writing, Resentment
• Part I An Industrial and Commercial Form
• 1 "Fairy Pictures" and "Fairy Fingers": The Photographic Imagination and the Subsumption of Skill
• 2 A Photographic Atlas: Divisions of the Photographic Field
• Part II An Aesthetic Form
• 3 The Story of the Houyhnhnms: Art Theory and Photography, Part 1
• 4 "The Solitary Exception": Photography at the International Exhibition, c. 1861
• 5 "The Faculty of Artistic Sight": Art Theory and Photography, Part 2
• 6 "Gradgrind Facts," or "The Background Is Simply a Background"
• Notes
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Using writings about English photography that appeared during its formative decades, the 1840s-50s, Edwards (art history, Open Univ., UK) illustrates how photography mirrored the social concerns of the time. What photographers wanted most of all was to appear to be respectable and not part of the rabble that threatened society. Only one of many fascinating examples is Edwards's examination of how photographers used images of organ grinders as emblems of all that was foreign and dangerous. Edwards's discussion of the earliest attempts to claim photography as an art and not as a product of mechanical production within the framework of class struggle is of great interest, as is his discussion of photography and science. Once photography is seen as an element of class struggle, Fox Talbot's stubborn attempt to protect his copyright and even something as simple as focus become elements of that struggle. For Edwards, even the backgrounds used in photographs serve to place the subject in his or her allotted role. The book ends with this sentence: "The fact that they (backgrounds) were debated with such intensity suggests that petit-bourgeois photographers lived a troubled life." A now examined life, thanks to Edwards. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. T. Sexton emeritus, University of Alaska, Anchorage

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Steve Edwards is Professor and Director of Art History at the Open University. He is the author of Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006), editor of A rt and Its Histories: A Reader (1999), and co-editor, with Paul Wood, of Art of the Avant-Gardes (2004).