Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Photography and its Critics offers an original overview of nineteenth-century American and European writing about photography from such disparate fields as art theory, social reform, and physiology. In this study, Mary Warner Marien argues that photography was an important social and cultural symbol for modernity and change in several fields, such as art and social reform. Moreover, she demonstrates how photography quickly emerged as a pliant symbol for modernity and change, one that could as easily oppose progress as promote democracy.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 The origins of photographic discourse
• 2 Photography and the modern in nineteenth-century thought
• 3 Art, photography and society
• 4 Forced to be free: photography, literacy, and mass culture
• 5 The lure of modernity
• Epilogue: ghosts: photography and the modern
• Bibliographic survey

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This excellent book focuses on what photography as an idea, rather than as a practice, meant in the 19th century. As Marien (Syracuse Univ.) states, "the idea of photography carried with it a large, loose collection of allusions and values." One of the first questions concerned what photography was--a product of nature or a product of technology. Was it natural, neutral vision and unmediated perception or not? Discussion of photography also led explicitly or implicitly to larger issues such as social democratization, the effects of industrialization, the relation of a society to its past, and mass culture. The author breaks these large ideas into chapters addressing the definitions of progress, the nature of art, the social usefulness of mass visual literacy, and the changing understanding of science and the relation of science to art at the end of the century. Highly recommended. General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. S. Spencer; North Carolina State University