Customer Reviews

American Archives

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This is a great book. Smith connects changes in the construction of class, gender, and race, to developments in photography. She links the invention and popularization of the daguerrotype to the emergence of the middle class, specifically to the way this class constructed its women as private and its men as protective of that privacy and privileged in their access to it. And she links later developments to the emergence of biological theories of race that, again, bolstered the construction of middle-class in terms of "whiteness." The chapters alternate between discussions of particular photographic archives and works of American literature; each one is astonishingly concise. There is a particularly charming chapter on family albums, early baby-photograph contests, and the explicit links both had to race science, which will make contemporary readers think twice about their own Kodak Moments.

Though the book is intended for an academic audience and offers a major contribution to studies in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, feminist and critical race theory, it also offers a great deal to non-academics who are interested in the history of the middle class, gender and race in photography, and the relationship between photography and literature.