Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression
Cara A. Finnegan
Abstract
Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. This book analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Abraham Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, the book treats the photograph as a ... More
Keywords: photography, war, national identity, child labor, citizenship, viewer engagement, cultural life, viewers, photographs, public life
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 | Print ISBN-13: 9780252039263 |
| Published to Illinois Scholarship Online: April 2017 | DOI:10.5406/illinois/9780252039263.001.0001 |
