Framing the Victorians : photography and the culture of realism
A wide-ranging exploration of the complex and often conflicting discourse on photography in the nineteenth century, Framing the Victorians traces various descriptions of photography as art, science, magic, testimony, proof, document, record, illusion, and diagnosis. Victorian photography, argues Jennifer Green-Lewis, inspired such universal fascination that even two so self-consciously opposed schools as positivist realism and metaphysical romance claimed it as their own. Photography thus became at once the symbol of the inadequacy of nineteenth-century empiricism and the proof of its totalizing vision
History
xii, 255 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780801432767, 0801432766
34850564
1. Coming to Terms: Realism, Romance, Photography
2. Pencil of Fire: The Photographer Speaks
3. Fiction's Photographers and Their Works: Villains outside the Frame
4. Framing the Crimea: The Narrative of Photographs in Exhibition
5. The Mind Unveil'd: Photographing the Interior
6. Signs of the Things Taken: Testimony, Subjectivity, and the Nineteenth-Century Mug Shot
Coda: Other Pictures, Other Worlds