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Introduction
In this epigraph, Thomas Carlyle expresses scepticism about the daguerreotype’s ability to capture the ‘likeness’ of his friend and admirer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a further letter, sent in response to finall...
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Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor
This advertisement for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62) attempts to disguise its purpose by claiming that its ‘value’ is manifestly true. That a newspaper advert would use photography as...
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‘We do the rest’: Photography, Labour, and Howellsian Realism
In Suburban Sketches (1871), one of William Dean Howells’ earliest publications, the Sallie family take a boat trip down Boston’s Charles River and along the East Coast. Like an increasing number of bourgeois Ame...
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Afterword
In 2008, with the intention of demonstrating its advanced weapons capability, the Iranian state released publicity photographs of a rocket launch. The release did not go as planned, however, as it soon became ...
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Chapter
E Pluribus Unum: History and Photographic Difference
The evolutionary model of technological advancement, present in many photo-histories, is liable to deny or repress aspects of multiplicity, and thereby construct a pure lineage for photography. This explains w...
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Composing Gendered Selfhoods in Robert Louis Stevenson and Amy Levy
In 1885 Sir Percy Shelley, son of the famous poet, took a series of photographs of Robert Louis Stevenson. Describing these pictures, Fanny Stevenson wrote: ‘It is very odd that while one represents an angel, ...
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Chapter
‘Literature of Attractions’: Jack London and Early Cinema
In 1902, Jack London penned a hurried letter to his lover, Anna Strunsky. It began with an apology: ‘I had intended to write you a good long letter for yourself, but people have come, must shave now or never a...
