San Antonio College Library

"For over a hundred years stories about photographs and photography have reflected the profound uncertainties and inconclusive endings of the modern world. For many writers, photography, supposedly the most realistic of the arts, turns out to be the most ambiguous. As Jane Rabb observes in her introduction, a number of the stories in this collection involve mysteries, perhaps because photography has a capacity for both documentary reality and moral...

"Before most Americans ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this visual form through written descriptions, published and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the land. In The Camera and the Press, Marcy J. Dinius examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization...

Moving through Whitman's career four times from four different perspectives, this book investigates several major American cultural developments that occurred during Whitman's lifetime - the development of American dictionaries, the growth of baseball, the evolution of American Indian policy, the development of photography and photographic portraits - and tracks the ways these cultural actions became essential components of Whitman's innovative poetics. Resisting...