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Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression by Cara A. Finnegan (review)

What people actually thought of photographs is a constant concern in historical studies of photography. In this volume, Cara Finnegan explores key moments of photographic engagement as a way of unpacking the work of photographs in public culture and seeing how Americans constituted and reconstituted themselves as agents of photographic interpretation. She explores the multiple visual translations and performances of photographs across media and presents writer and reader responses. She does so through a close reading of the photographs, their textual entanglements, and their cultural and political rhetorics. Contemporary written commentary is used throughout to illuminate viewer subjectivities. The argument is articulated through four case studies from four different but formative moments in U.S. history: the American Civil War, a daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln newly discovered in the 1890s, photographic campaigns around the question of child labor, and responses to an exhibition of Farm Security Administration photography of the Great Depression. Many of the images discussed are now well known and have generated their own critical discourses, to the point that at times this accumulated discourse has come to stand in for the photographs. Thus it is intriguing and salutary to peel back the critical layers to examine contemporary responses to the images as they were absorbed into contemporary concerns about nationhood, morality, and identity. Much of the discussion deals, understandably, with modes and patterns of circulation and the embeddedness of photography. This approach is very much in the spirit of recent historiography of photography, where the analytical focus is not on the content or style of the images, but their work in social contexts. Finnegan reconnects photographic narratives which have become disconnected, through chapters on Civil War and