{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03103020273065784, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004964832436905255, 'mean_word_length': 5.570652173913044, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Gervais, Thierry, ed. The “Public” Life of Photographs.

The “Public” Life of Photographs is the first volume in Critical Ideas, a new series published by Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto and MIT Press. The volume centers circulation as a key arena for signification, as publics, accessing photographs in particular institutional contexts, produce meaning. Three sections, with three essays per section, explore photographs’ circulation in mass culture, journalism, and art worlds. The essays contribute evidence — through case studies of particular individuals and institutions — that supplement and at times critique core texts in the literature. In Part 1, “Photographs as Mass Culture,” Joel Snyder and Geoffrey Batchen engage Walter Benjamin’s work on the photograph’s reproducibility. Snyder disentangles Benjamin’s murky fusion of the two meanings of reproduction, offering up an eighteenth-century naturalist’s alternative as a better starting-point for understanding photographic essence. Batchen explores the key role played by Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet, who opened London’s first two commercial photography studios, in forging “a remunerative place for photography” (72) within the political economy of consumer capitalism by embracing multimedial fluidity while selling photography as an idea with social class and financial value. Vincent Lavoie historicizes how photographs, activated by scientific discourses and legal rights, came to be taken as demonstrative proof in judicial settings and how contemporary court actors appropriate this power rhetorically. All three of these essays contribute to photographic theory by complicating its most unquestioned truths: that the photograph was, from the beginning, superlatively reproducible and uniquely convincing as a holder of truth-value. Part 2, “Photographs as Visual News,” examines key figures who shaped the public’s receipt of photographs as information. Mary Panzer presents the work of Romana Javitz, the head of the New York Public Library’s Photograph Collection (1928–68), who assembled over six million images in a “utopian project to provide the public with a vast resource of information” (99). For Javitz, the value of photographs was democratic, stemming from their availability for use and reuse, and thus for seeing and re-seeing the world. Olivier Lugon explores the short-lived genre of reproducible exhibitions by seeing how