Viewers Reading Photographs

This book examines the complex and historically specific relationships that shape viewers' participation in photography. Focusing on the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the book analyzes the discourse produced by viewers in response to specific photographs they encountered in public. It considers a number of cases where viewers left evidence of their responses in newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, speeches, photographs, and comment cards left at an exhibit. It shows that encounters with photography fostered in viewers a rhetorical consciousness—that is, “a manner of thinking that invents possibilities for persuasion, conviction, action, and judgment”—which they performed not only by describing or evaluating the photographs they encountered but also by mobilizing a sophisticated (though often implicit) rhetorical repertoire that grounded their arguments about war, empire, national identity, child labor, citizenship, and economic depression.