Contains information on new equipment, materials, and techniques including how to use a camera, darkroom techniques, and how to "see" a picture.

The tawdry world of 1950's pin-up magazines mingles with raw obsession in this original and engrossing whodunit by the author of the "Last Consonants" series. Illustrations.

"In the camera as historian, the groundbreaking historical and visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards works with an archive of neraly 55,000 photographs taken by 1,000 photographers, mostly unknown until now." -- Inside cover.

"This book results from research which was begun with all the casualness, but inherent seriousness, of the nineteenth-century amateur. I had the privilege of frequent access to the archives of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and began to go through the nineteenth-century photographs in a systematic way. I wanted to go beyond the clichés of the history of photography as a series of often-reproduced masterworks and to find out something about the history of seeing, or at least of thinking about, images in the nineteenth century."--Préface.

By the end of the nineteenth century, people began to record their daily lives using small, handheld cameras. This made photography more direct, faster, and dynamic. The similarity with our time, in which more and more people are taking photographs, is striking. In this publication, Mattie Boom describes the rise of amateur photography in the Netherlands: the photographers, the photographs, the albums, the key figures, and the backgrounds. At the time, amateur photography was mainly a pastime for the wealthy: upper-class gentlemen, gentlewomen and even the young Queen Wilhelmina. Especially young entrepreneurs, however, set out to bring photography to the general public. 00Exhibition: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (15.02.-10.06.2019).