Considers five documentary sequences or narratives: the antebellum portraits of Mathew Brady and others; the Civil War albums of Alexander Gardner, George Barnard and A.J. Russell; the Western survey and landscape photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan, A.J. Russell, and Carleton Watkins; and social photographs and texts by Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine; as well as documentaries inspired by the Depression, esp. Walker Evans's American Photographs.

Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer’s signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony’s story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures documents Sarony’s career as New York City’s premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art. Sarony’s larger-than-life public image was crucial to demonstrating photography’s creative potential. At a time when photographers were commonly regarded as straitlaced entrepreneurs or technicians, Sarony circulated self-portraits in outlandish costumes to assert himself as a flamboyantly eccentric artist. These photographic performances forged an authoritative link between the so-called father of artistic photography in America and the stylish celebrity portraits that emerged from his studio by the tens of thousands. Reconstructing Sarony’s biography and bringing to light never-before-published portraits, Erin Pauwels provides an illuminating view of how one artist’s quest for creative recognition fueled the rise of celebrity culture and artistic photography in the United States. This book will appeal to historians of photography and nineteenth-century American visual culture, as well as anyone interested in this master of the medium of photography and his celebrity subjects.

The Photographic Experience deals with episodes and issues relating to the spread and practice of photography from its beginnings to World War I. Bridget and Heinz Henisch concern themselves with the reception accorded to the new art by professionals, amateurs, and the general public. They examine reactions to the new invention in the press, literature, poetry, music, and fashion; the response of intellectuals and painters; and the beliefs held by prominent photographers concerning the nature of the medium and its mission. With a wide array of images - many never before published - they illustrate the photograph's use as a record of public and private moments in life.

It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition. LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite. It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the "Fanny and Stella" trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity.