Before most Americans ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this visual form through written descriptions, published and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the land. In The Camera and the Press, Marcy J. Dinius examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization of portraiture that photography enabled.
Dinius's archival research ranges from essays in popular nineteenth-century periodicals to daguerreotypes of Americans, Liberians, slaves, and even fictional characters. Examples of these portraits are among the dozens of illustrations featured in the book. The Camera and the Press presents new dimensions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville's Pierre, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave. Dinius shows how these authors strategically incorporated aspects of daguerreian representation to advance their aesthetic, political, and social agendas. By recognizing print and visual culture as one, Dinius redefines such terms as art, objectivity, sympathy, representation, race, and nationalism and their interrelations in nineteenth-century America.

Through a wide-ranging examination of antebellum images and literature, The Camera and the Press shows how Americans' first encounter with photography was more textual than visual. This thoroughly illustrated case study reexamines current theories on new media and reconnects print and visual culture in nineteenth-century America.

About the Author
Marcy J. Dinius teaches English at DePaul University.

Reviews
"A consummate feat of scholarship and descriptive prose." * TLS *
"An important and original study of interconnections between the daguerreotype and literary writing during the antebellum period. Dinius does a superb job of recovering the history of American responses to the daguerreotype, showing in particular the complex role of writing itself in that reception." * Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland *
"The greatest accomplishment of The Camera and the Press is the way Dinius has put texts and images into conversation with one another. She argues that 'daguerreian discourse' was instrumental in refiguring American society and culture and offers some wonderful new encounters with the problems of photographic representation." * Lisa Gitelman, New York University *



Book Information
ISBN 9780812244045
Author Marcy J. Dinius
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press