Title: The making of English photography : allegories /
Authors: Edwards, Steve, 1959-
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: Photography England History
Abstract: "The Making of English Photography examines the development of English photography as an industrial, commercial, and, most problematically, artistic enterprise. Concentrating on the first decades of photography's history, Edwards tracks the pivotal distinction between art and document as it emerged in the writings of the "men of science" and professional photographers, suggesting that this key opposition is rooted in social fantasies of the worker. Through a close reading of the photographic press in the 1860s, he both reconstructs the ideological world of photographers and employs the unstable category of photography to cast light on art, class, and industrial knowledge."
Contents: An industrial and commercial form -- "Fairy pictures" and "fairy fingers": the photographic imagination and the subsumption of skill -- A photographic atlas: divisions of the photographic field -- An aesthetic form -- The story of the houyhnhnms: art theory and photography, part I -- "The solitary exception": photography at the international exhibition, c.1861 -- "The faculty of artistic sight": art theory and photography, part 2 -- "Gradgrind facts," or "the background is simply a background."