Book description
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.
"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
Marcy J. Dinius teaches English at DePaul University.
