Making Culture Visible: The Public Display of Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the United States, 1847–1900 addresses the changing reception of photography from its early days up to the turn of the century as a function of expanding exhibition opportunities and strategies. It is the eighth volume in the Gordon and Breach series “Documenting the Image” (now distributed by Routledge) intended to promote visual collections from around the world and to bring out the influences and implications of visual documentation and communication.

Julie K. Brown’s study is a worthy addition to this impressive series, presenting a “decade-by-decade overview of how the public display of photographs evolved [in the United States] during the nineteenth century” (xi). In her examples, photography developed from the scientific offerings and commercial commodities exhibited at midcentury industrial fairs to become a progressive tool of government and special interests at the Centennial Exposition. She also shows how the medium emerged as cultural artifact in the new venue of museum and library exhibitions. Building on her previous work, Contesting Images: Photography and the World’s Columbian Exposition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), this volume makes good use of primary and secondary sources on fairs and expositions and offers new material on institutional exhibitions and the growth of photography’s wider cultural role. Placing photographs on public display, Brown argues, “added a new dimension of social and cultural significance to these images” (xi). She acknowledges her debt to Robert Rydell, whose work on exhibitions inspired her to look at photography within the scope of that public forum, and invokes a number of other scholars—Michael Baxandall, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, and Timothy Mitchell—whose writing on cultural meaning she has applied to her investigations.

The book is organized chronologically, with two chapters devoted to each of the three venue types. Each chapter ends with a useful summary of the changes that evolved in each exhibition mode. The illustrations convey the rich visual experience that characterized these expositions, and a well-intended but uneven appendix attempts to define the confusing array of processes and formats used during the period.

In the first section, Brown discusses industrial fairs, treating photographs as commodities in the new culture of commerce. She presents the challenges of displaying mounted and framed daguerreotypes, the small silvered images that lent themselves more properly to the intimacy of hand-held viewing. With new formats of paper prints developed from negatives, display options improved, and by the 1850s hundreds of images were on view, along with the materials and equipment of their production. Public interest was impressive, with crowds estimated in the tens of thousands for fairs held in major East Coast cities, even before 1850.

Beyond identifying the new audience potential the fairs offered, Brown also assesses the relationship of the photographic profession to what was shown. In fact, only a small percentage of practicing photographers was represented, either for reasons of expense to the exhibitor or for how the exhibits were defined. While largely considered a scientific novelty in its early years, photography was also classified among the fine arts at the Boston fairs of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. In Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute’s annual exhibitions emphasized technical advances, while at the American Institute fairs in New York a national promotional outlook obtained, as the organization’s name implied. Those photographers who wished to convene for professional exchanges or commercial benefit soon formed their own organizations with trade shows that also included public viewings. At all of these venues, the photograph was presented as an item of commerce, even when displayed together with fine art. Its public reception therefore carried a commercial connotation, although its connections to the fields of art, science, and industry were maintained. Brown does not discuss photography’s commercial status in terms of the active nineteenth-century art market, as her argument is largely based in cultural theory, and she avoids the running debate about photography’s place in fine art.

After the Civil War, the cultural context of the regional industrial fair shifted to larger international expositions. These venues included photographic displays from many countries, shown both in dedicated sections and as documentary and artistic offerings dispersed throughout the exhibits. In the second section of her book, Brown focuses exclusively on the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876, which, she notes, was the first international exposition to provide a separate Photographic Hall. Images were shown together with apparatus and materials, but the building was not large enough to contain every exhibitor. The effect was to replicate the national trade fair of the American photographers—with a few foreign examples—in that space, but in truth photography was “almost everywhere” on the Centennial grounds, and the exposition became a pantheon to the technical progress and usefulness of its applications. In her second chapter on the Centennial, “The Image as Tool,” Brown concentrates on the photographic exhibitions of the U.S. government. The western survey photographs of dramatic landscapes and haunting images of indigenous peoples helped define national identity, while photographs of astronomy and medicine informed the public of national scientific advancement. She writes, “Photographs were meant to embody an idea of progress in which the application of technology served the public good through the work of its government” (116).

Brown uses another industrial exposition, held in Cincinnati in 1888, to introduce photography’s cultural construction in her section on the exhibition mode that is most familiar today. In a chapter devoted to “The Photograph as Cultural Artifact,” she identifies the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition of photography in Cincinnati as a critical effort to display “the complete cultural practice of photography and its history” (144). For the first time, historical equipment such as S. F. B. Morse’s camera was shown together with current technical advances like Kodak’s camera No. 1. Morse’s daguerreotypes and other vintage images were gathered from government, private, and commercial sources as loans or purchases for this exhibition, and many were retained to build the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. The Cincinnati display was a unique assemblage representing simultaneously a retrospective and contemporary melding of technical achievement and cultural meaning that had important influences on the development of collections and exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum and in the formation of photography’s historical record.

In her final chapter, “The Photograph as Information,” Brown discusses photographic exhibitions as developed by libraries at the turn of the century both in terms of collection building and exhibition methods. Her examples come primarily from New England, with additional references to Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and Wisconsin’s statewide library commission. In the public library, photography became an accepted form of visual culture that reached geographically and culturally diverse audiences, serving, in the words of Melvil Dewey, as information, recreation, or “best of all, inspiration” (170).

But was it art? As Brown’s work demonstrates, placing photography in front of the public changed over time, from the novel formats shown concurrently as art and invention at early industrial fairs, as commercial commodity and the embodiment of technical and civic progress, and, finally, as a culturally constructed object. While her study offers many examples and resources for the continuing pursuit of this metamorphosis, it stops short of centering photography in the art world, and Brown avoids nineteenth-century arguments about the role of photography in the sphere of fine art. While she makes reference to the art galleries and paintings shown at industrial fairs and international expositions, she does not address the relationships or tensions between photography and painting that form a critical part of the larger story she is telling. Moreover, one of the primary venues for the public display of art and photography together was the commercial gallery, which Brown does not mention, even though the image reproduced on the book’s cover and frontispiece is a woman looking at photographs in just such a setting. Making Culture Visible ends with a brief afterword, but a more comprehensive conclusion might have considered the construction of photography to include art as well as commerce and documentation in order to present the full complexity of photography’s reception over time.

Given the international scope of the series in which this title was published, some point of reference to European expositions, where photography’s relation to art was more clearly manifested, would have offered a useful comparison, especially those critical events in London in 1851 and 1862, in Paris in 1855 and 1867, and at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Brown’s selection of U. S. venues, however, does bring together an important sequence of public opportunities to see photographs, and her work effectively demonstrates their influences on American photography in the second half of the nineteenth century.