Cara A. Finnegan. Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the
Great Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Illustrations. 256 pp. $50.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03926-3.
Reviewed by Sally Webster
Published on H-SHGAPE (November, 2015)
Commissioned by K. Stephen Prince
The Rhetoric of Photography
The scholarly literature on photography has grown
exponentially in the last few decades. The seriousness
with which photography is now regarded is evidenced
by the efforts of writers and theorists of several generations, including Susan Sontag’s 1977 polemic, Alan
Tractenberg’s book on photography and American history (1989), Naomi Rosenblum’s world history (1994),
Roland Barthes’s structuralist approach of the 1980s,
Carol Squiers’s essays on contemporary photography
(1980), and Geoffrey Batchen’s more recent postmodern
critiques. All of these works represent a rich and varied
approach to our understanding of the cultural and historical role played by photography.
the tools of rhetorical assessment provide fresh insights
into a group of well-known photographs ranging from
images of the Civil War to the Depression era. It is therefore necessary to frame a critique of her book within the
parameters of rhetorical scholarship and begin by asking,
what are the tools of rhetorical scholarship; how do they
function; and do they afford new and, perhaps, singular,
insights into the power and value of photography?
The value of Finnegan’s rhetorical analysis is that the
photographs, iconic or representative images of the specific time periods she covers, offer a “rhetorical repertoire” by which we can articulate and account for shared
national experiences (p. 2). Later, Finnegan defines a
“rhetorical consciousness” as “a way of thinking about
the possibilities of persuasion, belief, and judgment” (p.
169). Her focus includes photographs of the Civil War,
an early daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln before he
became a national icon, Progressive Era photographs of
child labor, and finally photographs produced under the
aegis of the Federal Services Administration (FSA). She
concludes that these photographs “shaped a collective
consciousness that enabled viewers to negotiate anxieties
of the period” (p. 175). Furthermore, each set of photographs is assessed as a stand-in for national concerns.
Civil War battle photographs produced a public concept
of “presence,” while an early photographic portrait of
Lincoln published in the 1890s helped a public enunciate
“character.” At the turn of the century, positive images
of child labor activated for the public “photography’s ca-
Cara A. Finnegan’s book Making Photography Matter:
A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression can be included in this literature but with a new fillip: the introduction to a new methodology, one based
not on French critical theory but on the precepts of visual culture. Within that domain, the author deploys the
strategies of rhetorical scholarship, which in her words
allows her “to seek out and analyze the public discursive traces of people’s responses to their photographic
encounters” (p. 1). To accomplish this, she documents
these traces in magazines, newspapers, government reports, and audience comment cards, which heretofore
have not been part of a given photograph’s historical narrative. These sources help her answer the question, who
is the viewer? Superficially, this method is similar to
the age-old archival one, but with a twist. For Finnegan,
1
H-Net Reviews
pacity for appropriation” (p. 124). Finally, photographs
taken under the aegis of the FSA were mobilized under
the rubric of “magnitude.”
tion of FSA photographs at the First International Photographic Exposition held in New York City for one week
in 1938. These photographs, which by and large documented the plight of the tenant farmer and the migrant
Finnegan begins her study with photographs of Civil worker, represented a small portion of the photographs
War battlefields, some with images of dead bodies, which on exhibit. Nonetheless, these images, which recorded
lead her into a discussion of spirit photography. For the
the nation’s rural crisis, garnered a great deal of attenauthor, these photographs evinced the quality of prestion and acclaim. Finnegan includes important details
ence and helped bring home the reality of the war’s regarding this exhibit but her primary concern is an analtrauma.
ysis of the 540 comment cards that were collected by the
The focus of her next chapter is the publication of a exhibition’s organizers. She regards these as “significant
newly discovered daguerreotype of Lincoln widely repro- rhetorical texts in their own right” (p. 129). These comduced in late nineteenth-century magazines. For the au- ment cards enabled her to interrogate “the reading probthor, the discourse around this image reveals how pub- lems posed by these striking images” (p. 143). Or, put
lic opinion migrated from a personal regard for Lincoln another way, the viewer response cards allowed her to
to appraising the slain president “as the face of the na- conclude that the overriding issue for viewers was the
tion” (p. 63). She claims that Americans could make bet- notion of magnitude. For Finnegan, “the intensity of reter sense “not only of Lincoln the man and myth but of sponses lent the exhibit a magnitude it might not otherthemselves as well,” and in this way a notion of national wise have had” (p. 137). Without the evidence of writcharacter emerged (p. 80). What goes unsaid, however, is ten responses, the importance of the exhibit could not be
that commentators of the day were no doubt predisposed documented but only assumed.
to see evidence of good character in a man they deeply
Finnegan deploys her rhetorical analysis well, exadmired.
plains its value, uses it consistently, and in the process
constructs a “viewer’s history.” However, I think her
methodology has limitations. For instance, in writing
about the viewer’s response to Civil War photography,
she acknowledges that most of the viewing public experienced these images second hand through the medium
of photoengraving. She leaves unsaid how this experience of seeing the photographs in a gallery, say, or
in the privacy of one’s home, is different from viewing
them in a magazine spread, which might mitigate the
experience. Also, the notion of audience is slippery. Is
it synonymous with the public? And is all public response the same? For example, the viewing public in
Finnegan’s chapter on Civil War photography is unclear.
More, too, could have been made of the changing image
of Lincoln over the period from the time of his assassination until the end of the century. I am not sure that the
change in his reputation hinged on this single daguerreotype, and to assume same is to overload it with meaning. Finnegan’s strongest and most coherent chapters are
the last two, which deal with issues in early twentiethcentury photography. For most readers, the introduction
to Dawley’s book will be a revelation. Finally, her analysis of the viewer cards for the FSA exhibition is strong
and helpfully reminds us that an exhibition’s ephemera
often hold important interpretative keys.
From these photographs of the nineteenth century,
Finnegan switches gears and focuses on a curious 1912
publication by Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr., called The
Child That Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation. This volume promoted the benefits of child labor, an argument that Dawley bolstered through the inclusion of one hundred photographs. His project was a
response to the federal government’s investigation into
the abuse of children working in factories. This investigation, put forward by the National Child Labor Committee, was supported by the heartrending photographs
of Lewis Hines. Dawley similarly deployed photography, but to a different end. His photographs illustrate
the children’s happy circumstances in the new industrial villages where they were well housed, fed, and educated, and thereby lifted out of rural poverty. The conclusion that Finnegan draws is that photography’s function can be hijacked through appropriation. By this I believe she means that context is everything. More specifically, Dawley and Hines had different agendas and each
appropriated photography for their own propagandistic purpose. Dawley’s book is not well known compared to Hines’s iconic and enduring images, and it is to
Finnegan’s credit that her analysis remains even-handed.
Her concluding chapter is an appraisal of the exhibi-
2
H-Net Reviews
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-shgape
Citation: Sally Webster. Review of Finnegan, Cara A., Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil
War to the Great Depression. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. November, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44706
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
3