LAUSR

Von Brevern’s thesis thus ultimately echoes the broader assertions of the collection: “some of the most profound changes photography brought about were not visual ones. They had little to do with what paintings looked like but a lot to do with how one looked at paintings and with what paintings were” (Leonardi and Natale, 106). The changes, in other words, were conceptual, organizational, having to do with readership, communication and cultural transmission, and they were broader, and far wider in their reach, than traditional narratives suggest. Given the volume’s interest in expanding (rather than simply redrawing) the boundaries of photographic history, it’s easy to imagine other essays that might have found their way into the collection. This reader, at least, would have liked to see more extended consideration of Geoffrey Belknap’s topic, “Photographs in Text.” Belknap focuses on photographs in scientific communication, arguing that in its reproduction “the photographic image... becomes less a visual object and much more an epistemological one” (Leonardi and Natale, 132). Reproduction indeed need not be visual at all: Belknap considers the substitution of text for photographs and its consequences, using as an example Rejlander’s famous photograph of Darwin to make the point that “Before it ever reached the pages of Nature, Darwin’s portrait was already circulating within his letter network, through review, and through visitors to Rejlander’s studio” (Leonardi and Natale, 143). Peppino Ortoleva’s interesting chapter on Balzac, the daguerreotype, and serialized fiction, similarly invites more work in this area (where’s Dickens? What about an essay on literary celebrity and the circulation of authors’ photographs?). Presumably it’s the mark of a successful collection that one feels that more remains to be said in certain areas, but it’s also a reminder that we tend to make claims on photography according to our own disciplinary lights. As Steffen Siegel succinctly puts it, and as, indeed, the collection itself affirms: “The history of photography is always also the history of ‘other’media” (Leonardi and Natale, 116).