Time in a frame: Photography and the nineteenth-century mind

Dust jacket notes: "We live in a pervasively visual age. Considering that even the early generations of this century were heavily dosed in images - illustrated newspapers, magazines, and later motion pictures - and that today television is a prime instrument in the education of youth to the 'realities' of the world. It is surprising that no more attention has been paid to the origins of our uniquely modern visual consciousness. In Time in a Frame, Alan Thomas traces the roots of that consciousness to the invention of photography in the early nineteenth century. Marveling at the unprecedented likenesses of reality that the photographic image made possible, the nineteenth-century mind did not need to take a great leap to come to the belief that the fixed image was, in itself, reality. How the members of this first 'visual' generation used photography and how it changed their perceptions of the world are the subjects of this lavishly illustrated book. As Alan Thomas convincingly shows, the camera's presence was felt nearly everywhere during the course of the nineteenth century. Approaching his subject topically, Thomas surveys the work of the early photographers in terms of its motivation, insights, and impact on society. The work of expeditionary and documentary photographs, such as Francis Firth, Roger Fenton, and Mathew Brady brought glimpses of exotic far corners of the world into Victorian parlors along with the grim realities of war - seen for the first time off the battlefield. Great portraitists, like Julia Margaret Cameron, immortalized the famous and powerful in elaborately drawn images; Cameron's evocative study of Tennyson is considered a classic photograph. On a more private level, the photograph album became a standard drawing-room fixture, widely used among the middle and upper classes to chronicle a family's growth, respectability, and social standing...."