| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890. By Robin Kelsey. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xii, 273 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-520-24935-6.)

Robin Kelsey's Archive Style is a well-written, thoroughly documented, and fascinating investigation into the politics and the aesthetics of pictures made for government surveys in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kelsey shrugs off what might be the expected course of his study: his gaze does not follow a tidy east-to-west trajectory of American territorial expansion, and he does not limit himself to one kind of image making. Instead, over the course of three chapters his examination moves from the surveying of the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1850s, to the surveys of the American West in the 1870s, and then to the documentation by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) of the effects of the 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake. Likewise, his study freely places the drawings made by Arthur Schott in the American Southwest alongside the photographs made by Timothy O' Sullivan in the intermountain West, and the photographs made by C. C. Jones in Charleston. Kelsey sees the emergence of a shared "archive style" in those very different kinds of pictures.

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