| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. By Shawn Michelle Smith. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv, 299 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-691-00477-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-691-00478-1.)

Shawn Michelle Smith's study offers an intriguing comparative approach that transcends disciplinary boundaries to decipher the ways that photography, from the 1839 daguerreotype to the turn-of-the-century Kodak, shaped ideology and consciousness. With its primary focus on the portrait, American Archives examines a diverse mix of photographic archives—including Mathew Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans, Francis Galton's eugenics catalogs, the 1900 Paris Exposition's "American Negro" exhibit, and family albums—to demonstrate how middle-class identity was fostered by photography. Smith's investigation also encompasses "emblematic" literary works that "pose subjectivity and social power as mediated by various gazes." But the heart of American Archives is the cumulative photographic archive, "a catalogue of 'essential' facial types," that over the course of the late nineteenth century changed from images of middle-class gender to representations of white middle-class racial superiority. . . .

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