| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Raeburn. A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 370. Cloth $75.00, paper $35.00.

The average student of American culture might be forgiven for assuming that the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project simply was 1930s photography. After all, scholars continue to mine the FSA archive, and today's audiences frequently encounter FSA images in history books and throughout popular culture. Public amnesia is so strong on this point that if all John Raeburn's book accomplished was to remind us that FSA photography was not the only game in town, it would still constitute a major contribution to scholarship. Fortunately for readers, Raeburn's book not only puts the FSA's role in proper perspective, it does much, much more. Arguing that 1930s photography warrants treatment with a "wider-angle lens" (p. xi), Raeburn leads the reader on a journey through the cultural landscape of 1930s photography, attending especially sensitively to the wide variety of contexts in which what he terms "artful" photography circulated throughout the decade: the walls of the museum and the exhibition, the realms of commercial advertising, the rhetoric of government institutions, and the pages of periodicals. In the process, Raeburn puts better-understood photographic efforts such as the FSA project on equal footing with projects that, though less familiar to contemporary students and scholars, achieved wide impact in their own time. The result is a broad yet substantive text that challenges scholars and students of history, American Studies, and photography to reconsider received narratives of 1930s photography.

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