| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. By Laura Wexler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi, 363 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2570-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-4883-2.)

Photography is a violent medium. As the critic Susan Sontag has observed, cameras can be aimed, subjects shot; the term snapshot, originally referring to a hunter's hurried rifle shot taken without deliberate aim, was in the latter nineteenth century employed to refer to an "instantaneous" photograph, usually taken with a hand camera. "Instantaneous" photography, itself enabled by technological innovations such as dry-plate glass negatives and mass production, enabled more Americans than ever before to take up photography as a hobby and as a profession. Women in particular were advised by photography journal editors and camera club presidents to take up this now genteel activity, if only to record domestic scenes of friends and family, of anniversaries and other celebrations, of frolics and outings abetted by another symbolic invention of women's increasing social and political mobility, the bicycle. Women joined bicycle and camera clubs and even hunting and camera clubs. And women crossed the boundary from amateur to professional photography, entering into the ranks of photojournalists in fin-de- siècle America. . . .

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