Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

    Alan Trachtenberg, above

During COVID-19, I have found some great books in Little Library's in Brooklyn.  I stumbled on Reading American Photographs in one of them a few weeks ago.  

I thought the book had the potential to be pretty interesting, or really boring, and it was the former.   Turns out that it's this famous book from the late 1980s.  I certainly learned things from it, like the fact that Mathew Brady was the front man for a whole bunch of photographers.  There wasn't one female photographer who Trachtenberg covered seriously; frankly, I think Dorothea Lange or Berenice Abbott is way more interesting than Walker Evans, but that's just me.    Trachtenberg did have interesting things to say about history per se, in addition to the history of the way US audiences perceived photography.

There is only one page where I spotted an error, not obvious to most people.  Chapter 4: Camera Work/Social Work covers Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz.  Trachtenberg describes Stieglitz returning from Europe to New York City, and feeling dislocated. He writes:  "Hearing the Italian opera singer Duse one evening in 1893, he felt a sudden charge:  a contract existed between myself and America.'"  I was shocked to read this, because as any theatre history geek knows, Eleanora Duse was one of the great European actresses of the early 20th century, not to mention the fact that her boyfriend, Gabriele D'Annunzio, inspired Mussolini to invent fascism.  So, Duse did not sing anything.  But presumably Stieglitz saw her act onstage in Italian, and that made him feel more connected to the US, not less (which I think is an interesting thing to contemplate).