Publisher's Synopsis
At the end of the 20th century we are accustomed to seeing photographs wedded to text - whether in the family album of daily newspaper - where the verbal framing of the photograph has become invisible. This text is internalized within the image, and the meaning of the photograph itself. It explores the experimental moment, at the inception of the new medium, when the word came to haunt photographic image, and the forty or so years during which the photographic image alternately resisted and became assimilited to the printed page.;The author's emphasis is on British books. Not only was it in an English book that the paper photograph was first described and published, but the range of subject matter of 19th-century British photographically illustrated books prior to the 1880s was as rich as it was peculiar and sometimes recalcitrant. Carol Armstrong focuses on one book about photography (Talbot's "The Pencil of Nature"); one "scientific" book (Anna Atkins' "Photographs of British Algae"); two travel narrative, one factual and one fictional (Francis Firth's "Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Observed", and his illustrated edition of Longfellow's novel "Hyperion: A Romance"); and one book of poetry (Julia Margaret Cameron's "Illustrations to Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King); as well as some miscellaneous books from the 1870s. According to Armstrong, art history has tended to remove the historic photograph from its printed and published context. Moving back and forth between close looking and equally close reading, she aims to reinsert the photograph into the book from which it was taken.
