Tender Violence

Laura Wexler takes her title from Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute, whose phrase described how to educate ex-slaves and Native Americans. This historic institution (now Hampton University) is still known through photographs made by Frances Benjamin Johnston and exhibited in 1900 at the Paris Exposition, part of the display on American Negro life. In her clear, complex, insightful book, Wexler explores the ideology that linked imperialism and domestic life at the turn of the century by studying documentary photographs by Johnston and four other studios run by middle-class women who worked in the public sphere--Gertrude Kasebier, Alice Austen, the Gerhard sisters, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. These women have attracted several generations of scholars interested in the connections [End Page 210] among feminism, photography, and American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Joining the work of photographic historians trained in the field of American studies with that of international theoreticians informed by cultural studies, Wexler's book is an especially welcome demonstration of the way in which complex ideas, informed by theory, can be supported by careful references to the images at hand and expressed in clear, eloquent prose

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