A Communion of Shadows

American culture today, besotted with mass-produced photographs, seems far removed from a time when a photographic image was rare, even singular. In this study Rachel McBride Lindsey analyzes diverse images created in a religious context, from the advent of the daguerreotype on American shores in 1839 to the unveiling of George Eastman's Brownie camera in 1900. Lindsey, though, focuses her study not on the producers but the beholders. She argues that “nineteenth-century Americans experienced religion, to a previously unexplored degree, through photographs ... [and] the very category of religion was created through circumstances of beholding” (p. xviii). Through these fragmentary images she seeks to reconstruct religious experience. She begins by examining family Bibles that doubled as repositories of family photographs, tucked into sleeves bound into the volumes. Thus a Bible became “an archive of familial descent, ... a narrative device” (p. 51). The biblical text pulled the inserted family photographs into its narrative context, which, according to Lindsey, “was so clearly mirrored in the likenesses of the saints” (p. 63

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · George (robot · Literature · Narrative · Negative · Photography · Visual arts · History · Religious Tourism and Spaces