Disillusioned

Jordan Bear is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto.

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The History of Photography and the Problem of KnowledgeOne. See for Yourself: Visual Discernment and Photography’s Appearance Two. Shadowy Organization: Combination Photography, Illusion, and ConspiracyThree. Same Time Tomorrow: Serial Photographs and the Structure of Industrial VisionFour. Hand in Hand: Gender and Collaboration in Victorian PhotographyFive. Signature Style: Francis Frith and the Rise of Corporate Photographic Authorship Six. Indistinct Relics: Discerning the Origins of PhotographySeven. The Limits of Looking: The Tiny, Distant, and Rapid Subjects of PhotographyConclusion. “Normal” Photography: The Legacy of a HistoryNotesBibliographyIndex

“In an impressive and timely counterpoint to recent emphasis on the archival appropriations of photography, Jordan Bear turns conventional assumptions about belief in photographic realism on their head, showing that, throughout the nineteenth century, claims for photographic verisimilitude were greeted with doubt, distrust, disappointment, and even ridicule, opening the way to other photographic practices—and, indeed, as exemplified by Disillusioned, to another history of photographic production and consumption and to important new insights into the historical formation of the discerning liberal subject.”—John Tagg, Binghamton University