A Communion of Shadows
Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day's parlance, a "mania." This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond.
Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame--theological expectations, for example--as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, "spirit" photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey's interpretation of "vernacular" as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.
A multimedia collaboration with MAVCOR—Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion—at Yale University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this important monograph, Lindsey, religion professor at Washington University in St. Louis, explores the relationship between Christian religious practice and early forms of what she calls "vernacular photography" to understand how 19th-century photographs operated as religious relics. Her survey of the intersection of photography and faith examines family photograph albums as an extension sometimes literally of the family Bible, the ways photographs were incorporated into 19th-century mourning practices, legal and religious debates surrounding spirit photography, and commercially produced stereographic views and visual tours of the Holy Land. Throughout, Lindsey engages the spiritual meanings of photographs as part of religious practice; the racial discourses at work through visual depictions of, for example, one's ancestors, as in the practice of using the family Bible to hold pages of a family tree accompanied by photographic portraits; and the presentation of contemporary inhabitants of Palestine as Biblical characters. Christianity is the focus in this text, and readers will be left wondering how 19th-century Jewish, Muslim, and Native communities (to name just a few) responded to photographic practices. This is a thoroughly researched, trenchant study of Christian America's use of photographs, as visual and material objects, to construct narratives of personal and religious significance.
