This thoroughly researched book covers how photography in the nineteenth century allowed Americans to transact traditional forms of religious experience in new ways. Rachel McBride Lindsey focusses on images as diverse as death and mourning pictures, spirit photography, and late-century stereographs of the Holy Land and other religious sites, which can be considered among the first examples of mass media. In addition to its focus on religious issues, this book could serve as an introduction to how the earliest forms of photography enacted new epistemologies that altered people's ways of defining themselves and their faith.

Lindsey focusses on how everyday people came to incorporate these newfangled images into their religious beliefs. In doing so, the author consistently demonstrates respect for their religious practice, and in large part avoids condescension or irony while analyzing the gullibility that surfaces, for example, in discussion of spirit photography as she deconstructs some of the truth claims made about these images. She employs in a thoughtful way a variety of methods developed in various interdisciplinary fields. Few of her subjects left behind written comments about these highly personal images and how they may have satisfied inner needs and how they drew millions to pictures that putatively represented promised new levels of objectivity and, perhaps, proof. Inevitably these topics remain challenging and conjectural. Lindsey develops pragmatic theoretical approaches, but wisely avoids being overly schematic or rigid. At several junctures she grounds her discussion by focussing on how particular families found ways to help process birth, death and religiously oriented themes as they evolved from daguerreotypes to stereographs and Brownie pictures.

The ambitious scope of A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America inevitably brings lapses. The need for such images among believers could be more rigorously pursued in places, perhaps buttressed by a more thoroughgoing discussion of the semiotic differences between religiously oriented photography and, say, traditional fresco painting, and how they could serve some of the didactic aims in different yet effective ways. There are times when Lindsey loses a sense of proportion in topics like the trial of Howard Mumler Boston in 1869 on the claims for spiritual photography, spurred on by P. T. Barnum's presence at the trial as a witness that was widely publicized at the time. In another chapter, the details of long-past itineraries of photographic expeditions in Palestine and elsewhere lose focus. More far-reaching issues of the time are barely touched upon, most notably the question of how or whether Darwin's theories may have fueled some of the rising claims for photographic objectivity in matters of Genesis and the Scriptures. Also, Lindsey largely ignores why death photographs, which were wildly popular from the 1850s onwards, virtually disappeared soon after World War I.

Nonetheless, Dr. Lindsey's commitment and evident passion for her subject, in addition to her brisk and engaging writing and her willingness to deftly introduce humor at crucial junctions, help make this an insightful, useful, and highly readable book.