The argument of this book is simple: viewers of photographs interpret what they see in historically contingent ways. Drawing on her background as a scholar of rhetoric, Finnegan draws on four case studies from American history to make her case that “photography animated particular ways of seeing and habits of response among viewers” (4). Focussing first on photographs of the Civil War dead in conjunction with spirit photographs, and then looking at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, child labor photographs, and an exhibition of Farm Security Administration views, Finnegan examines viewer responses to the pictures to argue that we can recover “historically specific interpretive communities” (8). Viewers are key participants in what she calls the “event” of photography. By analyzing their rhetoric – the ways in which they wrote about photographs – Finnegan contends that we can recover the historical experience of looking at pictures. In her own visual twist on the better-established study of reader response, she argues that we can understand the practice of photographic viewing as “contextual,” “communal,” “contestable,” and “contingent” (173–74).

The author uses each of the case studies here to illustrate that photographs can evoke very specific viewer responses, determined by the broader cultural and historical milieu, that speak to the larger communicative possibilities of the photographic image. Thus the collective response to the Civil War and spirit photographs of the 1860s reflects a grief and sense of communal loss that speaks to photography's capacity to “produce presence in the face of profound, and often permanent absence” (2, original emphasis). The interpretations of a photograph of the young Abraham Lincoln, recovered in 1895, speak to photography's ability to communicate character. T. R. Dawley's fascinating use of Lewis Hine's photographs of child laborers to advocate for the social beneficence of child labor – a view utterly at odds with Hine's – suggests the way that photography can be appropriated for the viewer's own ends. And finally, the comments written on hundreds of response cards filled out by visitors to an exhibition of FSA photographs in 1938 reveal photography's capacity to reveal the magnitude of social problems.

All too many critics imagine photographs to have a consistent meaning that persists across time and cultures. The author is thus correct to argue for the value of understanding photographic viewing in a historical context that acknowledges how prevailing social, political or economic concerns can shape viewer's interpretations, or how prevailing rhetorical tropes can determine the content of their responses. One might wish she could have tested her proposition herself, by looking at how some of the images she studies here – particularly the Civil War photographs and the FSA images of rural poverty – evoked different responses from viewers who encountered them later, and in different contexts.

Finnegan is explicitly writing against a tradition of photographic criticism that privileges the perspective of the author–critic above that of the broader viewing community. And she does a good job of bringing new voices to the fore. The passages in which she focusses on the voices of her recovered viewers are the strongest in the book. Ironically, though, when she steps back from her viewers’ words to frame her more theoretical and historical arguments about her case studies, she relies heavily on quotes from other scholars and critics, and the too frequent insertion of their words is a distraction. Just as she trusts her photographic viewers, Finnegan could have trusted her own voice. She has a good idea.