Mormonism was “born from visions of the dead,” states Mason Kamana Allred, “but its development was equally shaped by the media taken up by the living to see in extraordinary ways” (1). Seeing Things explores such shaping through a series of case studies showing Latter-day Saints embracing and adapting new media – from seer stones to books, pamphlets, panoramas, photographs, typewriters, microphotography, film, and television – in order either to connect with the dead or with church leaders’ visions of the dead, and, then, to institutionalize and manage those connections as the stuff of Mormon life. The result is an impressive contribution to the field of Mormon studies and to the historiography of religion and media in general.

Allred's study begins with a meditation on Mormon metaphysics as related to media theory. All spirit is matter, according to Latter-day Saint theology as Allred recounts it, and all matter has agency. Insofar as media is also material, then, it too has agency – in this respect the Mormon perspective resonates with contemporary media theorists’ perspective, Allred argues – not least insofar as it shapes the capacity and conception of vision, and, thus, humans’ ability to attune themselves to the more subtle (in)sights of matters spiritual in the first place. This is not to say (a la Friedrich Kittler) that media technologies are themselves wholly determining of spiritual sight or its capacity for dissemination and control, but rather that they exist in dynamic relation, such that (for instance) a cinematographer might use double-exposure to capture, model, and mobilize an otherwise experientially or theologically informed sense of meaningful interaction between matters relatively rough (first exposure) and refined (second exposure). In time such media techniques become supplemented or supplanted by others – photography begat microphotography and film begat television – and the history of Mormonism, Allred argues, is best told through (and as) the history of such inflection points, with special attention to how each medium occasioned different articulations of how best to be and act Mormon in a modern world.

This then is that book. The first chapter analyzes Joseph Smith's use of seer stones – which Allred likens to optical tools like phantasmagoria by which contemporaries both imagined and debated spirit-presence in the world – to develop texts that were simultaneously revelatory and pedagogical, insofar as they trained other would-be Saints to see like Joseph. Such seeing was potentially unruly, though, and early Mormons worked also to manage the antinomian capacity for visionary encounter through additional print publications and, then, panoramic paintings (chapter two) that canonized certain of Smith's visions and justified a particularly sectarian or “Brighamite” interpretation of their right reception and institutional continuance. In chapter three, Allred argues that Elfie Huntington's and Susa Young Gates's work with cameras and typewriters (respectively) tested the capacity for and capaciousness of queer and female agency within an increasingly patriarchal orthodoxy. Related concerns carry into chapters four and six (which themselves flank a fascinating fifth chapter on the amplificatory relationship between microphotography, genealogy, and temple work), in which Allred shows how Mormon leaders and media moguls, often the same people, moved Mormonism from the margins to the mainlines of an American cultural–political–religious milieu by consolidating and broadcasting, in film and television, an image of clean-cut, white, able-bodied, muscular, patriarchal, patriotic, and monogamous conservatism. Such conservatism, Allred suggests, was not only up-for-debate in the collective Mormon past (see again chapter three in particular) but is rightly and necessarily so now, too, that the internet has afforded new awareness of the very media and mechanisms of Mormon visionary development – from the seemingly weird to the evidently commonplace, and from the antinomian to the normative – that Allred himself centers in his study.

Allred's key terms and framing analytics are: vision, media, technology, and, to a lesser extent, infrastructure. Threaded throughout the book is also an interest in duplication and reproduction: Latter-day Saints sought to emulate Joseph Smith's visionary experiences; printers mass-produced Mormon texts; painters restaged historic moments; photographers echoed cultural stereotypes; typists transcribed written or spoken words; microphotographers doubled and stored genealogical records; cinematographers countered the proliferation of anti-Mormon films by creating their own, in which they used techniques like double exposure; and television producers established replicable patterns for Mormon life and looks. In each instance Allred highlights the capacity for alteration as well as standardization, as Latter-day Saints introduced subtle changes in their would-be copies, some of them critical of the will-to-copy itself; and he underlines also how copying catalyzes institutional development, as Saints developed new mechanisms for the distribution and deployment of duplicates. Allred appropriately nods to Walter Benjamin's famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” at two key moments in these discussions – once implicitly, in an evocatively phrased section header (“Polygamy in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” p. 106), and once explicitly, when suggesting that microfilm, despite destroying the “aura” of an original item through photoduplication, also created the conditions for “new potential signification and simultaneous existence” (pp. 135–136) – but I for one thought that he might have done more with it. This is because, as I read them, Allred's case studies show “aura” itself to be an industrial product in, of, and for the “halfway” space between ostensible originals and their would-be copies: reproduction mass-distributed the idea of originality in the first place, and also the raw materials for new rituals, as when microphotography enabled the extension of Joseph Smith's “original vision” to baptize the dead.

But to state here that I wanted more, is just another way of saying that I look forward to doing more with this book myself. In particular I look forward to teaching it: alongside Benjamin and other media studies classics; alongside primary sources such as Mormon stereocards from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and as part of an emerging field of religion, media, and infrastructure studies, where it pairs well with the works of (e.g.,) Jenna Supp-Montgomerie and Isaiah Ellis, as well as the more Mormon-focused works of John Durham Peters and Gavin Feller. Meanwhile individual chapters suggest different pairings. Chapter three (on photography and the typewriter) will find syllabus space near important studies of gender, media, and authority in nineteenth-century Spiritualism (for instance by Ann Braude and Molly McGarry, along with the forthcoming work of Emily Suzanne Clark), and with studies of women's religious agency via and despite articulations of patriarchal submission generally (Saba Mahmood, R. Marie Griffith, Kate Bowler). And chapter six (on television) is among the best studies that I know of the mechanisms and aesthetics of Mormon Correlation, complementing well the work of Matthew Bowman, Jake Johnson, and Sara Patterson. Regardless of whether it is read in part or whole, though, Allred's account has much to offer scholars in Mormon studies, media studies, and religious studies generally, and it is sure to find a place of honor in their more lively and most intersectional conversations for many years to come.