The purpose of this rich book is to offer a summation of the full range of what Raeburn terms the “artful” photography of the American 1930s, and to base it not on the photographs and figures featured most strongly in histories to date but on those images and their makers that his examination of primary sources suggests made a splash in the 1930s. By “artful” Raeburn means pictures that were not necessarily artworks per se but which had an aesthetic dimension pronounced enough to stop them being designated as merely commercial or news items. The usual suspects are not neglected – indeed, there are two chapters on the celebrated photographic output of Roy Stryker's Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, one on Berenice Abbott's famous documentary coverage of New York and, thinking of more obvious art photography, there are chapters on Group f.64 and on Edward Weston's Western landscapes. While much of the data here is familiar, Raeburn contributes new readings of particular images and new understandings of their circulatory processes, and, more importantly, he integrates these chapters with the rest of his study to sustain an account of the cultural work of the medium – both its images and its institutions – during the decade.

Raeburn treats individual photographic practitioners (too many to list), movements (not just Group f.64 but the Photo League), periodicals (not just Life and Look but Hound and Horn and Coronet), galleries and exhibitions (not just Walker Evans at MoMA but the San Francisco World's Fair and the establishment of the Julien Levy Gallery) and, equally crucially, the role of pundits and patrons (including Alfred Stieglitz, Lincoln Kirstein and David McAlpin). This is an ethnography of 1930s photography through what Clifford Geertz called “thick description.” Of all the facets of this description that could be highlighted, space permits mention of two: Edward Steichen's portraits of the famous and the documentary work of Margaret Bourke-White. Steichen himself told the story of his involvement with such Condé Nast publications as Vogue in his A Life in Photography (1963). Raeburn looks beneath the self-congratulatory to reveal, in considerable detail, how particular portraits and, crucially, Steichen's construction of celebrity through series of them valorized consumption when the Depression meant that most folks had no opportunity to buy. Bourke-White, by contrast, has generally been denigrated by historians, and it is heartening to assimilate the evidence with which Raeburn reinterprets – and successfully re-evaluates – her achievements.