The past decade has seen a growing interest in photography, and numerous studies of photographic practices and histories have tackled the subject from inventive angles. By now, Foucauldian and psychoanalytic accounts of the photographic image have become de rigueur, and as wonderful as these accounts are, they often lack a sustained engagement with photography's materialist history. Steve Edwards presents a compelling materialist account, since it situates photography not only as an institutional and discursive technology, but also as the site in the nineteenth century around which questions of aesthetics and truth were articulated through the language of labor and class politics. Edwards demonstrates through copious historical research that such figurations are not reducible to a simple battle over words, but point to the deepest philosophical and material investments of the contradictory discourse of nineteenth-century British photography.

In Edwards's account, photography is born within a paradox: its autogenic capacity, its power to produce—through apparatus alone—a more truthful document of the scene than painting, is initially praised by the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot even as this automatic production of the scene threatened to usurp the contested position of the photographer as an artist. Edwards shows how this paradox at the heart of photography's inception arises out of material history itself: the concern with “raising” photography to the level of fine art was born out of the aspirant class desires of the nineteenth-century photographers, who were generally petit bourgeois and anxious to set themselves apart from the “motley” proletariat. In other words, “Art is not separate from trade; rather, it presented individual photographers with an imaginary resolution to economic uncertainty and fear” (124). Edwards documents the comparisons made within photographic discourse, between the operators of photographic apparatus and operators of carding machines. These comparisons depended on the autogenic features of photographic apparatus in order to link photographers to the proletarian rabble, relegating the role of photography to “handmaiden to the arts” at best, and machine documentation at worst. At stake, then, in shifting the focus from the autogenesis of the machine to the autotelic nature of the photographer subject is not only the alignment of photography with the established discourse on aesthetics (essentially the precepts of Joshua Reynolds) but, simultaneously, an attempt to repress the allegory of labor that underwrites the operation of the photographic machine.

Among the results of this constant shifting back and forth between the autogenic nature of the machine and the autotelic nature of the subject is an opposition between “documents” (associated with machine labor) and “pictures” (associated with lofty aesthetic output), an opposition whose checkered history forms the connective tissue among the book's chapters. Edwards is primarily concerned not with individual readings of photographs (we receive no more than three or four readings of specific photographs) but with the assumptions and investments that underscore photographic discourse, as represented by British photographic journals such as The Photographic News and The British Journal of Photography. Among his most insightful interventions is his analysis of the classification of photography at the International Exhibition of 1861, a year that marks a turning point for photographers as they actively seek to be classified in the exhibition's fine arts section. While their petitions do not succeed (it would take another decade before photography would be admitted to the hallowed space of fine arts at an English international exhibition), photography proves to be a point “where classificatory orders break down so that new systems might be generated” (177). The organizers of the exhibition are forced to concede a separate room for photography even though it would remain under the larger rubric of machinery. The anomaly of photography at the International Exhibition, according to Edwards, reveals “the principle moment of fetishism in these displays [as] located in the taxonomic structure that inscribed a division between mental and manual labor as the basis for the representation of industrial society” (176). The numerous histories of international exhibitions have emphasized spectacle over the organizing principles of the exhibitions themselves, and Edwards's original reading of Exhibitionary taxonomy is provocative and very convincing.

In fact one can hardly dispute any of the arguments Edwards puts forth in the book; the labor of meticulous research is not only clear at the level of the sentence, but the arguments are nuanced and very finely wrought. If there is something missing here, it is a more thorough engagement with the theoretical models that Edwards alludes to but never quite develops. A sentence like the following, for example, too often appears at the end of a section: “The categories of labor, which such a knowledge denies, break through in the end—and at that point the fetish can be glimpsed, if only briefly, shivering in the split second of its exposure” (199). But if the category of labor “breaks through” then the fetish can hardly shiver, one would think, since it would become demystified and therefore would no longer remain a fetish. This claim, in other words, is a very broad one, and its implications for photography, if not for the Marxist theory of the fetish, need to be worked through and developed. Marxist analysis obviously provides the analytical impetus for Edwards project as a whole, and given that this is the case I wish Edwards had tied his brilliant argument about the division of manual and mental labor as it bears on nineteenth-century aesthetics in Britain to Marx's discussion of this division in The German Ideology and his resolution of its antinomies in his theory of fetishism in Capital, volume 1. Such a discussion would have articulated wonderfully with the concern with fetishism that is central to the book's main claims. This is, perhaps, too much to ask of a book that already accomplishes much and never set itself the task of being a theoretical excursus, but the author's suggestive gesturing left this reader itching for more. These minor reservations aside, this is an important for anyone interested in nineteenth-century aesthetics, visual culture, and science and technology studies. Though at the moment it may be the only book-length history of photography with a materialist bent, it is bound to set the benchmark for future studies.