Writing in 1931, German philosopher Walter Benjamin identified photography's original contribution as making visible what is generally imperceptible. Photography, he explained, made evident “the optical unconscious.”Footnote ¹ In At the Edge of Sight, Shawn Michelle Smith takes up Benjamin's concept to explore “the new frontiers of vision that photography introduced” (5) and contributes to the robust scholarly project of “showing seeing”—or making seeing “accessible to analysis.”Footnote ² What distinguishes this work is its exploration of “the dynamics of … not seeing” (7). Benjamin presented the optical unconscious as the result of failings in human sight. Smith shows that limitations of photography and blindness generated by particular discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and nation also produce the unseen.

This small volume consists of seven chapters, the bulk of which consider the work of professional photographers operating during the Progressive Era. Smith opens by challenging the conception that Roland Barthes put forth in Camera Lucida of the punctum—the personal response to an aspect of a photograph that “pierces” the individual viewer.Footnote ³ The punctum, Barthes argued, defies analysis because it resides outside knowledge systems that inform structural readings of a photograph (the studium). The puncta that Barthes defines for various photographs, however, consistently reveal anxieties about race and reproduction borne out of his social position and cultural knowledge as a gay, white man. Exposing Barthes's blindness to the reliance of the punctum on the studium, Smith establishes the analytical foundation of her study: seeing and not seeing cannot be divorced from the “cultural discourses and habits of thought” determined by particular systems of meaning (8).

Race and sexuality continue to be explicit themes as Smith moves into an exploration of the relationship between photography, science, and technology. By the late nineteenth century, the fields of eugenics, criminology, sexology, and anthropology all relied on photography to codify bodies along hierarchies of race, sex, and sexuality. Photography, however, also offered a means for freeing the body from these scientific archives. Smith details how F. Holland Day's use of “soft” pictorial aesthetic in his photography prompted “imagination rather than observation” (47) and allowed him to bring into view homoerotic desire otherwise rendered invisible. The comprehensive photographic study of human motion that Eadweard Muybridge produced in the mid-1880s provides further evidence of the limitations of photography as a tool of science, as well as perception. These motion studies do not (indeed, cannot) capture motion. Motion, Smith clarifies, resides only in the black spaces between photographic frames, implied by the logic of sequence and reliant on “the labor of imagination” (98). Conversely, Andrew J. Russell produced photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad in the late 1860s that captured what motion would erase. Documenting the path of the railroad, Russell made visible the foreground that the speed of trains rendered impossible to see. But, in his focus on the tracks, the landscape, and Irish tracklayers, Russell made invisible the Chinese laborers who worked for the railroad and Native Americans who inhabited the land it traversed. “Making the way for the train,” Smith writes, “Russell's photographs also mark the path of white territorial expansion, making an imperial destiny visually manifest” (124).

Another prominent theme in this work is the privilege and power of professional photographers to indulge, even create their optical desires. Working at the turn of the century, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons resisted industrialization with nostalgic photographs of New England family farms staged to depict an “idealized agrarian past” rooted in Anglo-Saxon land ownership (18). Against these photographs, Smith argues, Emmons's later photographs of southern tenant farming can be read as critiques of the poverty and exploitation inherent to that institution. However, because the past agrarianism celebrated (and mourned) in Emmons's northern photographs was inextricably linked to slavery—the progenitor of tenant farming—it is possible to read her southern images as also nostalgic.

The book's final chapter brings its primary themes into the twenty-first century with an examination of the widely disseminated digital photographs depicting the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. The role of the young, white Pfc. Lynndie England in the photographs and torture (which included hooding the detainees and humiliating them sexually) revitalized “suppressed images of lynching,” with England symbolizing “the ghosts of white women, in whose names lynching was condoned” (18–19). The Abu Ghraib images, Smith concludes, reveal “willful blindnesses in both the present and the past” (212).

Smith's previous works firmly established her as a leading cultural historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography. The 2014 recipient of the Lawrence W. Levine Award for the “best book in American cultural history,” At the Edge of Sight is uniquely impressive. This text's innovative examination of photography's relationship to the unseen ensures its appeal and importance to visual culture scholars. Yet, it is also an invaluable primer for the novice student of photography and its history. In the course of her analysis, Smith introduces the reader to a myriad of prominent photographers, details various types of photography, and engages a vast field of visual culture theorists, past and present. Her rigorous contextualization of the photographers and photographs under study also illuminates historical dynamics shaping the Gilded Age and Progressive Era United States, bringing into the frame developments such as the expansion of the railroad and nation, changing racial orders, increased immigration, the advance of scientific racism and sexology, and advances in visual media and practices. Moreover, containing 120 photographs, including nine color plates (one of which reproduces the “first” photograph), this book constitutes an extraordinary archive of celebrated and understudied photographs. Finally, the product of a working artist, At the Edge of Sight is an original and disciplined collage of theory, history, photography, and the author's artwork, all woven together by smart and accessible prose. As complete as it is concise, this work moves beyond a consideration of how photography both exposes and compensates for the limits of human sight to ask how it reveals blind spots of the mind, as well as the medium itself.