In his historiographic essay “American Histories of Photography,” Anthony Lee claims that the photographic field is “mercurial and eclectic” in both “interests and methods.” This happens, he asserts, “partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target . . . and partly because the contours of photography’s multiple histories have touched on so many areas of inquiry—aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and more. For these and other reasons, the American history of photography is and always was a hybrid affair, pillaging its questions and attitudes from many sources in an effort to get hold of its subject” (Anthony W. Lee, “American Histories of Photography,” American Art 21 [Fall 2007]: 2). Lee could well have been describing the shape of his own remarkable (and at that time forthcoming) book. At the heart of A Shoemaker’s Story resides a single 1870 photograph (quickly made into a stereograph for wider distribution). It features seventy-five Chinese shoemakers outfitted in peasant garb—loose-fitting cotton jackets, baggy trousers, and soft slippers—posed in ranks along the exterior wall of a North Adams, Massachusetts shoe factory. This group photograph of Chinese strikebreakers hired by manufacturer Calvin Sampson, whose French Canadian workers had struck for a closed shop, becomes the focal point of an investigation into the social, cultural, political, industrial, and technological forces that produced the image. In the wake of its production, Lee follows up on subsequent events and images that emerged in response to the photo. It is a story of the production, circulation, and consequential reception of a photograph within the multiple contexts of Reconstruction America.

Lee quite literally happened upon the photograph through a chance encounter at the North Adams Historical Society where he saw a drawing of a floor plan for a North Adams Shoe factory on which was marked the location of a Chinese bunkroom. Familiar with caricatures in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated and Harper’s Weekly indicating the Chinese workers’ presence in the Berkshires in the 1870s, Lee knew of no other visual references to them in that locale. Sleuthing in the nearby North Adams Public Library, he found his photograph; that discovery led to a chain of others which in turn led to this project.

Almost halfway through the book, in a qualitative summary of the appearance and usefulness of the photograph, Lee confesses that its unfamiliar subject (undoubtedly the first Chinese anyone had seen in the Berkshires, not to mention New England) and its awkward flat composition made it nearly incomprehensible. With no overlapping planes to create three dimensions, it “simply failed” as a stereograph. With nothing beyond the factory wall and foreground strip of grass framing the line of workers, it “made no sense” as a view. Since the men remain unrecognizable, “[a]s portraiture it was useless.” And lacking focus, or any sense of event, it would have been an unlikely candidate for translation to wood engraving, so “[a]s an image for the magazines it was wanting” (125). One might ask how this unprepossessing photograph could engage our interest in such a lengthy account?

The answer comes from Lee’s assumptions about pictures generally, his claims about this and related photographs, and the fact that his book is a double project—both a history of the photograph and a methodological “primer for a means of inquiry into the many sorts of common images that fill our attics and make up our past” (264). Pictures are deposits of significant historical meanings, showing what otherwise might be lost. Even photographs that lack some obvious aesthetic quality or that remain products of less skilled practitioners are worthy of historical attention. This photograph and the images generated after people saw it constitute “a remarkable, momentarily discrete, and analyzable visual culture” (8). Thanks to Lee’s deep research, this temporally brief visual culture brings us into contact with an industry moving from a craft to an industrial setup with all its disquieting social upheavals. It engages debates about class, ethnicity, race, labor, and citizenship in migrant and immigrant populations. For the history of photography it tracks the stereoview, the emergence of a particular form of the picturesque, and the popularity of cartes de visites. This visual culture takes us beyond the Berkshires to China, California, and Quebec, via railroad and steamship. By the end of the book we have been immersed in a remarkably dense set of interrelated histories engaged by this photograph and have followed Lee’s journey as he unravels what he has found, what remains lost to us, and how, as both viewers and researchers, we can make sense of this composite.

Lee structures his four-chapter analysis around a set of actors who made and/or viewed the photograph—the shoe manufacturer, the photographers, the French Canadian shoemaker/strikers, and the Chinese strikebreakers. For all these players the image assumed significance in both constituting their identities and in generating a set of additional historical actions that were themselves photographic. Around these visual events nothing was secure, and the boundaries between pictorial events were as unstable and inconsistent as the historical forces and players that shaped them. These players and pictures circulated in and between one another in sets of constantly shifting relationships that are illuminated in a dialogue between the four chapters.

Chapter 1, “What the Shoe Manufacturer Saw,” introduces the life and times of shoe manufacturer Sampson. Lee situates the reader in New England shoemaking whose once quiet activities were transformed by Civil War production. He charts the social and technological relationships that allowed Sampson to fashion himself initially as a Yankee entrepreneur, and then as a prominent industrial manufacturer. In 1869 when he built his huge new factory outfitted with the latest machines, it required greater regimentation from his substantially French Canadian migrant labor force. They responded by organizing into a branch of the shoemaker’s union, the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, and by going on strike. When Sampson sent to San Francisco for his Chinese strikebreakers, he would have known of other work photos in the region, such as those attached to the building of the Hoosac tunnel to connect Boston rail traffic to North Adams. When the Chinese arrived he set them before his own achievement, the massive factory that dominated the city. It was also a gesture of his emerging paternalism toward his workers, generated in part by their contractual demands for lodging, water, and firewood in the factory as well as by a racialized discourse of “Christianizing” and “citizenizing” a so-called voluntary workforce. Sampson also profited from substantial press coverage of his domestic arrangements for the Chinese. In one final image response, Sampson then asked his Chinese workers to visit the photographer again, this time as individuals. Taking a copy of each bust-length photo, he made an album (now lost) as testimony to his paternalism—a unique activity for a manufacturer. But these relationships were ultimately economic and turned on the power of the manufacturer over his laborers. What Sampson saw in the photograph, Lee concludes, was the factory at the center, with labor in its proper place, “bonded” to him.

Chapter 2, “What the Photographers Saw,” looks to a second set of producers, those responsible for shooting and developing the photograph. What they saw was similar to what Sampson found in the Berkshires—a new set of entrepreneurial possibilities, but now in terms of photography. For them, Lee argues, it was a chance to market a new genre, the group portrait, but as a stereograph with ties to the tradition of the view. With people clamoring for stereoviews of national sites and events, “the Chinese in the Berkshires” signaled opportunity to merge landscape and land use. Lee carefully takes the reader through the biographies of local photographers William P. Hurd and Henry D. Ward, eventually identifying the photo as by Hurd. He shows how they learned to become professionals and watches them grapple with developments in new technologies, with the conventions for studio portrait practice, and with the highly competitive industrial production of stereoviews.

Chapter 3, “What the Crispins Saw,” examines the responses of the French Canadian migrant shoemakers to the arrival of the Chinese, including the photograph. While the Crispins saw evidence of their displacement and staged their own “response” photograph along the opposite side of the factory, it became for them a challenge to settle and become an American working class. To make his case Lee studies the history of this marginalized set of actors who forged a “diasporic identity” displaced from their subsistence Canadian farms, and establishing a strong ethnic community in the United States. On the one hand, romanticized by Longfellow’s popular Evangeline poem, on the other vilified as drunken, uneducated migrants, they were collectivized by their mill experiences and held to the romantic ideal of la survivance to establish cooperative workplaces. When they recognized an opportunity to stay, they used photographs to claim space as a community of workers with clubs, churches, and individual artisanal identities. And finally, they allied with the white English and Irish Crispins against the unorganized non-white Chinese, a small piece of the largely white working-class formation at the end of the nineteenth century.

In chapter 4, “What the Chinese Saw,” we discover the Chinese strikebreakers’ response to the photograph, one considerably different from the collectivity proposed by townspeople who saw them as uniformly strange. For North Adams residents, the photograph’s continual repetitions—of identically dressed workers or repeating windows across a façade—reinforced that sameness. What the Chinese saw instead was a need to mark their differences from one another. To map those distinctions Lee undertakes a three-part journey from Pearl River Delta villages by steamship to San Francisco and then in packed rail cars to the east. We learn of the men’s distinct positions and values, reforged in the West, reshaped by modernity, and their understandings of themselves if not as autonomous individuals then as distinct from one another. And those distinctions were marked in their frequent trips back to the photographers’ studios where they posed in changing costumes with a set of changing props. Their many cartes de visites moved out of Sampson’s purview to become part of a circulation of social relations, whether with relatives abroad or North Adams bible teachers and merchants.

In asking what his actors “saw,” Lee’s social and cultural histories return to period notions of sight as curiosity and experimentation as well as “understanding,” especially as they apply to the still relatively new and often strange medium of photography. He asserts that deep and broad explorations are required to understand these photos and discover the particular kinds of seeing and comprehension that unfolded around them. My brief summaries here fail to plumb the depth of Lee’s historical research into places, domestic arrangements, individual and collective emotions, ethnic groups, educational activities, transportation, and industry. Added to the secondary reach are searches into myriad archives, credit reports, newspapers, deed registries, labor annuals, and government surveys. The rewards are everywhere present in Lee’s research—and the pleasure of his writing. As a historian, Lee combines the local detail with the large issues, all the while turning elegant phrases and marshalling his account into a page-turning story that asserts, after all, “what the author saw.” Lee’s story has an unhappy ending. The 1870 photo and the entry of the Chinese into the Berkshires became embroiled in a national debate about labor, immigration, and race that culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Lee’s understanding of the interconnections between photography, historical forces, and multiple agents tells of the complicated time before that abrupt and disturbing end to the tale of Chinese shoemakers in the late nineteenth century.