Debate continues over whether visual culture studies represents a coherent field with the means to effectively train students in historical methods. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader mounts a powerful challenge to the field’s critics both by providing a historical genealogy of visual culture studies as a discipline that may trace its origins to the role of vision and visuality in the works of key writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin, and by presenting a carefully chosen set of scholarly essays that make good on the opening claims by editors Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski that visual culture has a history and that its study must be organized as a historical problem.

Sensitive to charges that visual culture studies is an amorphous and ever-expanding field without either a clearly defined object of study or rigorous research and analytical methods, the first section of the reader on the practice of visual culture studies relative to established humanities, science, and social science disciplines features three new essays that set out to define and shape the field as a historical discipline with a historical consciousness. Focusing on vision and visuality while emphasizing the need to situate seeing in relation to the other bodily senses, the essays also define visual culture as an “interdisciplinary mode of analysis” and a “concrete inventory of objects, institutions, and historically located observers.” Well-illustrated with over seventy black-and-white reproductions that attest to the Reader’s diverse range of objects, the selected essays encompass not only what the editors call the new “visual technologies” of cinema and photography but also—to name a few—the railroad, the physionotrace, the stereoscope, the lantern slide, and painting and sculpture. However, the inventory of objects is far from limitless or arbitrary. Whether the objects are commercial street signs, department stores, electric lighting, family photographic albums, or public exhibitions, the question of the importance of vision and visuality to modernity runs through the entire volume.

For those familiar with efforts to define the field of visual culture studies, such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s claim that instruction in visual culture should endeavor to defamiliarize the experience of vision by “showing seeing,” the editors’ decision to give the Reader coherence by focusing on new ways of seeing and modern forms of spectatorship is far from surprising. What makes the volume especially interesting, however, is not just its mission to historically locate seeing but also its emphasis on understanding seeing as part of complex systems and its promotion of collaboration across disciplines as a way of grasping this complexity. Lead essays by Schwartz and Przyblyski, Margaret Cohen and Anne Higonnet, and Michael Wilson distinguish the interdisciplinary field of visual culture studies as a field both defined by and especially able to handle multifaceted interrelationships, edges, and clusters. These essays call attention to the fact that the Reader is the product of a dynamic collaboration between Schwartz, a historian and scholar of cinema, and Przyblyski, an art historian and scholar of photography and urbanism who teaches in an art school.

The clear and concise introductions to the Reader’s eight sections combine the editors’ insights and training to serve as demonstrations of the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation. The specially commissioned co-authored essay by art historian Higonnet and literary studies scholar Cohen, aptly titled “Complex Culture,” self-consciously concludes by posing the model of scholarly collaboration well-accepted in natural science fields as the best way of analyzing culture as a dynamic system by bringing different and even opposed disciplinary expertise into energetic contact. While this form of interaction is strongly advocated and modeled to great effect both in Schwartz and Przybyski’s overall construction of the volume and Higonnet and Cohen’s contribution, collaboration is no collapsing merger in these essays but rather a productively agonistic process for engaging complexity. While historian Wilson’s essay asking whether visual culture is a useful category of historical analysis is not collaborative, its self-consciously interrogative mode enlists its addressed audience of skeptical historians into engagement with the field of visual culture studies. Edges and boundaries between, for example, textuality and visuality again feature prominently here as not something to be dissolved but rather analyzed. Answering his opening question in the negative (i.e., historians need not adopt “visual culture”), Wilson’s essay hails the negative benefits of interdisciplinary traffic and, specifically, the capacities for encounters between scholars and fields not to erase distinctions but rather, in conflict at the edges and boundaries, to radically question assumptions and values.

No one compendium can include everything, and the editors frankly disclose the Reader’s limits in the opening preface, particularly, the sacrifice of any attempt at a “global view” in favor of a focus on the “Western experience.” However, the Reader erects some unnecessarily limiting boundaries. To the editors’ credit, attention to gender and racialization in the context of imperialism is not segregated to the section explicitly dedicated to “Imagining Differences.” Rather, attention to differences in the excellent essays by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Kirk Savage, and Joy Kasson in the section on “Visualizing the Past” leads elegantly into the section devoted to the construction of sexual, racial, and geopolitical differences. This section also features two new essays by younger scholars: Eric Ames’s study of the ethnographic exhibition in Germany and Marcus Verhagen’s analysis of misogynistic and anti-Semitic images employed in Bohemian self-representation. Feminist scholarship (including intersectional analysis of, for example, gender and race) are well represented in the Reader.

The editors have made a striking effort to end the volume with a section entirely committed to feminist scholarship on the politics of public and private, but studies of sexuality and the contributions, for instance, of queer theory to visual culture studies are curiously left out. This culminating section is titled “Inside and Out,” a heading that perhaps unintentionally echoes the important lesbian and gay theory anthology Inside/Out edited by Diana Fuss. However, with the exception of Sharon Marcus’s discussion of the portière and the “homosocial networks” of the nineteenth-century Parisian apartment building’s resident caretaker as a threat to male heterosexual voyeurism, there is oddly no acknowledgment of the very public and visibly “out” nineteenth-century formations of homosexuality in the figure of the dandy and in and around such spectacles as the Wilde trials. Given the importance of the nineteenth century for Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality and Foucault’s prominence within the Reader, serious incorporation of lesbian, gay, and queer studies scholarship on the nineteenth century would have fit easily and logically within the shape of the volume.

Furthermore, although a comprehensively global volume may have been beyond the reach of the Reader, and while there are profound problems with the token essay approach, the editors’ justification for its limitation to Western Europe and the United States (i.e., “[A] Reader about the twentieth century would be richer in such issues as appropriations of Western visual cultures” [xxi].) does not explain the omission of scholarship on nineteenth-century visual technologies in use outside the “West,” such as, for example, the work of Christopher Pinney on early photography in India or of Timon Screech on the response to the “Western scientific gaze” in the imagery of Edo-period Japan. At the same time that the Reader might have included scholarship on aspects of the global diffusion of photography and cinema in the nineteenth century, it would also have been helpful to connect the concept of “visual technologies” to technologies of the self—again, given the importance placed on the work of Foucault. Linking visual technologies such as the camera to technologies of the self might have justified introducing difference at the foundation of the volume, that is, in the Reader’s “Genealogies” section. For example, this section might have effectively included W. E. B. DuBois’s abstracted use of photography (in his discussion of the “gorgeous” imagery of the visiting-cards of his childhood) to formulate the concept of “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Finally, in not only taking a historically bounded approach but also in self-consciously framing the question of historical methods, the Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader differs markedly from most other visual culture readers and anthologies. While the Reader shares a commitment to historical inquiry and attention to trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization with the excellent collection An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–1830, edited by Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), the Reader is distinct in the argument it makes for the importance of the nineteenth century to the field of visual studies. While there are certainly active professional associations, journals, and book series in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, there is no other interdisciplinary nineteenth-century collection that focuses so centrally on the visual. However, this restricted attention to the nineteenth century is also the Reader’s weakness. Although the Reader’s temporal parameters from the very end of the eighteenth century to the beginning decades of the twentieth contribute to the volume’s coherence, the continued location of modernity in the nineteenth-century West is at odds with the Reader’s efforts to include studies informed by postcolonial critique.

But these questions and problems raised by the Reader attest to its provocative nature. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader is the second project in Routledge Press’s “In Sight: Visual Culture” series (edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff), and the Reader makes its own strong argument for the vitality and importance of the series and the need for further visual culture readers that will take up the task it sets to others to provide a global, polycentric account counterpointing its focus on nineteenth-century Western Europe and the United States.