Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Lindsey, Rachel McBride

Paperback

Religion General 19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Photography

ISBN10: 1469633728
ISBN13: 9781469633725
Publisher: Univ Of North Carolina Pr
Published: Oct 30 2017
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day's parlance, a mania. This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond.

Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame -- theological expectations, for example -- as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, spirit photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey's interpretation of vernacular as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.

A multimedia collaboration with MAVCOR--Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion--at Yale University.

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