In Doctored, Tanya Sheehan takes a new look at the relationship between photography and medicine in American culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheehan focuses on Civil War and postbellum Philadelphia, exploring the ways in which medical models and metaphors helped strengthen the professional legitimacy of the city’s commercial photographic community at a time when it was not well established. By reading the trade literature and material practices of portrait photography and medicine in relation to one another, she shows how their interaction defined the space of the urban portrait studio as well as the physical and social effects of studio operations. Integrating the methods of social art history, science studies, and media studies, Doctored reveals important connections between the professionalization of American photographers and the construction of photography’s cultural identity.

Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Arts & Photography

Sheehan, Tanya

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.
Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s, the popularization of amateur photography around 1900, and the mass circulation of postcards and other photographic ephemera in the twentieth century. She examines the racial politics that shaped some of the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile. The book also places historical discourses in relation to contemporary art that critiques racism through humor, including the work of Genevieve Grieves, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. 
By treating racial humor about and within the photographic medium as complex social commentary, rather than a collectible curiosity, Study in Black and White enriches our understanding of photography in popular culture. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary, this book will be of vital interest to scholars of art history and visual studies, critical race studies, U.S. history, and African American studies.

Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor

In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century. Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s, the popularization of amateur photography around 1900, and the mass circulation of postcards and other photographic ephemera in the twentieth century. She examines the racial politics that shaped some of the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile. The book also places historical discourses in relation to contemporary art that critiques racism through humor, including the work of Genevieve Grieves, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. By treating racial humor about and within the photographic medium as complex social commentary, rather than a collectible curiosity, Study in Black and White enriches our understanding of photography in popular culture. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary, this book will be of vital interest to scholars of art history and visual studies, critical race studies, U.S. history, and African American studies.

Becoming Disfarmer uses a compelling sequence of over 100 images to tell the story of Mike Disfarmer's vernacular portraiture and its transformation into art. This monograph features his vintage prints along with a selection of enlargements made from his negatives in the 1970s, through which his work first became known. Disfarmer's postcard-size vintage photographs are reproduced in full color to accurately convey their varied surfaces, and most of the examples are shown in the condition in which they were found, rather than as restored images. This publication also reproduces the backs of selected vintage photographs and provides transcriptions of all handwritten notes that appear on the objects. In addition, the monograph contains high-quality reproductions of newspaper pages in which Disfarmer's images appeared, locally produced historical journals that include images by other photographers who worked at the same time and in the same region as Disfarmer and album pages like those for which Disfarmer's photographs were originally made. These fascinating additions to the scholarship were collected as primary research by the editor over a three-year period and provide historical context for Disfarmer's portraits. Complete with three scholarly essays, a bibliography and exhibition history, this monograph qualifies as the most comprehensive Disfarmer publication to date. Mike Disfarmer (1884–1959) was born Michael Meyer in Indiana, and began working as a photographer in Heber Springs, Arkansas in 1914. In addition to selling portraits made in his studio, he processed film, sold postcards and worked for hire. He was considered a mythical figure in his own lifetime for changing his surname to Disfarmer in 1939 and claiming to have originated from a tornado. His portraits--commonly considered as honest depictions of a rural population made by an eccentric outsider--have been compared with the work of masters such as August Sander and Irving Penn.

Becoming Disfarmer

Blank, Gil

Photography & Video

Neuberger Museum of Art

Pictures with Purpose, the seventh volume in the Double Exposure series, explores images from the NMAAHC’s collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography that includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, cyanotypes, stereographs, and other early photographic forms. The volume looks at how early photographs of and by African Americans were circulated and used, and considers their meaning, for the sitter, for the photographer, and for the owner of the photograph. Particularly significant is how African Americans used photography to shape their image within and beyond their communities.
Pictures with Purpose features images of unknown African Americans before and after Emancipation—including children, couples, images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform, and African American nursemaids with their white charges. Also included are photographs of renowned African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Mary Church Terrell. Photographers include J.P. Ball, Cornelius M. Battey, Matthew Brady, Frances B. Johnston, and Augustus Washington.

Pictures with Purpose: Early Photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Double Exposure, 7)

Moresi, Michèle Gates

Coyle, Laura

GILES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sheehan, Tanya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sheehan, Tanya

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sheehan, Tanya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor

Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor

Becoming Disfarmer

Pictures with Purpose: Early Photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Double Exposure, 7)