Photographic Presidents
Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks
Lincoln’s somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in. George W. Bush’s reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama’s selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium’s transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs—as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation—sparked public debate on these values and their implications.
An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Finnegan (Making Photography Matter), a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, demonstrates in this captivating work how photographs of U.S. presidents both shape public experience and have served as catalysts for "dramatic transformations" in the history of photography. "Presidential photographs represented elite leaders and became prominent contexts in which the implications of new visual values played out," she writes. She begins with daguerreotypes from the 1840s depicting John Quincy Adams, whom, she notes, often lamented that they were "hideous." (The technology was replaced by film in the 1880s.) She then moves to the "snapshot" presidents around the turn of the century, and writes of how the 1901 assassination of William McKinley led to a public "morbid race to publish his last photographs." The "candid camera" era that followed found Herbert Hoover and FDR to be the first presidents to have an official White House photographer document their daily activities. Finnegan's discussion of contemporary methods zeros in on the Obama administration's use of Flickr, which allowed presidential photographer Pete Souza to share more than 6,000 images on social media. Broad in scope and rich in anecdotal detail, this will please photography and history buffs.
