Silver Cities

"First published in 1984, Silver Cities rapidly became a classic in the history of photography and in the then-nascent field of visual culture studies. Now this vastly expanded edition presents a lively interdisciplinary history of the first century of urban photography in America. Silver Cities envisions the transformation of American civilization via mass-produced and mass-disseminated photography of cities made between 1839 and the onset of World War II. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban photographers were visual explorers of the rapidly evolving urban sphere, but their understanding of that environment was defined by the prevailing cultural prejudices. To examine their visual products is to educate ourselves in the deepest concerns of American culture in the century of its transformation from agrarian youth to urbane maturity.