Illustrating Contingency: Photographic Reproductions in Writing on the Visual Arts

This dissertation, Illustrating Contingency: Photographic Reproductions in Writing on the Visual Arts, considers the gap that often exists between photographic reproductions and the texts that they are used to illustrate. While the written text may refer to a brilliantly colored painting or a monumental sculpture, the object is usually represented on the printed page by a small reproduction, often in black and white. Such illustrations are central features of published texts on the visual arts, however the disparities between text and image are typically dismissed as the inevitable results of high printing costs, divisions of labor in publishing or copyright restrictions. I assert that these differences between text and image are actually of foundational importance to the construction of disciplinary knowledge and as such can provide valuable insight into historically specific modes of seeing the productions of visual culture. By bringing together case studies across the histories of art, film, and architecture, I aim to create an understanding of the illustrated text as a unique and particularly modern medium of communication. I maintain that the interpretive framework provided by the illustrated text was critical to the experience of modernity because it modeled ways of seeing and understanding the rapidly changing visual world. Analysis of the reproductive images used in these texts, coupled with the written descriptions that originally guided their interpretation, provides a valuable, though typically overlooked, point of access into the varied expectations for visual experience across the disciplines from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.