Silver Cities. The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839 - 1915.

Chapters :
1. Development of an Urban Photographic Style, 1839-1870 ;
2. Anchoring the City: Photographers and Their Studios ;
3. Grand Style Urban Photography, 1870-1893 ;
4. At its Peak: Grand Style Photography and the World's Columbian Exposition, 1892-1895 ;
5. The Hidden Hand: Jacob Riss and the Birth of Reform Photography ;
6. Photography and the Dynamic City, 1890-1915 ;
7. Silver Metropolis: Photographing the Cosmopolitan City, 1915-1939.
[Focusing on five American cities - San Francisco, Denver, Chicago,
Boston, and New York - during different stages of growth, this profusely
illustrated book surveys the changing urban scene.]
From the "blurb":
"Between 1839 and 1939, many photographers took the city as their subject. Their vision of the city became the heritage of modern America. Offering not simply facts but information, they were cultural messengers, and their messages both reflected and defined how Americans saw their cities. More important, they assisted in the process by which American culture adjusted to its urbanization.
This book is a study of American attitudes toward the city as revealed in one of its most important media. It is also an ongoing history of an urban art form. The purpose is to construct a base from which historians and those concerned with the city in America can continue to discuss a critical aspect of our history: the image of urban America and its transformation, from shortly before the birth of the modern American city to its maturity in the twentieth century. From this base, perhaps, we may begin to extrapolate the interaction between the urban environment and the men and women who dreamed it, destroyed it, and created it again.
With the arrival of the twenty-first century has come a new form of American urbanism; the festival city has replaced the service city, which itself replaced the industrial city nearly a century ago. Images of the urban past, particularly photographic images, have become instrumental tools in the casting of a strange dream-city of nostalgia overlaying superb, even cruel efficiencies of communication and information. In this new century, a digitized version of a historical photograph of a now-disappeared urban neighborhood may well travel through fiber optics below that very neighborhood, racing through the ruined and buried remnants of the original, reappearing in a design studio or a municipal planning office, where elaborately and expensively produced reproductions of those dwellings and structures rise, their outlines and their iconography generated by designers working from those digitally enhanced and disintegrated versions of the historical icon. In the process, the nature of the image as history—its imbeddedness in conditions of time, place, class, economics, knowledge, hope, and despair—is easily forgotten and difficult to reclaim. That work of reclamation is the impetus to the work that we will do over the next pages."