Joshua Brown (1) (1949–)

Brown argues that pictorial newspapers in the mid-late 19th century performed a representational balancing act in order to deal with the complexities of Gilded Age society. This included a reworking of pictorial and physiognomic cues inherited from antebellum print culture, and the development of new visual signs for the increasingly fragmented/niche identities of Americans, according to enclaves of sex, race, region, and class.

Brown convincingly argues (though I would have liked to see some consideration of print culture within a larger visual field) that news reporting was one of the most potent, fraught, and complex visual languages of the time period, and was absorbed and interpreted in many different ways by a diverse nineteenth-century viewership.… (lisätietoja)