Study Notes on François Brunet's Analysis of Robert Taft and Photography as a Mass Medium

Author: François Brunet
Source: American Art, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 25-32
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Stable URL: JSTOR

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In 1938, two key American histories of photography were published:
- Photography: A Short Critical History by Beaumont Newhall (Museum of Modern Art).
- Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 by Robert Taft (University of Kansas).
Newhall’s work is well-known and critically analyzed; however, Taft’s text has garnered little scholarly attention despite continuous reprints and its role as a primary source of information.
Recent digitization of Taft’s research papers by the Kansas Historical Society encourages a re-evaluation of his contributions to the history of photography.

The article highlights Taft’s perspective on photography, particularly its role as a mass medium and as a form of news illustration.
The rise of illustrated news magazines in the 1930s was a catalyst for writing about photography in the context of mass communication.

Brunet’s previous works characterized Taft’s “social history” as one that narrates photography's influence on American history and discusses its “historical value.”
The article does not aim to position Taft’s work against Newhall’s but instead emphasizes its relevance in art history and its contribution to understanding photography within a cultural context.

Historical Value of Photographs: Taft defined this in two ways:
1. Documentary Value: Photographs that serve as truthful records, documented with proper dates and contexts, are historically valuable (PAS, 317).
2. Influential Photographs: Those that significantly impacted society should be valued equally, if not more so, than technically superior or artistically meritorious photographs (PAS, 321).
Examples discussed:
- Mathew Brady’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln, influential in the election of 1860 (PAS, 321, 194–95).
- William Henry Jackson’s photographs of Yellowstone, which influenced national park policy (PAS, 321).

Taft’s book integrates the technological evolution of photography with significant historical narratives from the Jacksonian era to the Gilded Age, focused on popular and mass culture.
The text lacks clarity in its theoretical framework and avoids European topics, presenting an multiperspective empirical account based on over ten years of research.

Newhall framed photography primarily as an aesthetic medium in his critical history and tied the photographic narrative to the museum context as opposed to technological or historical development.
Taft critiqued the aesthetics-focused narratives by highlighting photography's social utility in modern print culture and its role in the commercialization of history.

Taft contrasted the idea of artistic merit with the notion of social influence, arguing for the societal implications of photographs over their artistic qualities.
For Taft, photographs transcended aesthetics to become documents of historical significance, emphasizing their impact on collective memory rather than their immediate visual qualities.

Taft's analysis culminated in a review of photography’s integration into modern print media, particularly focusing on the pictorial press.
He documented the transition from traditional illustration to photography in newspapers, noting that this transition occurred gradually and was met with resistance from traditionalists.
Taft emphasized the photography revolution as gradual, situating it within the technological advancements of the halftone process that significantly improved reproduction capabilities in journalism and popular media.