"Making Culture Visible provides a fresh focus on the history of nineteenth-century photography. The narrative moves from a close focus on several selected events between 1847 and 1900, beginning with six industrial fairs of the 1840s-1860s to the looming presence of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in the mid 1870s. The last two chapters deal with the exhibition work of the Smithsonian Institution's US National Museum in the 1880s and finally the collecting and displays of public libraries in the 1890s. The evolution of the increasingly complex social function of photography is clearly demonstrated. Photography had moved from being an object of commerce to an applied tool of specialized knowledge, a museum artifact of social culture, and finally, a visual resource of information." "This book revitalizes the roots of photography's own cultural history by reconnecting it to a living social process that has often been absent in recent theoretical works on photography. Photography does not operate in a vacuum, and the public dimension of the history of photography was, as it continues to be, played out on the cultural stage of exhibition."--BOOK JACKET.