READING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS: Images as History <i> by Alan Trachtenberg (Hill & Wang: $25; 326 pp.) </i>

Photographs say much about the eye of the beholder--what Emerson called “the transcendental eyeball.” Alan Trachtenberg offers glimpses into the perceptions and values of photographers and their pictures, “a history of photographers employing their medium to make sense of their society.” Trachtenberg focuses not on the subject matter in pictures, but rather on “the point of view of the photograph itself, the interpretation it allows viewers to make of its subject.” Insofar as there is a single theme to the book, it is that American photography has represented--often in spite of itself--the violent economic and social upheavals of the hundred years beginning with the emergence of the art in 1839 and ending with the publication of Walker Evans’ “American Photographs” in 1938.

Trachtenberg zeros in on five time periods; following the current fad, he calls them “moments.” The first deals with the era of the daguerreotype and considers the portraiture of illustrious Americans and the elitist Roman models of civic virtue they convey. The second treats the Civil War, in particular Mathew Brady’s photographic chronicle. The third takes up post-Civil War photographers of the Western natural views that would soon be familiar to tourists (like Yosemite and the Rockies). The fourth presents photographers as social commentators from the 1880s to World War I. The last concentrates on Walker Evans’ photos from the 1920s and ‘30s; these, Trachtenberg says, use photography as a political art to present the theme of American anonymity. The book moves implicitly from the portraiture of an identifiable ruling elite to the anonymity of Evans’ vision, reflective of populist transformations in the American political and social consciousness.

The fact that the movement is only implicit points to a failure to knit together the discrete chapters. Trachtenberg, a professor of American Studies, makes the all-too-common mistake of confusing textual analysis--”reading”--with historical analysis and understanding. The clutter of critical paraphernalia of recent literary fads from Foucault to Barthes detracts from the substantial merits of the book and lends an obscurity to the exposition. However, when Trachtenberg allows his quest for the meanings of the photographs to take him to literary sources he clearly knows well (Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson) that his writing is persuasive and exciting.