List of Illustrations  ix

Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction. First Photographs  1

— Excess and Accident  21

1. Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida  23

2. The Politics of Pictorialism: Another Look at F. Holland Day  39

— My Muybridge  73

3. The Space Between: Eadweard Muybridge's Motion Studies  75

4. Preparing the Way for the Train Andrew J. Russell  99

— When the Train Rolls In  129

5. Chansonetta Stanley Emmons's Nostalgic Views  131

6. Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography  165

— In the Crowd  193

7. Afterimages: Abu Ghraib  195

— Untitled (Abu Graib)  213

Epilogue. A Parting Glance  215

Notes  217

Bibliography  265

Index  283

"A beautifully written and deeply original book, At the Edge of Sight integrates historical and theoretical sophistication with the author's distinguished practice of photography in very new ways. Shawn Michelle Smith investigates the medium's patterns of blindness. This negative potential—learning to observe what one is not seeing—is revolutionary, and its profound, peculiar, uncanny force is beautifully invoked throughout."—Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism

"Shawn Michelle Smith is our foremost scholar of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American photography. In this book, she engages with Benjamin's notion of the optical unconscious to think through what's at the 'edge of sight' in the work of photographers and theorists, an approach that allows her to bring together, successfully, a wide range of insights and political formations."—Elspeth H. Brown, author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929

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