Ann-Janine Morey, Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves: Vintage American Photographs (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014).

Reviewed by Matthew Brower

Matthew Brower is a lecturer in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Developing Animals: Early American Wildlife Photographs, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). His most recent curatorial projects are Threatened Endangered Extinct: Artists Confront Species Loss (Open Studio, 2014) and Through the Body: Lens Based Works by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists (University of Toronto Art Centre, 2014).

Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves: Vintage American Photographs was a difficult book to read. This difficulty was surprising because, as a photo historian who has written on American animal photographs from an Animal Studies perspective, the book engages with topics and themes that are central to my work. However, the book approaches the material in ways that are unfamiliar to me and which did not address many of the touchstones that I see as central to either animal studies, the history and theory of photography, or visual culture. This gap in method and literature raised the question of to what extent the interdisciplinary field of critical photographic study, which, as I understand it, focuses on photographies plural and takes as one of its touchstones that, as John Tagg argued in The Burden of Representation (1988), “Photography as such has no identity,” can lay claim to the study of photography in the face of other disciplinary approaches. For this reason, I focus my response on the book’s methodology to explore how those readings are made and what they might make possible, and to determine the limits of their effectiveness.

Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves examines a personal archive of vernacular photographs that include dogs, produced between approximately 1860 and 1950, in an attempt to gain insight into American culture. The core of the book is a collection of over 300 photographs that author Ann-Janine Morey purchased in second hand stores and on eBay (xiii). The collection includes cabinet cards, cartes de visite, real photo postcards, and black-and-white snapshots. The 123 figures reproduced in the book are compelling, and reward repeated engagement. There is a vitality to these images that speaks to the cultural significance of the relationships they depict. Assembling them as a collection is a significant accomplishment and they deserve scholarly attention.

Morey started her career as a religious studies scholar and now works as an English professor (ix). To support her analysis, Morey consulted guides to narrow down the date range of the CDVs and cabinet cards to within ten years, used postmarks and guides to date the postcards, and invented her own dating system, based on her family's photographs, to date the snapshots (xiii-xiv). This book is her first academic engagement

with photography and comes across as a deeply personal project. To open the introduction, Morey presents family stories and photographs to explain that her sense of how to read photographs is shaped by her family’s own photographic history and its storytelling practices (1-6). Morey also frames Chapters 3 and 4 with introductory anecdotes or photographs from her family. The reason for this personal narrative seems to be that her family records posses the explanatory context that the anonymous images in her collection lack and she tries to use the context of her own family to establish principles and frameworks for the images she will be reading (103-4). In other words, she takes her family’s structures and history as a model for understanding the wide range of practices in the material she analyzes.

In addition to her familial frameworks for reading photographs, Morey’s conceptual engagement with photographs is also structured by her role as a collector. While she distinguishes her practice from mainstream collecting by noting her interest in images regardless of their condition, her exploration of photography is shaped by her collecting practice and focus (xiii). For example, while contrasting daguerreotypes and real photo postcards as photographic formats, she describes daguerreotypes as “the earliest and most costly of photographic images for collectors” (27). She also categorizes the images in her collection as either vintage or antique photographs. These are categories, which, while in wide use in the collecting literature, do not map on to the cleavages and periodizations that photo scholars have identified in their examination of the field. This collecting focus frames Morey’s engagement with her photographs in terms of the images’ desirability for pictorial analysis rather than their conditions of production and circulation. The effects of this framing can be seen in her positioning of the collection.

Morey acknowledges there are limits to the historical representativeness of her collection and that economic class would have differentially made photography available (xii-xiii). However, the majority of the limits she acknowledges are framed in terms of her personal standpoint rather than in terms of the representativeness of the available material. “I had to have the time to look for them and the financial means to purchase them, both class-based elements,” she writes. “The process of selection was subject to my liberal arts educational framework, along with my class, gender, and racial biases” (xiii). The representativeness of the collection becomes more pressing when we consider the book’s omissions. While Morey devotes Chapter 3 to the representation of African Americans and Chapter 6 to the representation of women, the book contains a single image of an Asian child (fig. 27, p. 43), no images of Latinos or Mexican Americans, and the single mention of Native Americans compares their ostensible fear of being photographed with white Americans' reluctance to smile in late nineteenth-century studio portraits (30). Other constraints that might question the representativeness of the collection such as which images are available on which secondary markets, the distinction between images largely circulated outside of families (such as CDVs) and images largely circulated within families (such as snapshots) in terms of how they enter those markets, and which images are thought to be worth scanning for distribution on

eBay (based on presumptions of marketability) vs. which images remain in dealers' bulk drawers, are not raised. In other words, without looking in second hand stores in New Mexico, Arizona, the West Coast, or the Dakotas, the representativeness of the available images and the paucity of images of Latinos, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asians should not be taken as completely dispositive of the images available in the underlying archive. There also remains the possibility that the majority of such images may, like the author’s, remain in their extended family context.

Morey's method is to treat the photographs in her collection as folk productions and read them through the lens of folklore analysis (46). This means treating the images as part of evolving patterns of depiction and reading the variations as significant. Morey argues that to read the images, “it is important to describe the protocols that governed the dog in the picture, because, as with any folklore, deviation from what is expected is part of the surprise and charm of the event” (28). Her core methodological assertion is that the individual photographs are meaningless but the collection has significance that can be drawn out by placing the photographs in conjunction with related works of literature. This need for a supporting context arises for Morey because "most of my photographs come from persons and contexts unknown, so any conclusion about a singular photograph must be taken as a suggestion, not fact. Having said that, however, the operating perspective assumes that while no single photograph can have meaning by itself, these photographs do have meaning as a collection" (xiv). The images in her collection, isolated as they are from their original contexts, are read against each other and contextualized with dog stories to restore “the public portion of the cultural story that gave them life” (xiv).

In arguing for the meaningless of single images, Morey draws on Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000). Wexler’s argument for reading images collectively in Tender Violence is presented in opposition to what she sees as naïve realism in contemporaneous understandings of photographs and argues instead for an inter-textual engagement with images as a strategy of reading that looks to understand domestic representations as a field. By taking the strategy as a methodological principle, Morey extends Wexler’s statement beyond what can be supported. Where Wexler notes the presence of alternative meanings in the images, Morey instead reduces the images to singular meanings and readings, arguing, “These pictures accrue their meaning as a collection, not as individual images” (89). The book also lacks Wexler’s focus on the production and circulation of the images studied, focusing instead on a vague notion of cultural meaning. It is never entirely clear if that meaning is supposed to be present for contemporaneous viewers or only for contemporary ones.

Morey’s framing of the project under as ‘Seeing Ourselves’ invites particular attention to her repeated use of ‘we’ throughout the book. Who is the ‘ourselves’ that readers are invited to see in these photographs? Who is included in Morey’s ‘we’? Is the invitation to belong extended consistently, or are there multiple senses of ‘us’ at work

throughout the book? Centrally, the book is an Americanist project; the ‘ourselves’ is not humanity (in contrast to dogs) but Americans. The book’s ‘we’ is not simply American, but also mostly white and middle class and largely southern and northeastern. While Morey devotes Chapter 3 to representations of African Americans, the core of the chapter’s argument is that photographs of African Americans must always be read as containing an implicit coercive white gaze from outside the frame. This implied positioning of the reader as white is echoed in her insistence that in addition to being suspicious of white photography, “African Americans could not trust their own access to the technology” (86). While it is important to acknowledge the structural racism shaping American photographic practices, Morey’s folklore structure does not allow a more nuanced analysis of African American access to photography by period and region, which would offer other possible relations than straightforward mistrust of the technology. Additionally, her ‘we’ has a particular view of human relations to dogs which may not be shared by the majority of the subjects of the photographs in her collection. When contrasting the cultural roles of dogs and horses, Morey suggests that "we don't ask for a dog's cooperation. We assume that will happen once the dog understands what we want, and we assume that the dog wants to cooperate no matter what" (19). This ‘we’ presumes an agreement about the structure of human-animal relations that ignores the historical range and diversity of human-dog dynamics.

Perhaps most significantly for this review, the book’s ‘we’ doesn’t seem to include photo historians and theorists. In arguing for the significance of her project, Morey suggests that “Since its inception, photography has been a key element in the design and perpetuation of cultural hierarchies, but we have yet to grapple with this powerful visual rhetoric and its historical impact" (44-5). While we, as photo scholars, may not have completely resolved these issues, I would argue that most of the important photo scholarship since the 1970s has been focused on grappling with these questions. This lack of sustained engagement with the literature on photography makes some of her analysis less effective than it could be. Morey repeatedly refers to photography as a coercive technology but never provides a clear account of who is coerced or how. Is it the sitters who are coerced, the photographer, or the viewers? This is where Morey's lack of attention to the specificity of the photographic processes, economies, and modes of circulation surrounding her objects of study causes problems for her argument.

At their strongest, her readings of literature to contextualize images reveal patterns that might otherwise be overlooked, as in her reading in Chapter 2 of curls and lace collars in portraits of young boys as attempts to perform the literary characters of Buster Brown and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Less convincing is her use, in the same chapter, of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby to provide explanatory context for a 1908 photograph of a young man beside a dog on a table. The presence of a dog on a table in the novel, and the claim by the writer of the postcard’s text (not reproduced) that the dog belongs to him or her and not the sitter, is taken by Morey as evidence that the photograph can be meaningfully elucidated by reference to the novel’s themes of imposture. The different

conditions of imaging technology, economics of photographic production, cultural and social conditions, and the intervening world war are not considered in her interpretation of the image’s meaning.

This lack of interest in the specificity of images and their cultural contexts shapes her discussion of hunting imagery. Morey’s reading presents American hunting culture as unified rather than regional and class based. The hunting literature she focuses on is largely Southern, and she reads it as characteristic of American hunting culture as a whole. For example, in describing the meaning of Southern boys’ desire for guns as representing “entrance into the brotherhood of white masculinity,” Morey explains that it is “likely that this comment was as salient for youth in the West and East as it was for Southern youth” (144). Yet, the literature on American hunting clearly argues that Southern hunting culture is distinctive from other American hunting cultures, just as Southern masculinity is distinctive from other American manhoods. Morey’s overarching reading of American hunting culture treats hunting as a symbolic activity focused on policing masculinity, one in which animals, by being penetrated by the hunter, are feminized. Morey summarizes her reading as follows: “when viewed through the hunting scope, all prey is feminized and all hunters are male” (167). This framework, which she draws from Brian Luke’s activist account Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (2007), buys into a dangerous gender binary in which masculinity is always only penetrating and femininity is always only penetrated. While she acknowledges in Chapter 6 that the existence of women hunters troubles this reading, she takes this trouble as challenging “to animal studies perspectives on the ethical treatment of animals” (168). This is a narrow engagement with the animal studies literature that conflates animal studies with animal advocacy. It is also a reading that fails to engage with the literature on American hunting photographs.

Overall, there is a cultural and aesthetic richness to the images reproduced in the book that is compelling and that speaks to the historical importance of dogs in the lives of Americans. While the book claims that photography is culturally coercive, the coercion that is most clearly present in these images (besides the coercion of African American subjects that Morey rightly highlights) is focused on the animals who have been constrained in order to assure their appearance in the image. The question of the relation between the need to impose that constraint to make the animal visible, and the desire to include the animals in images which document and commemorate family, reveals something significant about the role of the animals in the sitters’ lives. Given the technical, cultural, and aesthetic pressures acting on the photographers as they composed and produced the images, the differing degrees of visual and photographic literacy of the subjects, and the shifting cultural roles and understandings of photography in the period the collection covers, as well as the regional variations in human-animal relations, it is hard to generalize and provide a comprehensive account of those tensions. Morey’s attempt to do so is sometimes unconvincing. Dog stories are an important resource for helping to understand the history of human-animal relations in America. It is less clear

that they can provide the kind of context required to make the images legible in the way that Morey wants.