New Books In Communications

Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization. Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, Picture Research reveals the intermediation that has been performed by