Feeling Exposed: Early Photography and Privacy in the United States

Feeling Exposed examines the relationship between early photography and emerging concerns about privacy in nineteenth-century America. While scholars have often located the eruption of privacy anxieties in the 1880s with the advent of the handheld camera and halftone printing, this book argues that photography has always posed a risk to privacy—not because of any single technological innovation, but because it is fundamentally a system of visibility.

Despite the limitations of early photogra...