Home > Author > Alan Trachtenberg
1 " Consider how often you see young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks, chiefly led in their little conversation by the suggestions given to their minds by what or whom they see passing in the street, men, women, or children, whom they do not know, and for whom they have no respect of sympathy. There is nothing among them of about them which is adopted to bring into play a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness, or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search of physical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink and eat all manner of vile things. "
― Alan Trachtenberg , The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
2 " A pioneering work in the study of neurasthenia, American Nervousness builds its case through an elaborate mechanical metaphor: the nervous system is like a machine presently under strain in response to the pressures of the machinery of civilized life. "
3 " He finds that spectacle, as he leaves the vicinity of the assembly, in an unexpected place: through the window of the speeding train, in a flashing glimpse of "a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction. "
4 " Somewhere between what the lens depicts and what the caption interprets, a mental picture intervenes, a cultural ideology defining what and how to see, what to recognize as significant. "
― Alan Trachtenberg , Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans
5 " The daguerreotype reproduces what appeared before a lens at a particular moment and never again-its appearance is simultaneous with its disappearance, its death. "
6 " Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience "
7 " Perceived as an incalculable force in its own right, reified, fetishized, even demonized, the machine thus found a troubled place in the culture of the times. "
