The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London [Paperback]

The Mass Image situates the creation of the first photographically illustrated magazines within the social relations of the emerging popular culture of late Victorian London. It demonstrates how photomechanical reproduction allowed the illustrated press to envisage modern life on a much more intense scale than ever before.Introduction: Mass Reproduction and the Mass Audience Imaging the City: London and the Media in the 1890s Wood Engraving: Facsimile and Fragmentation Process Reproduction and the Image Assembly Line The Illustration of the Everyday The Photograph on the Page Learning to Read the Halftone Bibliography

'In additon to being an important work on photomechanical reproduction in its own right...The Mass Image is also a fascinating and valuable read for any and all scholars of pre-cinema and early cinema in general.' - Simon Brown, Journal of British Cinema and Television

'Beegan offers a scrupulous historical account of one aspect of an otherwise well-documented visual culture. The technical and biographical information exhibited here ensures that this will be a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the photographically reproduced image. A number of Beegan's conclusions are refreshingly counterintuitive in disrupting the triumphant march toward ever greater realism presumed to follow the introduction of the photograph. The common Victorian failure to recognize 'the act of representation within reproduction', as Beegan points out, mirrors our own continued failure to do so.' - Matthew Rubery, Victorian Studies

'By bringing us into the Victorian social history and cultural debates surrounding the development of new techniques of mechanical reproduction, Beegan takes us beyond Walter Benjamin's over-used pronouncements on 'aura' and into the complex relationships among aesthetics, technologies, labor, and meaning. As with many late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century works on the Victorian period,lË