A mirror with wings: Photography and the new era of communications

Simone Natale’s chapter, “A Mirror with Wings: Photography and the New Era of Communications,” questions how and to what extent photography participated in the transformations of the ways communication was conceived, administered, and used in middle-nineteenth century United States. Examining aspects of the medium’s reception of the period, he argues that this was related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies, and that photography was conceived, from the very beginning, as a medium of communication in the strictest sense of this term: a tool for putting images in movement in order to be carried, marketed, and transported.