Photographic Presidents

Cara A. Finnegan is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression and Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs.

CoverTitleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. The Daguerreotype Presidents1. Photographing George Washington2. Early Daguerreotypes in the U.S. and the Nation's Capital3. John Quincy Adams and National PortraiturePart II. The Snapshot President4. Handheld Photography and the Halftone Revolution5. William McKinley's Last PhotographsPart III. The Candid Camera Presidents6. Visual News in the Early Twentieth Century7. Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Candid CameraPart IV. The Social Media President8. Changing Visual Media from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Digital Age9. Barack Obama and FlickrConclusion: The Portrait Makes Our PresidentNotesSelected BibliographyIndexBack cover

"Entertaining yet informative. . . Photographic Presidents is an excellent book that brings context and depth to certain decision points within history and how photography shaped them. It takes on a concept often overlooked by scholars as simply there, and moves it front and center into the discussion." --Congress & the Presidency "Well-written and engaging . . . What will be the next step in how presidents become photographic? Finnegan cannot-and does not try to-answer that question, but the fact that the question resonates in my head after putting down her book is a testament to how thought-provoking Photographic Presidents is." --Journal of American History "Very interesting and informative . . . Finnegan has covered a lot of ground in this well-illustrated book. She traces the development of the photographic medium and techniques with the history of visual communications and the image of the presidents, and has done it extremely well." --Journal of American Culture