This is a fascinating book on a topic that, astonishingly, has received little treatment, and certainly not at all in the broad cultural context that Rice proposes. A broad, penetrating consideration of 'photographic culture'. Rice has written here photographic history, art history, urban history, social history, psycho-history. But after all, that's what many of us have been trying to write for a long time.
Kenneth E. Silver, Associated Professor of Fine Arts, New York University
Scrutinizing the photographic documentation of mid-19th-century Paris, Shelley Rice resurrects the magic of the camera as a mirror of historical change. Through a dazzling mixture of scholarship and grippingly vivid prose, she takes us on a fabulous trip through time where we can relive the excitement marking the birth of the modern city.
Robert Rosenblum, Professor of Fine Arts, New York University
Here is a book written not only for a public of specialists: it takes its knowledge into general, philosophical questions like the sudden change of time, like death, like the matter of the soul, all questions that any cultivated reader knows already, but probably still ponders.
Molly Nesbit, Associate Professor of Art, Vassar College