Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography

The Beautiful and the Damned, with its heavily illustrated text, goes to great lengths to contextualize the development of portrait photography in the nineteenth century. The parallel trends of common and celebrity portraiture on the one hand, and anthropological/scientific photography on the other, are thoroughly examined and ultimately shown to be intertwined as two facets of a fascination with classification and perceived order.