ABSTRACT
In November 1935, Robert Taft, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, wrote to the Houghton Mifflin publishing firm in Boston to submit his "manuscript history of American photography". A "social history", as the book's subtitle termed it, was what Taft had envisioned since at least 1935. In 1938, in the context of Newhall's explicit quest for the esthetics of the medium, the label "social history" might have meant "non-artistic". Photography and the American Scene inaugurated a long lineage of American publications that, from the 1950s to the present day, have expanded the social and cultural history of American photography, although they have often been overshadowed by the better-known and mostly US-based histories of photography as an artistic medium. Robert Taft's insistence on establishing "firsts" seems naive today; his isolationist epistemology sounds awkward. His book discreetly acknowledged, and responded to, the frequent ignorance of American facts in European and especially French histories of photography.
