At the Edge of Sight Photography and the Unseen

"A beautifully written and deeply original book, At the Edge of Sight integrates historical and theoretical sophistication with the author's distinguished practice of photography in very new ways. Shawn Michelle Smith investigates the medium's patterns of blindness. This negative potential - learning to observe what one is not seeing - is revolutionary, and its profound, peculiar, uncanny force is beautifully invoked throughout." - Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism "Shawn Michelle Smith is our foremost scholar of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American photography. In this book, she engages with Benjamin's notion of the optical unconscious to think through what's at the 'edge of sight' in the work of photographers and theorists, an approach that allows her to bring together, successfully, a wide range of insights and political formations." - Elspeth Brown, author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929