Quotes from Alan Trachtenberg

The daguerreotype reproduces what appeared before a lens at a particular moment and never again-its appearance is simultaneous with its disappearance, its death.

Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience

Perceived as an incalculable force in its own right, reified, fetishized, even demonized, the machine thus found a troubled place in the culture of the times.

A pioneering work in the study of neurasthenia, American Nervousness builds its case through an elaborate mechanical metaphor: the nervous system is like a machine presently under strain in response to the pressures of the machinery of civilized life.

He finds that spectacle, as he leaves the vicinity of the assembly, in an unexpected place: through the window of the speeding train, in a flashing glimpse of "a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction.