Peter Claver Fine's innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form.

Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction—typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.

Cover design by Louise Dugdale

Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021

Softcover, 216 pages, 32 color and 42 b&w images, 6 × 9 inches

ISBN: 978-1-47-429957-2