This lecture examines the emergence of photojournalism in Paris in the last third of the nineteenth century in relation to the importance of changing technologies of speed, especially in relation to the history of transportation. It contextualizes one of the most notorious global media events, “The Dreyfus Affair,” in a broader visual culture of the news in which photography and film emerged as the key modes of news reporting.
“[In Spectacular Realities], Schwartz weaves a multilayered history of the evolution of mass entertainments in Paris during the 19th century . . . an engrossing study.”
— F. Burkhard, Choice
Vanessa R. Schwartz is Professor of History, Art History and Film at the University of Southern California, where she also directs the Visual Studies Research Institute. She is the author of It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007), Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (1998), and Modern France: A Very Short Introduction (2011). She was awarded a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
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