Since the 1936 publication of Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the revolutionary impact of the photographic medium has been widely acknowledged, while the extent and nature of this impact has been much debated. Following Benjamin, some scholars have focused on photography’s effect on the nature and status of the art object; others have concentrated on its role in spectacle, on its ability to aestheticize everyday life, including the realm of politics, which is what Benjamin observed, and feared, in 1930s Germany. Part of this aestheticization of politics involved the visualization of a collective body, a cohesive community united around a core set of values and a belief in an “essence” shared by its members. Predicated on its indexical relationship to the material world and its claim to be the bearer of visual “truth,” photography was—and still is—able to seduce viewing subjects into believing the story it purports to tell and even to transport them into the picture, to see themselves within. It is in this regard that theories on the nature of photography and theories on the nature of community intersect and even become by necessity intertwined, as recent books by...