Today we are so accustomed to seeing photographs wedded to text - whether in the family album or daily newspaper - that the verbal framing of the photograph has become invisible. The text is internalized within the image, and the meaning of the photograph becomes clear and self-evident, as if by the evidence of the photograph itself.

In Scenes in a Library, Carol Armstrong explores the experimental moment, at the inception of the new medium, when the word came to haunt the photographic image and the forty or so years - roughly from the 1840s to the 1880s - during which the photographic image alternately resisted and became assimilated by the printed page.