Organizational fields, cultural fields and art worlds: the early effort to make photographs and make photographers in the 19th-century United States of America

The utility of the production of culture perspective is expanded by incorporating concepts developed for analysis of culture consumption into a framework for the historical investigation of emerging fields of cultural production. The idea of 'role as resource' and the concept of 'field structuration' processes are linked with Bourdieu's approach to fields of status differentiation and to 'art world' analyses to illuminate the creation of photographic meanings in the emerging, and rapidly growing, held of cultural production and economic activity surrounding 19th-century photography in the USA.