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, field of cultural production and economic activity surrounding 19th-century photography in the USA.