In the mid-1970s a holographic future seemed imminent. A quarter of a million people crowded into the London exhibit of holographic art, Light Fantastic, sixty thousand in two weeks for a similar Stockholm event. A flickering 3D Princess Leia pleaded for help in the cinemas of every town. Straight-faced exhibition organizers could write that ‘before the end of 1984 it will be commonplace to have holograms in the same way that we have photographs in our homes’ (p. 315). In New York a Museum of Holography was launched. There was every reason, so the holographers thought, for optimism.

But the museum stumbled. Attendance dropped year on year. Donations dried up. By 1986, rather than representing a ubiquitous visual culture, a consultant director could only wonder what had gone wrong:

In 1992 the Museum of Holography closed, and its contents were sold to MIT. Now at the MIT Museum, an exemplary modern repository of the marvellous, uncanny and frightening, the best of the old Museum of Holography's contents are on display: a fantastic ensemble of geometric shapes, winking girls, corporate logos and artist's heads. The fate of the collection mirrors that of holography more generally. Holography remains enigmatic, a road not taken, an unclassifiable practice, a medium both miraculous and mundane. In particular, holography has seemed strangely context-less.

Historians of the Renaissance have had no problem making sense of the invention of a remarkable new method for representing three dimensions in two – geometric perspective – in the context of broader cultural and social change. Only now, with Sean Johnston's richly sourced, carefully argued, multi-perspectival history, do we have an account that turns holography from a curious failure to a technique, tool, end-product, science, technology, art form and medium that can be understood as an organic part of twentieth-century society and culture.

Johnston gives us a history in four parts. The first two focus on techniques: the largely independent creation of the subject by pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s in England, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the development of holography as a varied medium. The latter two parts explore holographic cultures: the social identities of scientist, artisan and artist holographers; the formation of schools and museums; and the creation of audiences and markets for holograms. Holographic Visions goes comfortably beyond received histories that celebrate the pioneers, such as Dennis Gabor, to give us a rounded picture populated by technicians, artists, entrepreneurs and pornographers. Indeed, Isaac Asimov once penned a limerick (p. 398):

What holography was actually for was indeed a difficult question, with many answers. Most impressively, Johnston untangles the conflicting histories of the early decades of holography and demonstrates how those histories served their narrators. The problem of George Stroke will best illustrate. In the first decade after the Second World War, Gabor, a Hungarian ex-pat who had landed at British Thomson-Houston's laboratories in Rugby, wrote up some novel techniques for improving electron microscopy; meanwhile Yuri Nicholaevitch Denisyuk, a young theoretician at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad, wrote a promising thesis on wavefront optics; and, deep in the Cold War laboratories of the University of Michigan, the optical processing of synthetic aperture radar proceeded apace. All of these would be later written up as moments of the invention of holography. Emmett Leith's work at Willow Run, Michigan, in particular, shows how holography – in this case the optical reconstruction of radar imagery at speeds impossible with electronic data-processing – was partly a direct response to Cold War demands.

The secret work of making Russia open to radar scrutiny could not be publicly celebrated. But a spin-off – Leith and Juris Upatniek's lensless photography – could be. But with its origins secret, the technique could easily escape its makers’ control. The term ‘lensless photography’ was a misleading PR invention. More alarming yet, a Michigan colleague, George Stroke, began hinting that he had played a substantial role in holography's development. To Johnston's credit the episode is painted in shades of grey; in a European context, Stroke's seniority would be a credible basis for the claim. In ‘Constructing holography’, a chapter that should serve as a model of how and why people make up ‘official histories’ of scientific specialities, Johnston shows that the received history of holography was written to secure particular actors’ interests.

There is much else to praise in Holographic Visions. Johnston shows how holography became an art form as well as an invention. An impressive array of actors of different statuses, backgrounds, interests and projects is put on display. The social depth is important; quite literally, holography has been made by fringes, and Johnston has, miraculously, made a coherent picture. Furthermore, he aims at, and succeeds in, telling a necessarily complex story without resorting to misleading simplifications. The notion, for example, that holography was simply a consequence of the laser is comprehensively dismantled. Johnston's vision is a clear and welcome one.