Author Description

Volume 3: "Since the invention of photography, legions of practitioners have mined its artistic and practical potential, paying particular attention to its novel depiction of space and time, its utility as a tool for documentation and exploration, and its distinctive take on modernism and modernity. This volume explores the ways in which this new medium -- photography -- and this new apparatus -- the camera -- evolved during its first century, from the masterworks of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s inventors, to the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, and Gertrude Käsebier; the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge; surveys of landscape and architecture by American and European practitioners; the documentary images of Carleton Watkins, Eugène Atget, and Lewis Hine; and the modernist works of Karl Blossfeldt, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand. This publication provides a wide-ranging look at a medium so thoroughly and instantly modern that it is represented in MoMA’s collection by works that predate any of the Museum’s paintings or sculptures by a full forty years. And now, more than 175 years later, the modern spirit of early photography remains intact, and Photography at MoMA: 1840 to 1920 provides a record of its contradictions, aspirations, and achievements. This is the final volume in the three-volume Photography at MoMA series, which draws upon the exceptional depth of the Museum's collection to tell a new history of photography."--Publisher website.