Before photography: Painting and the invention of photography

Dust jacket notes: "The invention of photography was one of the most important cultural and artistic events of the nineteenth century. Yet its origins have been studied largely from the scientific point of view. This carefully reasoned essay challenges the conventional notion that the invention of photography was fundamentally a technical achievement, without artistic roots. Peter Galassi, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, argues that the medium 'was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition.' Ever since the Renaissance invention of linear perspective, artists had considered vision the sole basis of representation. But only gradually did they formulate pictorial strategies capable of suggesting the immediacy and relativity of everyday visual experience; only after centuries of experiment did they come to value pictures that seem to be caught by the eye rather than composed by the mind. Galassi argues that photography was born of this transformation in artistic outlook. To support this argument the author has assembled forty-four innovative European paintings and drawings made in the half-century before the invention of photography was announced in 1839. These works, landscapes by John Constable, J. B. C. Corot, and their contemporaries, show an impressive independence from earlier standards of composition, an original sense of pictorial order based on a heretical concern for the most humble scenes. In their fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of synoptic perceptions and dicontinuous, unexpected forms, Galassi identifies the critical shift in artistic norms that led to the invention of photography." 152 pages, 82 plates (9 in color), 38 reference illustrations.