How American Photography Came Into Its Own

The earliest photography was voracious and encyclopedic. There was a whole world of things that had never been seen in this particular, startlingly realistic way. People were especially intrigued by imperial, foreign, and exotic subjects: queens, presidents, and maharajahs; Gothic cathedrals, volcanic mountains, the pyramids, a herd of elephants, a rickshaw. But, as the medium became more accessible, it also became more personal. People wanted to see themselves and people like them. Photographs became not just documents but mementos, and the memories they preserved were treasured and passed on. Photographers also took note of the entirely ordinary and ephemeral things around them: a shelf of glassware, a broom in a courtyard, a tree, a leaf. This is especially evident as the show builds from format to format—including tintypes, ambrotypes, paper prints, and stereographs, each an improvement on the last where the maker’s control was concerned. Although a number of images are credited to known studios or established photographers like Alice Austen, Carleton Watkins, Mathew Brady, and Eadweard Muybridge, there are no trophies here, and much of the modern work is by little-known or unknown makers. The best curators are not just connoisseurs or experts in their fields; they have something undefinable, something that “taste” doesn’t really cover—an understanding, sympathetic, and discerning eye that sees beyond the surface to something emotional and hard to pin down. “The New Art,” curated by Jeff Rosenheim, the reliably sharp and witty head curator of the museum’s department of photographs, is full of pictures chosen for what they convey about their moment in history: Atlanta in ruins in 1866, the shattered façade of a building that barely survived the San Francisco earthquake, the scars of a formerly enslaved man in the famous image “The Scourged Back.”