The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

摘要

The task of writing a survey of the history of photography presents numerous challenges. What images to include, what themes to foreground, and which persons and subjects to highlight are only a few of the many questions that require consideration. In The Origins of American Photography, Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspenwall present one of the most thorough overviews yet of American photography's first fifty years. Like several other photographic surveys from the past two decades-including Maria Morris Hambourg's The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century (1993) and Merry A. Foresta's At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (2003)-their study is centered on a specific body of images from an institutional collection, in this case the Hallmark Photographic Collection, built by Davis over the past three decades and recently presented to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.