Galassi P. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography

Museum of Modern Art, 1981. — 156 p.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 halfcentury 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,jan 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 discontinuous, unexpected forms, Galassi identifies the critical shift in artistic .'orms that led to the invention of photography.The paintings and drawings are followed by a comparable group of photographs from the first three decades of the medium. These works represent the considerable artistic capital that such outstanding photographers as Gustave Lc Gray, Roger Fenton, and Timothy O'Sullivan made of the fact that the camera could not compose. They show, in other words, the talent with which the best early photographers embraced the artistic strategies that painters had long been inventing and which photographers could not avoid.This book accompanies an exhibition, also directed by Peter Galassi, at The Museum of Modern Art. The author has provided, in addition to the essay, a catalogue containing biographies of the painters and photographers in the exhibition and comments on the plates. His carefully selected annotated bibliography completes the volume.