"Aristocracy of Talent for an Egalitarian Art

From the daguerreotype to the cellphone snapshot, the history of photography has unfolded as a series of miracles, each of which has profoundly altered our understanding of the time-space continuum. As the innovations become familiar, the photographs become miracles in another way, as connections to a past we’ve never seen.

Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic.

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The show singles out 13 photographers, representing each with 10 to 16 mostly stunning images. It begins with the innovations of the British gentleman William Henry Fox Talbot, and concludes with the homespun classicism of the American Walker Evans, the studio experiments of Man Ray and, finally, the breathtaking moments captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, geniuses of the street. In between are the landscapes of Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins; portraits by Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron; and views of 19th- and early-20th-century Paris and France by Charles Marville, Édouard Baldus and Eugène Atget."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/arts/design/06fram.html

Be sure to click on the Slide Show. My favorite image is #9 - “Rue de Constantine, Paris” (circa 1865) by Charles Marville.

Robert M. Teague

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