JEFF ROSENHEIM: This is a delightful nature study by a really unsung, great artist named John Moran.

We’re looking at an individual, with either a magnifying glass in his hand, it’s hard to tell, or tweezers, let’s say pulling a beetle off the bark of this beech tree. The individual is looking carefully at nature, and we are asked to do the same.

I think one of the deep structures of the medium of photography is paying attention to the real world and its many splendors. And this is a picture that encapsulates that.

NARRATOR: During the mid-1800s, a group of landscape painters known as the Hudson River School championed the idea that there was something essentially American about depictions of nature.

ROSENHEIM: What the American landscape had was an Edenic quality. We didn’t have cathedrals like Europe had. We had forests. We didn’t have grand buildings yet in our cities. We had valleys and mountains.

NARRATOR: In capturing the beauty of that landscape, painting and photography both played a role.

ROSENHEIM: This is a photograph that was made by an artist who considered himself an equal to any of the painters of the day. And this is the beginning of the sort of fine art of photography as opposed to pure documentary expression.

NARRATOR: But in works of art like this one, we also see how nature photographs differed from paintings.

ROSENHEIM: In photography, which is monochromatic, there’s more of an abstraction. You get the details, you get specificity, and less idealism.