Visiting The Met? The Temple of Dendur will be closed Sunday, April 27 through Friday, May 9. The Met Fifth Avenue will be closed Monday, May 5.

Learn more

Audio Guide

English
Young person in vintage western attire holds a rooster. Red frame surrounds the image with bold white text: "The New Art: American Photography 1839-1910".
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910

Listen to fresh perspectives on early American photography.
This tour runs approximately 40 minutes.


600. Introduction

Welcome to The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910

0:00
0:00

JEFF ROSENHEIM: Something remarkable happened about 185 years ago. It was kind of a celestial event that changed the world as we know it. It was the invention of a new medium. We called it photography.

Hi, I'm Jeff Rosenheim. I'm the Curator-in-Charge of Photographs here at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and I'm the curator of this exhibition.

NARRATOR: The exhibition you’re about to see features American photographs from this revolutionary new medium’s first seventy years. They come from a single collection, amassed by William L. Schaeffer, and they were donated to The Met by Jennifer and Philip Maritz.

ROSENHEIM: This exhibition explores the transformation of the country, of the United States, through the lens of photography.

NARRATOR: The majority of the photographs you’ll encounter have never before been exhibited. Most of the people involved—both behind the camera, and in the photographs—–are not famous. We don’t even know who many of them are.

ROSENHEIM: This rarely seen body of photographs are going to allow us to tell a new history of American photography.

Most art history is told from the top down, with canonized, bold-faced names. But this exhibition is expanding the canon dramatically. It's a tour of American photography from the bottom up.

NARRATOR: Throughout this Audio Guide, you’ll hear from curator Jeff Rosenheim, alongside other writers, artists, and cultural historians. We suggest you begin with the gallery to the left, where you’ll see some of the earliest photographs in the exhibition.

To hear how the poet Walt Whitman inspired the curator of this exhibition, listen to the next stop on the playlist.

    Playlist

  1. 600. Introduction
  2. 600, Part 2. Walt Whitman’s America
  3. 601. Early Daguerreotypes
  4. 602. Postmortem Photography
  5. 603. Meta Images of Photographers
  6. 604. Tintypes: Fooling Around
  7. 605. Pride of Place
  8. 606. Portraits of Black Americans
  9. 607. Ambrotypes: Occupational Portraits
  10. 608. Nature Photography and Landscapes
  11. 609. The Civil War and the Camera
  12. 610. Mineral Extraction
  13. 611. The Civil War: Capturing Slavery
  14. 612. Views by Philadelphia Amateur Photographers, ca. 1874–99
  15. 613. Applied Color: Grandma and Grandpa Miller
  16. 614. Female Photographers: Anna K. Weaver
  17. 615. Cabinet Cards: “Oddities”
  18. 616. Cartes de Visite: Imagination and Whimsy
  19. 617. Portraits of Indigenous Americans
  20. 618. Stereographs: Armchair Travel and Westward Expansion
  21. 619. Cyanotypes
  22. Credits