Photographers used its growing influence to expose society’s evils, which the prosperous, self-indulgent Belle Époque chose to ignore: the degrading conditions of workers in big-city slums, the barbarism of child labor, the terrorism of lynching, the devastation of war.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again. This time the subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early ’50s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers looked at the world.

The symposium "Truth, Lies, and Photographs" was presented in conjunction with the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop, on view October 11, 2012, through January 27, 2013.

While postwar street photographers on the East Coast were transforming documentary photography into a subjective experience of the contemporary world, photographers in other parts of the country were expanding the f/64 tradition to accommodate their own personal creative spirit.

Just as traditional media and materials were being subjected to intense reappraisal at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy advocated unlimited experimentation with the photographic process.

Photography’s long-acknowledged power to mirror the face of the world was by no means abandoned, but in the 1920s and ’30s a host of unconventional forms and techniques suddenly flourished.

Teen Advisory Group Member Genevieve considers the role the photographs play in history and discusses Timothy H. O'Sullivan's photograph A Harvest for Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, currently on view in the exhibition Photography and the American Civil War.

The use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation or distortion to render their images uncanny.

Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York in 1890 determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture.

(New York, March 16, 2005)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Howard Gilman Foundation announced jointly today that the Museum has acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world's finest collection of photographs in private hands. With exceptional examples of 19th-century French, British, and American photographs, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods, the Gilman Collection has played a central role in establishing photography's historical canon and has long set the standard for connoisseurship in the field. In addition to many unique and beautiful icons of photography by such masters as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Mathew Brady, Carleton Watkins, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, the Gilman Collection includes extensive bodies of work by numerous pioneers of the camera. The collection was acquired through purchase, complemented by a generous gift from the Foundation. It contains more than 8,500 photographs, dating primarily from the first century of the medium, 1839-1939.

Masterpieces of early French photography and groundbreaking modern photographs created since 1960 – both the earliest and most recent chapters in the history of the 160-year-old medium – will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition celebrating the first decade of collecting by the Museum's Department of Photographs. Photographs: A Decade of Collecting will open on June 5, 2001.

The symposium "Truth, Lies, and Photographs" was presented in conjunction with the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop, on view October 11, 2012, through January 27, 2013.