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.

Intimate Landscapes, an exhibition of fifty-five color photographs by Eliot Porter, is the first one-man exhibition of color photographs ever presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works by Eliot Porter entered the Museum's collection as far back as 1949, when Georgia O'Keeffe presented from the Estate of Alfred Stieglitz an important collection of photographs assembled by Stieglitz himself. This collection included three early black and white prints by Eliot Porter, one of which is reproduced in this catalogue. All the photographs in the present exhibition brilliantly reflect the standards of excellence that are Eliot Porter's greatest contribution to the field of color photography. Upon seeing these photographs, the viewer is immediately struck by the artist's distinctly individual and intimate interpretation of the natural world.

"These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography," wrote an artist friend in autumn 1895, the moment of the great Impressionist painter's most intense exploration of photography. Degas's major surviving photographs little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are insightfully analyzed and richly reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Degas's photographic figure studies, portraits of friends and family, and self-portraits—especially those in which lamp-lit figures emerge from darkness—are imbued with a Symbolist spirit evocative of realms more psychological than physical. Most were made in the evenings, when Degas transformed dinner parties into photographic soirees, requisitioning the living rooms of his friends, arranging oil lamps, and directing the poses of dinner guests enlisted as models. "He went back and forth ... running from one end of the room to the other with an expression of infinite happiness," wrote Daniel Halévy, the son of Degas's close friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy, describing one such evening. "At half-past eleven everybody left; Degas, surrounded by three laughing girls, carried his camera as proudly as a child carrying a rifle." Lively eyewitness accounts of Degas's photographic activity from the journals of Daniel Halévy and Julie Manet, as well as from Degas's own letters, are included in Malcolm Daniel's essay, "The Atmosphere of Lamps or Moonlight" which presents a fascinating account of Degas's brief but passionate embrace of photography. Daniel explores the psychological connection between events in the aging artist's life and his decision to take up the camera and demonstrates the aesthetic connections between Degas's photographs and his work in other media. Eugenia Parry's essay, "Edgar Degas's Photographic Theater," illuminates the fertile interplay between painting, posing, theatrical direction, and photography in Degas's work, and Theodore Reff, in "Degas Chez Tasset," sheds light on the hitherto barely known Guillaume Tasset and his daughter Delphine, from whom Degas sought photographic supplies, advice, and services. Finally, this volume includes a scholarly catalogue raisonné and census of prints, an essential tool for further study of Degas's photographs.

Malcolm Daniel, senior curator in the Department of Photographs, offers an explanation of the importance and context of the newly digitized Pictorialist Photography exhibition catalogues.

From the moment the first photographs of the war appeared in the public sphere, their authority and visual power shaped the direction of American art. The dramatic events documented so effectively by the camera moved Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Eastman Johnson, and other painters of the era to use an even more symbolic vocabulary. This in turn freed photography to focus on physical realities—the facts of life and death—that define the human experience. By the early decades of the twentieth century, when most of the combatants were dead, the photographs of the Civil War had developed a potent resonance that would last for years. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, and many others sharpened their observational and interpretive skills by looking at photographs by Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, and Andrew Joseph Russell. The images by these four photographres and all the others featured in this book remain a vibrant tradition for artists working today. This exhibition comprises more than two hundred photographs, among them thirteen from the Museum's 1933 acquisition and thirty-two acquired in 2005 from the renowned holdings of the Gilman Paper Company. This second major purchase of Civil War photographs included a mint-condition copy of America's first photographic anthology, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, from 1866. Together, with George N. Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign from the same year, purchased by the Metropolitan in 1970, Gardner's two-volume masterpiece forms the foundation of the Metropolitan's celebrated collection of nineteenth-century American photographs.

Photographic manipulation is a familiar phenomenon in the digital era. What will come as a revelation to readers of this captivating, wide-ranging book is that nearly every type of manipulation we associate with Adobes now-ubiquitous Photoshop software was also part of photography's pre-digital repertoire, from slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles to adding people to (or removing them from) pictures, not to mention fabricating events that never took place. Indeed, the desire and determination to modify the camera image are as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed. By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography's development, in which champions of photographic "purity," such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies. Among the techniques discussed on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, overpainting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage "the camera does not lie" is one of photography's great fictions.

As a chemist in the Museum's Department of Scientific Research, I work closely with Anna Vila-Espuña, also in the Department of Scientific Research, and Nora Kennedy, in Photograph Conservation, on collaborations with Met curators to increase our understanding of methods and materials used to create paintings, works of art on paper, and photographs.

Former Intern Karalyn Mark discusses some early photography trade literature that she digitized in Watson Library.

Danielle, a participant in this summer's Digital Stories workshop, highlights the ways in which Garry Winogrand's work has changed her perception of the act of taking a photograph.

Nadja Hansen and Hilary Becker introduce the Photography and the American Civil War exhibition catalogue.

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.

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.

[America in the 1940s and ’50s] saw the apotheosis of photojournalism and few photographers were unaffected by its rise, whether they joined the bandwagon or reacted against it.

(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.