The History of Photography

Curator and historian Beaumont Newhall traces photography from the first pictures made in 1839, relating its growth as an art to its technical innovations. The survey reproduces more than 300 works by photographers including William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugene Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. The fifth edition added color work, from hand-tinted daguerreotypes and Edward Steichen's autochromes to pictures by Eliot Porter, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz. Newhall became librarian of the Museum of Modern Art in 1935 and the first director of its photography department in 1940, and later served as curator and then director at the George Eastman House.

Photographer David McCammon called it a great overview of photography's early days up to the 1950s and a starting point.