When a democratic medium documented a democratic nation

Nearly two centuries later, it's impossible to imagine the transformative effect the invention of photography had. As the medium grew and developed, it allowed for an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly varied, documentation of the growth and development of the nation that sustained it.
'The New Art' is drawn from a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the William L. Schaeffer Collection. The show runs at the Met through July 20.
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Anonymous, "Roller Skate and Boot," 1860s.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
It's abundant and abundantly miscellaneous, though portraits very much predominate. What people most wanted to see was themselves and other people. If anything, that was even truer then than now, since accessible (and affordable) portraiture was a phenomenal novelty. In no other genre did this democratic medium democratize more. As Douglass also said in that speech, 'The farmer boy gets an iron shoe for his horse, and metallic picture for himself at the same time, and at the same price.'
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Installation view of "The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910."
Photo by Eugenia Tinsley, Courtesy of The Met
But among the 275 photographs on display there are also still lifes, landscapes, nature studies, charming bits of bizarrerie. The hats on a quartet of sorority sisters from around 1870 are millinery a la Hogwarts. The aplomb of a young man posing with a rooster is positively monarchical. Pet squirrels appear not once but twice. In one of the images, the animal's tail is blurred, thanks to the long exposure times required by the daguerreotype process.
Anonymous, "Studio Photographer at Work," c. 1855.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Of special interest are multiple examples of the medium taking itself for its subject. There are images of photographic studios, of photographers at work, of people holding photographs. Are they more documentation or celebration? Clearly, it didn't take long for photography to enter the realm of meta and reflexivity. That, too, was part of the medium's newness, extending to how, in its self-awareness and capacity for fantastical juxtaposition, photography foreshadowed Surrealism.
Along with photographs, 'The New Art' includes three vintage cameras and three stereopticons. Greeting visitors at the entrance to the show is a studio camera from the 1870s. A handsome object of wood, brass, and glass, it's bigger than
two
breadboxes. In the last gallery, there's a stereoscopic camera from the 1880s. With its pair of small protruding lenses, it could be the stationary great-great-great-grandfather of the title character in Pixar's
Installation view of "The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910."
Photo by Eugenia Tinsley, Courtesy of The Met
The cameras are a reminder that the title of the exhibition could just as well be 'The New Technology.' A camera, after all, is a machine as a paintbrush, say, or pencil is not. It was this piece of machinery that enabled the newness of this new art.
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The show's abundance makes it all the more important that it be mounted with skill and imagination, which it is. The exhibition is organized by photographic format, which effectively means it's organized chronologically, as a succession of new formats advanced the medium. They included daguerreotypes, tintypes (made of iron, not tin), ambrotypes, cyanotypes, salted paper prints, albumen prints, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints, which would dominate 20th-century photography.
Anonymous, "748. Schoolmaster Hill Tobogganing, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts," 1905.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
One of the fascinations of 'The New Art' is the interplay of format and subject.
Published by E. & H. T. Anthony, "Specimens of New York Bill Posting, No. 897," from the series "Anthony's Stereoscopic Views," 1863.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Religiosity does come through in several portraits of dead infants and children. In an era when the depredations of infectious disease were a given, such images weren't seen as morbid. That absence of morbidity underscores how different then was from now. Much more frequent are photographs that look ahead (more newness): a roller skate strapped to a boot, a wall of ads (both from the 1860s), locomotives; a Ferris wheel. Or there's the way four views of Niagara Falls, one of them showing a tightrope walker crossing above, contrast with an 1897 platinum print of a high-power line being raised there.
Famous events are recorded — the California Gold Rush, the Civil War — but daily life and everyday people are much more prominent here. A few celebrated photographic names appear:
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Carleton E. Watkins, "View on the Columbia River, from the O.R.R., Cascades, No. 1286," from the series 'Pacific Coast,' 1867.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Yet the vast majority of photographers are either little remembered or simply unknown. Anonymity, in a way, is fitting. Again and again, what we see here — not that this was the photographers' intent — is the rendering of what was common then becoming uncommon in the eyes of posterity. Posterity is, of course, just a fancy way of saying 'us,' 'now,' and, yes, 'new.'
THE NEW ART: American Photography, 1839-1910
At Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, through July 20. 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at

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