The popularization of amateur photography and the recognition of photography as an art framed the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Until now, these crucial events in the history of photography surprisingly have been unexamined. Paul Sternberger offers the first thorough investigation of the part played by the amateur photographer and of the struggle to legitimize photography as art. He shows that the change in the perception of photography resulted not from a linear evolution but from an intricate, divergent, and often conflicting barrage of strategies.
He also re-evaluates the role of Alfred Stieglitz and his use of Pictorialism as a means to escape photography's reputation as "merely truth." The photographic illustrations include some by the well-known names of the period--Stieglitz, Steichen, Peter Henry Emerson--and many by photographers now long forgotten. This fascinating study shows the late nineteenth century to have been a complex time for both photographic theory and practice in America. At the same time it enlarges our understanding of photographic history.
