Photography as Art: the Met's Most Iconic Photographs

The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first photographs in 1928 and has built one of the world's finest collections — spanning from the earliest daguerreotypes and calotypes of the 1840s through the major movements of the 20th century. The collection is notable for its depth in 19th-century documentary and artistic photography: the survey photographers of the American West, the French pictorialists, the early modernists who established that a photograph could aspire to the condition of painting or printmaking. These are the works that shaped photography's self-image as an art form.