Photography as Art: the Met's Most Iconic Photographs

Watkins was the photographer who made Yosemite internationally famous — his 1861 mammoth-plate photographs were among the evidence used to argue for the valley's preservation. This later image of the New Almaden mercury mine in California shows a different Watkins: the industrial landscape photographer, documenting the extraction economy that funded the American West's development. The composition is no less masterful than his Yosemite work; the subject is no less monumental. It is just mining rather than wilderness.

Watkins returned to the Columbia River gorge repeatedly throughout his career, drawn by the scale of the landscape and the technical challenge of photographing moving water in long exposures that turned the river silky. This image — the forest descending to the water's edge, the sky reflected in the calm reach above the rapids — is characteristic of his best work: formal rigor combined with a genuine responsiveness to the qualities of specific light in a specific place. The entire history of American landscape photography flows from Watkins.

Le Secq was part of the Mission Héliographique — the French government's systematic photographic survey of the nation's architectural heritage, carried out in 1851. His photographs of Chartres Cathedral are among the greatest works in the history of architectural photography: the column statues photographed here with a clarity that reveals them as people, not merely decoration. The photographs were made as documents for preservation purposes; they ended up being art. The tension between the medium's documentary function and its aesthetic potential is visible in every frame.

Nègre was a painter who turned to photography as a way of working faster — and the painter's eye is evident throughout his work. This photograph of the dining hall at a Vincennes institution shows his approach at its most ambitious: the long colonnaded room, the figures arranged at the tables, the light falling from high windows. It is a compositional problem that any history painter would recognise, solved by photographic means. The scale — Nègre worked large, often printing from paper negatives — allows the architectural space to breathe.

Baldus was the most technically accomplished architectural photographer of the 19th century — his large albumen prints from waxed-paper negatives remain technically extraordinary even by modern standards. This view of the port of Boulogne, with its harbour entrance and the sea beyond, shows his approach to maritime photography: formal, precise, attentive to the geometry of the engineered landscape. Baldus also photographed the new railway lines for the Chemins de fer du Nord; he understood that the modern age was building a new kind of monument.

Maritime photography presented particular challenges in the 1850s — long exposure times meant that ships in motion blurred, and the contrast between bright water and dark hull was difficult to manage with wet-plate technology. This photograph of the clipper ship Stag Hound, made in harbour, shows how early photographers worked around these constraints: still water, flat light, the ship at anchor rather than under sail. The result is an image of extraordinary formal clarity, the ship's rigging against a grey sky like a drawing in ink.

This daguerreotype portrait of the sculptor Maniglier is one of hundreds in the Met's collection from the earliest years of photography — and like the best of them, it achieves an intimacy that painted portraiture rarely managed. The daguerreotype's quality of detail (the silver surface records everything in the focal plane with equal precision) combined with the sitter's evident alertness creates a sense of genuine encounter. You feel you are looking at an actual person, not a type or an ideal. Photography changed what portraiture meant; this is one of the first moments of that change.

This albumen print from a paper negative is characteristic of early French photography's interest in rural genre subjects: the farmyard as a setting for a scene that could as easily be a Dutch Golden Age painting or a Barbizon landscape. The soft tonalities of the paper negative, the slightly uneven focus, and the sense of catching a moment — the cow looking toward the camera, the buildings bathed in outdoor light — give it a quality that wet-plate photography, with its harder precision, could not replicate. Early French photography was as much about painting as it was about documentation.

Delamotte photographed the construction, interior, and eventual burning of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham — the building that defined Victorian optimism about technology, trade, and the reach of the British Empire. This late view of the interior, made after the Great Exhibition's exhibits had been removed and the palace converted to a permanent public attraction, shows the extraordinary scale of the iron-and-glass structure. Delamotte's photographs are among the great documents of Victorian England; as the Crystal Palace is gone, they are all we have.

Watkins was the photographer who made Yosemite internationally famous — his 1861 mammoth-plate photographs were among the evidence used to argue for the valley's preservation. This later image of the New Almaden mercury mine in California shows a different Watkins: the industrial landscape photographer, documenting the extraction economy that funded the American West's development. The composition is no less masterful than his Yosemite work; the subject is no less monumental. It is just mining rather than wilderness.

Watkins returned to the Columbia River gorge repeatedly throughout his career, drawn by the scale of the landscape and the technical challenge of photographing moving water in long exposures that turned the river silky. This image — the forest descending to the water's edge, the sky reflected in the calm reach above the rapids — is characteristic of his best work: formal rigor combined with a genuine responsiveness to the qualities of specific light in a specific place. The entire history of American landscape photography flows from Watkins.

Le Secq was part of the Mission Héliographique — the French government's systematic photographic survey of the nation's architectural heritage, carried out in 1851. His photographs of Chartres Cathedral are among the greatest works in the history of architectural photography: the column statues photographed here with a clarity that reveals them as people, not merely decoration. The photographs were made as documents for preservation purposes; they ended up being art. The tension between the medium's documentary function and its aesthetic potential is visible in every frame.

Nègre was a painter who turned to photography as a way of working faster — and the painter's eye is evident throughout his work. This photograph of the dining hall at a Vincennes institution shows his approach at its most ambitious: the long colonnaded room, the figures arranged at the tables, the light falling from high windows. It is a compositional problem that any history painter would recognise, solved by photographic means. The scale — Nègre worked large, often printing from paper negatives — allows the architectural space to breathe.

Baldus was the most technically accomplished architectural photographer of the 19th century — his large albumen prints from waxed-paper negatives remain technically extraordinary even by modern standards. This view of the port of Boulogne, with its harbour entrance and the sea beyond, shows his approach to maritime photography: formal, precise, attentive to the geometry of the engineered landscape. Baldus also photographed the new railway lines for the Chemins de fer du Nord; he understood that the modern age was building a new kind of monument.

Maritime photography presented particular challenges in the 1850s — long exposure times meant that ships in motion blurred, and the contrast between bright water and dark hull was difficult to manage with wet-plate technology. This photograph of the clipper ship Stag Hound, made in harbour, shows how early photographers worked around these constraints: still water, flat light, the ship at anchor rather than under sail. The result is an image of extraordinary formal clarity, the ship's rigging against a grey sky like a drawing in ink.

This daguerreotype portrait of the sculptor Maniglier is one of hundreds in the Met's collection from the earliest years of photography — and like the best of them, it achieves an intimacy that painted portraiture rarely managed. The daguerreotype's quality of detail (the silver surface records everything in the focal plane with equal precision) combined with the sitter's evident alertness creates a sense of genuine encounter. You feel you are looking at an actual person, not a type or an ideal. Photography changed what portraiture meant; this is one of the first moments of that change.

This albumen print from a paper negative is characteristic of early French photography's interest in rural genre subjects: the farmyard as a setting for a scene that could as easily be a Dutch Golden Age painting or a Barbizon landscape. The soft tonalities of the paper negative, the slightly uneven focus, and the sense of catching a moment — the cow looking toward the camera, the buildings bathed in outdoor light — give it a quality that wet-plate photography, with its harder precision, could not replicate. Early French photography was as much about painting as it was about documentation.

Delamotte photographed the construction, interior, and eventual burning of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham — the building that defined Victorian optimism about technology, trade, and the reach of the British Empire. This late view of the interior, made after the Great Exhibition's exhibits had been removed and the palace converted to a permanent public attraction, shows the extraordinary scale of the iron-and-glass structure. Delamotte's photographs are among the great documents of Victorian England; as the Crystal Palace is gone, they are all we have.