{"product_id":"before-photography-painting-and-the-invention-of-photography-9780870702532","title":"Before photography: Painting and the invention of photography","description":"\u003cp\u003eDust jacket notes: \"The invention of photography was one of the most important cultural and artistic events of the nineteenth century. Yet its origins have been studied largely from the scientific point of view. This carefully reasoned essay challenges the conventional notion that the invention of photography was fundamentally a technical achievement  without artistic roots. Peter Galassi  Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art  argues that the medium was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art  but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition. Ever since the Renaissance invention of linear perspective  artists had considered vision the sole basis of representation. But only gradually did they formulate pictorial strategies capable of suggesting the immediacy and relativity of everyday visual experience; only after centuries of experiment did they come to value pictures that seem to be caught by the eye rather than composed by the mind. Galassi argues that photography was born of this transformation in artistic outlook. To support this argument the author has assembled forty-four innovative European paintings and drawings made in the half-century before the invention of photography was announced in 1839. These works  landscapes by John Constable  J. B. C. Corot  and their contemporaries  show an impressive independence from earlier standards of composition  an original sense of pictorial order based on a heretical concern for the most humble scenes. In their fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of synoptic perceptions and dicontinuous  unexpected forms  Galassi identifies the critical shift in artistic norms that led to the invention of photography.\" 152 pages  82 plates (9 in color)  38 reference illustrations.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45279941623861,"sku":"ByrdShop_087070253X","price":108.53,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780870702532.jpg?v=1780616369","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/before-photography-painting-and-the-invention-of-photography-9780870702532","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}