CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/14/2015

Modern Times: The Age of Photography

"The relationship between art and photography was certainly strained throughout the nineteenth century," Rijksmuseum curators Matti Boom and Hans Roosenboom write in Modern Times: The Age of Photography, the superb new survey, superbly designed by Irma Boom. "The fact that mechanics, optics and chemistry played such a key role in the production of photographs was fundamentally at odds with the notion that art was a product of the human mind and hand. This explains why, initially, photography was universally rebuffed as an art form. It was, however, appreciated so long as it was only used for making preparatory studies or reproducing works of art. In short, in the nineteenth century the young technology sought to gain access to an art world which exploited it while keeping it safely at arm’s length." Herbert Matter's 1943 gelatin silver print "Light Drawing" is reproduced from Modern Times.