Title & Author:

The Waking dream : photography's first century : selections from the Gilman Paper Company collection / Maria Morris Hambourg [and others].

Publication:

New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art, [1993]
Distributed by Harry N. Abrams.
©1993

Description:

xxii, 384 pages : illustrations (some color), portraits ; 29 cm

Notes:
"This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition The waking dream, photography's first century, selections from the Gilman Paper Company collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 25-July 4, 1993; Edinburgh International Festival, City Arts Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 7-October 2, 1993; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1993-94."--Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 368-370) and index.
Preface / Howard Gilman -- Foreword / Philippe de Montebello -- Introduction / Maria Morris Hambourg -- Picturing Victorian Britain -- Photography as art in France -- Extending the Grand Tour -- America: an insistent present -- Turn of the century: chrysalis of the modern -- Modern perspectives -- Catalogue of the photographs: Maria Morris Hambourg, Pierre Apraxine, Malcolm Daniel, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Virginia Heckert.
Also issued online.

Summary:

An "evanescent shadow, a delicate, just perceptible image, the trace of a small plant on a field of periwinkle blue." With this description of one of the very earliest photographic experiments, Maria Morris Hambourg begins the riveting story of photography's first century, a story that concludes on the eve of World War II with the dramatic photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Walker Evans, images imprinted indelibly into the consciousness of the modern era. The 253 works in the exhibition, many of them rare or unique and all of exceptional print quality, have been culled from the more than five thousand that comprise the legendary but seldom exhibited Gilman Paper Company Collection, the most important private collection of photographs in the world. Assembled over the past two decades, the collection is composed of images both ravishing and historically significant, setting the standard of connoisseurship in the field and illuminating the aesthetics of the medium.
The first three chapters cover the period from the birth of photography in 1839 through its early maturation in the 1860s, in the locales where it first and most magnificently flourished, in Victorian England and France of the Second Empire and on tours of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, in India and Asia. Chapter Four examines photography in America during the nineteenth century and vividly charts the Civil War and the exploration of the majestic terrains of the American West. Investigations of the self and society are explored in Chapter Five, in the psychologically penetrating portraits and dreamlike landscape studies of the fin de siècle in Europe and America. And in Chapter Six, the modern era rushes into view with the provocative new vision of the twentieth century.
The artists represented include such renowned British and French masters as Roger Fenton, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Édouard Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray. The American chapter highlights the work of Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and many anonymous practitioners. Revealing portraits of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Vaslav Nijinsky, among others, bring to life the charged atmosphere of the turn of the century. And the pioneering imagery of Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Alfred Stieglitz, Eugène Atget, Martin Munkacsi, and Alexander Rodchenko exuberantly re-creates the vitality of the twenties and thirties. The title of the book, The Waking Dream, is taken from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and suggests, in the words of Maria Morris Hambourg, "the haunting power of photographs to commingle past and present, to suspend the world and the artist's experience of it in unique distillations?'.
Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg and Pierre Apraxine after critical overviews of each of the six chapters, and carefully researched texts by members of the staff of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, enlivened by often surprising and entertaining vignettes, clarify the historical context of the photographs. Unusual attention has been given to the production of the plates, which were executed under the supervision of the innovative and highly regarded photographer and master printer Richard Benson.

ISBN:

0810964279 (Abrams)
9780810964273 (Abrams)
0870996622
9780870996627
0870996630 (pbk.)
9780870996634 (pbk.)

Subject:

Talbot, William Henry Fox, 1800-1877.
Fenton, Roger, 1819-1869.
Howlett, Robert.
Cameron, Julia Margaret, 1815-1879.
Man Ray, 1890-1976.
Clifford, Charles.
Atget, Eugène, 1857-1927.
Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946.
Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich, 1891-1956.
Evans, Walker, 1903-1975.
Gilman Paper Company Photograph collections.
Gilman Paper Company
Photography, Artistic Exhibitions.
Photography, Artistic.
Photographie artistique.
Photographie artistique Expositions.
art photography.
Photograph collections
Foto's.
The Gilman paper company collection.
Artistic photography Exhibitions.

Form/genre:

Exhibition catalogues.
exhibition catalogs.
Exhibition catalogs
Catalogues d'exposition.

Added entries:

Hambourg, Maria Morris.
De Montebello, Philippe.
Gilman Paper Company.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Holdings:

Location: Library main 18200
Call No.: TR650.W3 (ID:93-B1324)
Status: Available