“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later, Douglas Crimp would use the term “Pictures” in his homonymous 1977 exhibition at Artists Space in New York to herald the “photographic activity of postmodernism” and thus distinguish from the modernist notion of photography itself the post-medium practice of the new breed of appropriators/pasticheurs/bricoleurs who used photographic media. Aesthetic perception, artistic intuition, and the inner self of the author were at the heart of the metaphysics imbuing Stieglitz’s multivalent practice—artistic, curatorial, and editorial—that promoted a transcendental vision against what he saw as the vulgarity of modern life in the barbarism of commercialism and popular culture.

Shared among his Photo-Secession coterie and propagated though avant-garde exhibitions at his Little Galleries at 291 Fifth Avenue as well as national and international salons of pictorialist photography, these values would become the blueprint not only for creative photographic practice on the East Coast in the early twentieth century; they would also inform the subsequent curatorial treatment of photography as an independent art within art museums. Most famously, the programmatic declarations of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) newly formed Photography Department (est. 1939) openly acknowledged Stieglitz’s enduring influence. The establishment of a new “judgement seat” for photography (as Christopher Phillips once put it) as art on a par with painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints in American art institutions was for Stieglitz a Holy Grail quest. This aspiration is evident in his long diplomatic negotiations with Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, keeper of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and William M. Ivins, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which eventually ushered photographs into the print departments of the two museums in the early 1920s. It seems only logical that the anthology Photoshow: Landmark Exhibitions That Defined the History of Photography pays dues to Stieglitz’s dynamic curating practices as a centerpiece and a connecting link between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices, modernist dogmatism and postmodern relativism, private initiatives and public institutions, policies and politics.

Photoshow solicits the expertise of international photography curators, historians, and academics to shed light on the rationale for, and cultures of, exhibiting photography at selected historical moments, from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first century. Edited by Alessandra Mauro, artistic director of the Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan, the book seeks to fill in a notable gap in current histories of curating and histories of photography that tend to undervalue the significance of photography exhibitions in the democratization of contemporary art, the popularization of the art museum, and the legitimization of photography’s identity as art and culture. The book highlights events that, according to Mauro, “would soon become watersheds, presenting new ways to exhibit and perceive” photography (6) across Europe and the United States: from London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the Vienna International exhibition of 1891, Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929, and MoMA’s The Family of Man (1955) and New Documents (1967), to Sebastião Salgado’s touring show Workers (1993) and Here Is New York in 2001. Along with the abovementioned homage to Stieglitz, one chapter is devoted to another influential figure in the sphere of photographic exhibitions and publications in the twentieth century: the first director of the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Robert Delpire, to whom the volume is dedicated.

Oddly, despite the strong emphasis on the role of MoMA’s Photography Department as arbiter of taste throughout the twentieth century, in the lengthiest chapter of the volume, John Szarkowski’s analytical contribution to exhibiting photography in the art museum is discussed by Alessia Tagliaventi only briefly in a focus section and in relation to his early exhibitions (chapter 7). Two contemporary interviews serve as bookends, situating the volume in the new millennium. In lieu of an introduction Quentin Bajac, currently chief curator of photography at MoMA, kick-starts the discussion on the future of photography exhibiting, envisioning a digital museum as showcase for projects created specifically for online space (15), while Charles Traub, cofounder of the public-generated project Here Is New York, concludes Mauro and Tagliaventi’s argument on alternative outposts for photojournalist images (chapter 10) by shifting the focus onto photographic responses to trauma and on public engagement and participation, emphasizing the significance of allowing people to have a voice in a “democratically organized outlet” (267).

Photoshow is generously illustrated with over one hundred black-and-white and color photographs of exhibition spaces and installations, floor plans, and display designs, with key artworks and documents, thus effectively visualizing the narrative recreation of the selected exhibitions. Its story is chronological, but the historical narrative proposed includes noticeable gaps. For instance, the momentous impact of Conceptualism and postmodernism is only mentioned in Francesco Zanot’s reflection on the advent and evolution of the installation as a work of art (chapter 9), while the burgeoning exhibition activity of the 1980s is reduced to Michel Frizot’s insider account of Delpire’s exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (chapter 8). The (re)discovery of vernacular photography, the snapshot (as discussed in Catherine Zuromskis’s Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013]) (click here for review), and the archive, along with the turn toward a post-medium practice in museum exhibitions in the 1990s, are other palpable thematic omissions. In her preface, Mauro acknowledges “occasional leaps” as well as the subjective selection of case studies, which may not be “necessarily the most significant exhibitions in photographic history” (7). These decisions, however, could have been better explained in an overview that would signpost and situate the selected case studies in their historical and cultural contexts and thus significantly add to the educational value of the publication.

These methodological shortcomings aside, Photoshow is a welcome addition to existing photographic literature. It affords unique insights into the workings and customs of photography exhibitions across three centuries through primary material and rich contextual analysis, continuing Mary Anne Staniszewski’s exploration of the exhibition as an aesthetic medium and cultural practice in The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) (click here for review) and complementing the discussion of the ideology of exhibition installations as well as the historical continuum in Jorge Ribalta’s Public Photographic Spaces: Propaganda Exhibitions from “Pressa” to “The Family of Man,” 1928–55 (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009) (click here for review). At the same time, the anthology also offers historical counter examples to current debates on the status of the photographic image, its chameleonic nature, its shifting objecthood, and its ubiquity in today’s visual culture. The multiplicity of authorial voices, standpoints, and working methodologies—from art-historical research and rigorous archival documentation to empirically informed accounts—opens up a plethora of stimulating juxtapositions for a wide range of readers, whether scholars or students of photography and museum studies, curators and art professionals, or simply photography enthusiasts. Chapters can be usefully paired together in or out of chronological sequence. Those by Gerry Badger, Paul-Louis Roubert, and David Spencer (chapters 2, 3, and 4), for instance, discuss the ontological dilemmas in relation to photography’s classification as art or science in nineteenth-century international exhibitions in England, France, and Austria, and how institutional prejudices drove the aspiration of national photographic societies and clubs to elevate the photographic image above its lowly commercial connotations and establish a respectable niche for photography through ambitious, large-scale exhibitions. One may compare how László Moholy-Nagy’s “New Vision,” celebrated and visualized in the seminal Film und Foto exhibition (chapter 6), was narrated in Beaumont Newhall’s grandiose Photography 1839–1937, MoMA’s inaugural photography exhibition in 1937 (chapter 7) which adapted Stieglitz’s mise-en-scène (chapter 5). Or, one can measure two oppositional curatorial approaches (the curator as author versus the effacement of the curator) that used photography as a medium to honor the dignity of humanity (and American patriotism) in both Steichen’s classic The Family of Man and the post-9/11 Here is New York, arguably the two best-attended exhibitions in the history of photography (chapters 7 and 11). Or those interested in genealogies may trace the evolution of the snapshot aesthetic and its public display, from the controversial “New Documents” of the 1960s, to Wolfgang Tillmans’s lifestyle snaps as installation, to public-generated “authentic snaps” (chapters 7, 9, and 11).

Contributors outline an array of issues, some ontological or aesthetic, others methodological or ideological, identified and addressed in different ways by photographers and curators in the previous two centuries that may also be pertinent to exhibiting photography today, whether in the gallery or the museum. These issues include the changing materiality and scale of photographs, shifting modes (sequential, story-telling, autonomous, installation) of display and spectatorship (alternating between personal and collective vision), authorship and ownership, uniqueness and multiplicity, the cult of the vintage original versus modern and exhibition prints, the plurality of forms and formats, the celebration of the amateur and collective creativity, inclusivity and participation. Underlining the increasing diversification of photographic practice and opposing his predecessors’ view of the photograph as artwork, Bajac proposes a more comprehensive approach to the photograph as a cultural object. Instead of an epilogue, Mauro ends with a discussion on the cultural value of photographs in exhibitions using public-generated content, heralding yet another shift in photography’s judgment seat, one that ought to be explored in a future publication.