This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.

Photograph - New York,

PAUL STRAND (1890–1976) Photograph - New York, 1916 Hand-pulled photogravure Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas Bequest of Laura Gilpin P1979.153.21.1

Woman Twirling

JO ANN CALLIS (B. 1940), Woman Twirling, 1985, Inkjet print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas P2014.10.1.1 © Jo Ann Callis

Migrant Mother, Nipomo

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895–1965), Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936, Gelatin silver on paper, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, Art Center Acquisition 1980.03.01

Self-portrait

ELLEN CAREY (b. 1952), Self-portrait, 1984, Dye diffusion transfer print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P2018.4 © Ellen Carey

Nude, ca.

CLARENCE H. WHITE (1871–1925) Nude, ca. , 1900, Platinum print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of Laura Gilpin P1979.148.13

May Apple, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania May 13, 1957

ELIOT PORTER (1901–1990) May Apple, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, May 13, 1957, Dye imbibition print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of the artist P1989.19.17

Untitled (From the series Portraits of My Family)

JUAN RODRIGO LLAGUNO (b. 1964) Untitled (From the series Portraits of My Family), 1993, Gelatin Silver print, Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas Museum Purchase Funded by Barbara and Don Pender 1997.28.1

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California

ANSEL ADAMS (1902–1984), Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927, Gelatin silver print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas P2002.2 © Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Art museums have not always embraced photography. One of the earliest museum efforts to define the medium’s contribution to the arts came in the mid-1930s, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) asked its librarian, Beaumont Newhall, to create an exhibition survey of photographic history. Relishing the challenge but unclear on how to shape his show, Newhall reached out to photographers, picture editors, cinematographers, and even scientists for advice. He then organized his display around technical advances in the medium. That 1937 show led to a twenty-five-year debate inside MoMA over whether to treat photographs as works of personal expression on par with painting, or as vibrant, easily reproduceable tools for communication and persuasion. Gradually, the argument for personal expression won out, though only in the late 1970s and early 1980s did many museums subscribe to that stance and begin actively collecting and displaying photographs.

This exhibition was originally organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American art with objects from the Carter’s expansive photography collection. The current presentation was reconceived as a team project with the Amarillo Museum of Art, Art Museum of South Texas, and Ellen Noël Art Museum. The artworks tell a story of American photographers’ efforts, from the late nineteenth century on, to explore and proclaim photography’s artfulness, and how broad acceptance of that perspective has since affected their practices. This exhibition reveals how often photographers have looked to painting for reference and ideas even as they shaped their medium’s own artistic language.