A two-volume box set edition of a first-rate history of photography as told through two hundred works from one of the most significant collections in the USA.
In Volume 1, Nineteenth Century, Acton tracks the history, artistic concepts, and technical advances of photography, including the pioneering work of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Alphonse Louis Poitevin (1819-1892), Frederic Flacheron (1813-1883), Roger Fenton (1819-1869), Desire Chanay (1828-1915), Felice Beato (1832-1909), Mathew B. Brady (1822-1896), Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879), William Bell (1830-1910), Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913), and Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Specialty areas include Mathew Brady's famous photographs of the Civil War and the exploration of the American West by photographers including Eadweard Muybridge and Charles Savage.
In Volume 2, Twentieth Century, Acton traces the history, artistic concepts, and technical advances of photography, from the Photo-Secession movement, represented by Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier through to the advances in color photography seen in images of Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston. The volume provides a striking pictorial history, featuring images of the Great Depression by Farm Security Agency photographers Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein, of World War II by Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, and of the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s by Gordon Parks and Danny Lyon. The shifting styles and emphases of the 20th century are traced via the remarkable photographs of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams as straight photography superseded Pictorialist poetry in the 1930s, via the work of aesthetic photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind who were influenced by abstract painting, and through the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus who were observing and recording the rapid social and economic changes in American society.
The Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame is considered to be one of the finest university art museums in America. Its permanent collection of photography comprises 10,000-plus pieces
