ABSTRACT
Photography’s first modem histories were better than they ought to have been. The form of Newhall’s The History of Photography was established in 1949. Mumford’s call for an aesthetics of photography seems forgotten in the 1949 publication. The savviest section of the 1949 edition has nothing to do with art, but dwells on the documentary, and what has continued to be called the antiaesthetic. In the 1949 edition, Newhall modelled a vital photographic realm removed from the world of modern and contemporary art. As artists like Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol were beginning to use the photograph in pop-art expressions of its mass media and advertising forms, Newhall seems to have made a decision to rule them out of the confines of the book. Pictorialism now merits an entire chapter, and Atget, the darling of documentary in the 1964 edition, has been demoted. Photography is being ‘mainstreamed’ into the museums, galleries, and colleges through several forces.
