Architecture -11- Felix Duban - School Of The Beaux Arts

Description: The titles of exhibitions can sometimes be deceptive. Take, for example, The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855. Despite the promise of its title, this exhibition turned out to have little to say about the beginnings of photography, made no attempt to define what was "French" about French daguerreotypy, and never ventured to demonstrate what distinguished the daguerreotype from other, competing photographic processes. Instead, this exhibition did what exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are supposed to do: it gathered an extraordinary array of exceptional works and hung them in beautifully lit surroundings that allowed you to appreciate each picture's aesthetic qualities with a minimum of distractions. In short, it presented its chosen photographs as if they were precious art objects, explaining in an opening wall text that "this exhibition is the first to survey the best surviving examples of the art as practiced in the country of its birth." The question to be canvassed, then, is not whether this was a good exhibition--in the Met's own terms, it certainly was. The terms themselves--the art historical assumptions reproduced in every photography exhibition of this kind--are what are at issue. (1) Given the distortions that result, we have to ask ourselves: What does an exhibition of the "best surviving examples of the art" actually contribute to our understanding of the daguerreotype or, for that matter, the history of photography in general?