“Photography was not a bastard left on the doorstep of art, but a legal child of the Western pictorial tradition,” insisted the Museum of Modern Art photography curator Peter Galassi in 1981, somewhat defensively. At the time, photography was still not widely accepted as a legitimate art form and was scarcely represented in the collections of major art museums. Art and photography existed in distinct and separate domains. Fine-art photography was pursued by the avid few and was always distinguished as being superior to commercial photography and photojournalism. Art photographers and curators generally seemed preoccupied with formalist issues of light and composition and with technical complications of equipment and analog printing—as opposed to, say, concerns of social or political import. The tiny world of art photography, with few galleries and little critical discourse, was largely dominated by two judgment seats: the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), then headed by the curator John Szarkowski, and the book and magazine publisher
