Picturing Modernity: Highlights from the Photography Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Since its founding in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been acquiring photographs, making its collection one of the oldest and most distinguished in the world. Tracing the medium since its invention in 1835, the museum’s holdings comprise more than nine thousand works by many of the most important photographers. This elegant volume features eighty highlights of the SFMOMA collection, from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes and turn-of-the-century pictorialist works to groundbreaking works by the f.64 Group, experimental European photographs from the 1920s and ‘30s, works in the American documentary tradition, and contemporary color images. A virtual compendium of the photographic medium, Picturing Modernity reveals the transformation of a scientific invention into one of the most prevalent art forms of the modern era.