Photography expert and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Jeff L Rosenheim believes that cameras are profoundly entwined with the American story. “I’ve always been drawn to photography because it has this baseline democratic principle,” he told me. “It arrived from Europe in 1839, and what were we going to do with it? How did the camera play a role in us becoming the country that we hoped we would become?”
Rosenheim sees cameras as furthering the anti-aristocratic principles that America was founded on, in the process helping individuals own their identities and document their world. His new exhibition at The Met, The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910, aspires to give us new ways of seeing precisely how that occurred. Dozens of portraits of everyday Americans showcase a fascinating people’s history of the United States, while also revealing a middle class deeply engaged in the process of discovering its identity, both as consumers and as participants in this young, quickly developing democracy. “Photographic portraits play a role in people feeling like they could be a citizen,” Rosenheim said. “It’s a psychological, empowering thing to own your own likeness.”
