Every Picture Tells A Story

Photography and painting were at odds from the beginning, each determined to determine how we look at the world. Although painting had eons of authority to draw upon, the camera soon won the battle for our minds if not our hearts, notes Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art.

“The camera more than the brush has determined how we understand the universe,” Broun says in her introduction to “American Photographs: The First Century,” an exhibit of some 160 vintage daguerreotypes and photographs dating from 1839 to 1939. “Photography now sets the terms and conditions of our visual culture,” Broun says, “while painting now is uneasy and ambivalent about its place.”

The exhibition’s grand title is a genteel fraud, but few visitors are likely to object. This is not a definitive or exhaustive survey, it’s curator Merry Foresta’s selections from the collection of Philadelphian Charles Isaacs, which the museum acquired in 1994.

Isaacs, a former photographer and photo editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has a perceptive eye, sound judgment and, not least important, a limited purse. In the beginning he bought large, late Ansel Adams prints, but soon had to sell them to pay for the 19th-century images he was finding at flea markets, auctions, bookstores and dealers. Every serious American collector has Ansel Adams; the Isaacs Collection has a broad and beguiling array of images that otherwise might have been overlooked.

The collection embraces nearly all the well-known early American photographers, from early Adams to Clarence H. White.

The entire exhibit, and more, also is available on the World Wide Web via the museum’s new Helios site, which may be the Smithsonian’s most engaging electronic gateway so far. (Access it at: http://www.nmaa.si.edu/Helios/AmericanPhotographs)

The exhibit continues through April 20 at the National Museum of American Art (202) 357-2700.