The Waking Dream - Photography's First Century The Gilman Paper Company Collection

The 253 works in the exhibition, many of them rare or unique and all of exceptional print quality, have been culled from the more than five thousand that comprise the legendary but seldom exhibited Gilman Paper Company Collection, the most important private collection of photographs in the world. Assembled over the past two decades, the collection is composed of images both ravishing and historically significant, setting the standard of connoisseurship in the field and illuminating the aesthetics of the medium. The first three chapters cover the period from the birth of photography in 1839 through its early maturation in the 1860s, in the locales where it first and most magnificently flourished, in Victorian England and France of the Second Empire and on tours of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, in India and Asia. Chapter Four examines photography in America during the nineteenth century and vividly charts the Civil War and the exploration of the majestic terrains of the American West. Investigations of the self and society are explored in Chapter Five, in the psychologically penetrating portraits and dreamlike landscape studies of the fin du siecle in Europe and America. And in Chapter Six, the modern era rushes into view with the provocative new vision of the twentieth century...