Edward Steichen who took over the MoMA in 1945, provided a landmark show in 1955, The Family of Man, which presented photography as a giant three-dimensional photo essay through which visitors could wander (Kelsey 268). Steichen’s curatorial methods suggested that photography in the art museum should feature not the aesthetically refined and personally expressive individual print, but rather a selection of images that could impart a clear message to a broad public (Kelsey 268). This photographic exhibition was considered the greatest of all time, and included 503 pictures from 68 countries (Kelsey 270). Connecting the bond between the camera operator and the photograph made way for calling into question the traditional model of authorship in the fine arts (Kelsey 270). Steichen celebrated photography as a universal language, capable of bringing the world together. He purposed that photographic art required no …show more content…
Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest (Sontag 89). Fox Talbot composed photographs in the genres taken over from painting such as portrait, domestic scene, townscape, and still life, but also trained his camera on a seashell, on the wings of a butterfly, and on a row of books. His subjects are still recognizably a shell, a butterfly, and books, yet when each object was isolated from its surroundings, it became abstract, and this new convention became what was beautiful (Sontag 90-91). Photography seemed to have found its role, as the bridge between art and science; and painters were admonished to learn from the beauties of abstract photography (Sontag 91). Gradually, many other photographers began to migrate to the abstract photograph (Sontag