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Photography The Museum began to collect photographs in 1930 and established the department in 1940; its holdings of more than 25,000 works dating from approximately 1840 to the present constitute one of the most important collections of photography in the world. As diverse as photography itself, the collection includes work not only by artists, but also by journalists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and amateurs.

One might say that Andreas Gursky learned photography three times. Born in 1955, he grew up in Düsseldorf, the only child of a successful commercial photographer, learning the tricks of that trade before he had finished high school. In the late 1970s, he spent two years in nearby Essen at the Folkwangschule (Folkwang School), which Otto Steinert had established as West Germany's leading training ground for professional photographers, especially photojournalists. At Essen, Gursky encountered photography's documentary tradition, a sophisticated art of unembellished observation, whose earnest outlook was remote from the artificial enticements of commercial work. Finally, in the early 1980s, he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie (State Art Academy) in Düsseldorf, which thanks to artists such as Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter had become the hotbed of Germany's vibrant postwar avant-garde. There Gursky learned the ropes of the art world and mastered the rigorous method of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs had achieved prominence within the Conceptual and Minimal art movements.

THEORY: "Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York" Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York ArtForum, Sept, 2005 by Carol Armstrong Walking with a friend through the Lee Friedlander retrospective at MOMA, I noticed that the two of us each had a different way of looking at almost every early street photograph on view: One of us saw the photograph a certain way right off the bat and couldn't easily see it otherwise, while the other noticed everything else in the photo and could only see the "hook" after having it pointed out. What in one viewing looked like Americanized pieces of Cartier-Bresson poetic doubling in another couldn't be disentangled from a set of densely stratified spatial and perceptual conundrums that at once posit the transparency of photography and question it at every level.

Kathy Ryan, photography editor at "The New York Times Magazine", Peter Galassi, chief photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and photographers Jim Nachtwey and Gilles Peress discuss the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition for which "The New York Times" gave 300 of its photographs. note this comes at the end of the video

By A. D. Coleman The "New Documents" exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 1967, almost exactly a third of a century ago. Organized by John Szarkowski for the museum's Department of Photography, this show featured almost 100 prints by three relatively unrecognized younger photographers from the east coast of the U.S. - Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand - and came as a watershed moment in the evolution of contemporary photography. What exactly did this exhibition signify?