Words on Pictures

Why did the art market in photographs arrive so late? Some Considerations  updated and addended 10-01-2026    The emergence of a serious art market in photographs in the 1960s was not simply the result of suddenly enlightened taste. It arrived late because of deep structural, ideological, and economic conditions that had constrained photography since its invention in 1839. To understand why it took so long one has to look at both the extended debate over photography’s legitimacy as art and the ways its support systems evolved outside the conventional art market    From the vantage point of the 1960s, the emergence of a serious art market for collectible photographs can look like a belated but straightforward correction: museums began to collect, galleries began to sell, critics began to write, and photographs finally took their “rightful” place alongside painting and sculpture. But if you trace the medium’s history from 1839 forward, the lateness of that shift i...

From the Annual Report of the NYPL Picture Collection, July 1948 thru June 30, 1949 "The gamut of subjects asked for at the Picture Collection is astounding, particularly as neither idle curiosity, nor hobby spurred the requests. Pictures on widely separate subjects were necessary for a Television broadcast to materialize, for men's ties to be manufactured, for an architect to landscape a cemetery, for a surgeon to give a paper on stumps." ... "Television with its requirements for rapidly organized productions began to use this collection heavily. Several hundred changes of costume are prepared weekly, research must be done quickly and since there is no other source from which pictures on the whole history of fashion may be borrowed, these files became indispensable." Excerpt From: Anthony T. Troncale. Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection. Television programs - CBS  Toast of the Town  with (front row, l to r) ...