Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography

The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography

Moisey, Andrew

Hardcover

Art Criticism & TheoryPhotography History & Criticism

ISBN10: 0300285205
ISBN13: 9780300285208
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Sep 15 2026
Pages: 248
Weight: 2.39
Height: 0.88 Width: 8.22 Depth: 10.30
Language: English

A dynamic prehistory of photography tracing the medium through more than four centuries of Western art

The prehistory of photography is often told as a story of science, of a magic arising from the camera obscura and advances in chemistry, but not as a history of art. In this exhilarating and erudite book, Andrew Moisey uses a practicing photographer's perspective to show how a sense of being there--the immediacy, takenness, and embodiment inherent in a photograph--originates in the Western art of everyday life before photography. Moisey argues that photography's spirit appears in art before its invention--and that its invention sets the standard of first-person subjectivity on which Impressionism and Modernism were raised.

Spanning over four centuries from the Renaissance to today, the book shows how pictorial models of the present shift from world pictures to embodied, situated encounters before photography's invention, giving paintings and prints a crucial role in photography's ancestry for the first time. Moisey then reverses the book's perspective to reveal how photographic artists in the twentieth century used graphic abstraction to resurrect the early modern world picture of life. Drawing on his experiences as both a scholar and a photographer, Moisey grounds his book in art history and his own first-hand experience.

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