AT FIRST SIGHT:
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SMITHSONIAN
by Merry A. Fresta

Hardbound, 8.5" x 11.25", 288 pages
82 color photos, 195 duotones, 2 gatefords
2003, Smithsonian Institution Press

From the Publisher:
The first look ever into the Smithsonian's 700 extraordinary photographic collections.

Photography and the Smithsonian were invented at the same time, and both were instrumental in revealing the modern world to itself. The Smithsonian holds more than 13 million images spanning over 150 years of taking and collecting photographs. This largely unknown body of photography, most never before published, represents nothing less than the Smithsonian's effort, in the name of all Americans, to describe and comprehend the world.

The book is at once a first glimpse at the wealth of photograph holdings at the Smithsonian and an exploration of the wonder and power of the photographic image. Open anywhere in these pages to be plunged in the ongoing history of our modernity, and what the Smithsonian charged as the nation's museum deemed important to document and preserve. The book contains photographs that span the medium's history and record science, geography, history, the arts, and cultural events, from the first photographs ever made to digital views beamed back from Mars. The famous, the infamous, and the never-before-seen are here in a remarkable "democracy of images": Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Lucille Ball, Greta Garbo, Babe Ruth; the earliest views of the moon and the earliest panoramic view of Damascus; rare Native American photography; views of Asia, Africa, and the American West; photographs of early flight, and much, much more. By recording the act of seeing, and of what was seen, both photography and the Smithsonian have shaped our sense of ourselves, as individuals, as a people, as a country.

About the Author:
Merry Foresta is senior curator of photography at the Smithsonian Institution. Her previous books include Perpetual Motif: The Photography of Man Ray; Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary Landscape Photograph and Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype.

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