The second installment in The Museum of Modern Art's three-volume history of photography drawn entirely from its own collection, this book surveys the medium through the height of the modernist period, from 1920 to 1960.
Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, and Sarah Hermanson Meister edited the volume. Douglas Coupland, Kevin Moore, Drew Sawyer, and Pepper Stetler contributed essays. The book opens with an introduction, then moves through eight chapters of full-color plates, each prefaced by a short essay. Photographers include Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, and Aleksander Rodchenko, alongside lesser-known figures who complicate the familiar modernist canon. The volume runs 392 pages in hardcover, with 375 plates.
MoMA formed the first curatorial department devoted to photography in 1940, under Beaumont Newhall. John Szarkowski's long tenure as department director further shaped photography's standing as an art form in American museums. This volume is the middle installment of a trilogy, alongside Photography at MoMA: 1840 to 1920 and Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now. Together they form the first history of the medium built entirely from one museum's holdings since Szarkowski's own Looking at Photographs in 1973.
Notes
Authorship: AbeBooks (schema.org Book record) and ARTBOOK/D.A.P.'s product page independently agree the book is credited 'Edited with text by Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister' with additional essay text by Douglas Coupland, Kevin Moore, Drew Sawyer, and Pepper Stetler. Bajac is listed first and held the title of Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA at time of publication, so he is set as authors[0]; the other three MoMA curators are listed as Editor-role contributors rather than co-primary authors since no single-name attribution appears ahead of the group on either source. This is an institutional multi-editor museum survey, not a single-artist monograph -- 'VA/NA' convention was not used because a primary curator (Bajac) is in fact named first on both sources. authors[0].url left null: Bajac has no independent personal/official website (he left MoMA in 2018 for the Jeu de Paume, Paris); per task instructions, MoMA's own site is listed in artist_links and publisher.url instead of forcing it into authors[0].url. height_cm/width_cm are converted from the ARTBOOK-listed trade dimension '9.5 x 12 in' (assumed W x H, portrait orientation matching the cover proportions) -- not independently confirmed against a MARC 300 field, since no LOC or Getty record was found for this ISBN. images.color/bw breakdown not confirmed beyond the '375 color' plate count given by the distributor.
Contributors
Editor
Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister
Contributors
Douglas Coupland (Text); Kevin Moore (Text); Drew Sawyer (Text); Pepper Stetler (Text)
