Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography

Discover how pictorialism, the first international art photography movement, developed across the world from the 1880s to the 1960s

Bringing together over 50 artists from Seoul to Sydney, New York to Cape Town, and Brazil to Singapore, this truly international exhibition takes a fresh and inclusive look at the history of art photography.

A global photographic movement that began in Europe in the 1890s, Pictorialism saw the early experiments of “photography as fine art”—with artists championing its expressive potential over its function as merely a scientific or documentary tool. Photographs, like paintings or drawings, could be imaginative, even staged or manipulated. What followed was an exhilarating body of work that rethought the practice of photography entirely, with artists from all over the world pushing at the medium's very boundaries.

Featuring over 200 vintage prints, many of which never-before-seen works, Light and Magic positions artists such as Wu Peng Seng, Lionel Wendt and Ho Fan alongside well-known photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Edward Steichen. Also featured is a photographic timeline, explaining in detail many of the different printing processes used by the featured artists.

This landmark publication is for lovers of photography and early modernism alike, providing an essential new chapter on the history of photography as an art form.