"First Seen," subtitled "Photographs of the World's Peoples, 1840-1880," is a testament to the voracious appetite of photography's earliest practitioners—amateur and professional, anonymous and renowned. The invention of the camera prompted a widespread rediscovery of the world, from the pyramids and the Parthenon to the contents of a local shop window and the flowers in the backyard. Everything old was new again. But the exotic had a special appeal to the English, European, and American photographers who dominated the field at the end of the 19th century and set out to capture and preserve ordinary and remarkable human specimens from... More >>>