Photo: A History From Behind the Lens

In 1928, the surrealists' favorite photographer was a machine: the photo booth, an American invention that had recently arrived in Paris, making self-portraiture available to all. Through the manipulation of images, the search was on to find the surrealism hidden in reality itself.

As photographers looked at the world with an artist's eye, photography became a new means to interpret reality.

The Dusseldorf school of the 1960s sought to preserve the memory of a disappearing world as the industrial landscape began to change. Its rigorous documentary style eliminated all elements of subjectivity, though the school's need to control images led to digital manipulation.

To tell a story better, photographs were scripted, executed, and then assembled by computer. Reality became a construction process in which all were free to follow their own imaginations.

As photography escaped the rigidity of its rectangular format, magazines covered everything from the Dustbowl to New York nightlife to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. To avoid being overtaken by television, photography relied on unique images that created vivid memories.

Pictorialists responded to the nostalgia for hand-produced paintings and the rejection of art generated by machines. Endeavoring to free themselves from the camera's mechanical objectivity, they relied on laboratory work as much as the shot itself for inspiration.

A wind of madness swept over European photography in the 1920s. Verticals and horizontals were abandoned, as were the rules of perspective handed down since the Renaissance. With its unexpected vantage points, the New Vision saw the diagonal as the axis of modernity.

The act of photographing one's private world affirmed the importance of a subjective point of view in images captured for the photographer's personal use. Taking the camera into places out of bounds to others made the rest of us voyeurs.

The breakthrough of daguerreotypes encouraged people to commission portraits, or "likenesses," as they were known. Because subjects had to pose for hours, few children featured in these early photographs. For the daguerreotype, the ideal portrait subject was a dead one.

Most of the estimated 350 billion pictures taken since the beginning of photography in the early 19th century have no artistic merit or intent. But that hasn't stopped these so-called found photos from being used as raw material for new forms of photomontage.

In the 1960s, the conceptual photography movement strived to express thoughts not with words, but with pictures. Amateur cameras captured reality with absolute neutrality, gestures revealed a casual attitude towards photography, and deconstruction evoked the relationship between image and concept.

Since the invention of the digital camera, photographers have both embraced and rejected the art of digital illusion. Some photographers "perfect" reality with photo manipulation software, while others distort images to heighten their unreality. Still others return to the simpler technology of pinhole cameras.