page_840 < previous page page_840 next page > Page 840 aperture-lens Ermanox, and twin-lens-reflex Rolleiflex  greatly enhanced the new format. In the hands of Steichen and Irving Penn, these and other new small cameras provided appropriate tools for yet another new vogue, fashion photography. But more important, news photographers could abandon their bulky Graflex cameras, flash guns, and fast tank development in the darkroom. Using the new cameras and available light, such photographers as Eric Salomon in Europe and Albert Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and others in the United States became the pioneers of modern photo-journalism. Socially concerned photographers such as Aaron Siskind made an early record (1928) of slum conditions in Harlem  even as his older and then unknown contemporary James Van Der Zee recorded in his studio, and sometimes in street scenes, the last vestiges of the black community's earlier social fabric. Before 1900, the manufacture of cameras, emulsion-coated dry plates, photographic paper, and so on, was conducted by small firms. But the arrival on the scene of George Eastman and the dawn of a new era of business trusts and chain-store retail merchandising changed all this. By the turn of the century, photography, like the horse and buggy, was poised for a coming age of mechanization. At the outset, photography was clearly in the lead; there were, by 1900, 100,000 Kodak cameras alone in the hands of a new generation of amateurs, whereas only some 8,000 horseless carriages were registered by this time. During the years 18891909, production of photographic apparatus and materials grew at an annual rate of 11 percent, as against a growth rate of only about 4.7 percent annually by U.S. industrial production in general. In the latter years of the twentieth century, photography remained well ahead in the race, if there was one, with the horseless carriage, reaching an annual level of 10.7 billion in the number of photographs made by amateurs at the outset of the 1980s. Until Kodachrome color film reached the market in 1935, no successful mode for combining color screens in a camera to produce color photographs had been perfected, although by the 1890s screens could be combined for three-dimensional viewing like card stereographs and could be projected on a wall or screen by a magic lantern. Polaroid introduced its first instant-picture camera in 1947, and the following year the manufacture of Nikon cameras began, leading after the Korean War to Japan's "invasion" of the U.S. camera market. The rudiments of camera automation appeared just before the outbreak of World War II with the development of prototype exposure control and flash synchronization systems. The Metropolitan Museum of Art accepted its first collection of photographs (personal photographs belonging to Stieglitz) in 1926, fourteen years before the trend-setting department of photography was established at New York's Museum of Modern Art. When the J. Paul Getty Museum in California mounted a year-long series of five exhibitions to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the daguerreotype invention, the title chosen for the series was Experimental Photography, which allowed subjective illustration of early daguerreotype, calotype, and wet-plate-era works; photographs by painter photographers such as Thomas Eakins and Charles Sheeler; industrial and commonplace scenes artistically rendered by Strand, Weston, Walker Evans, and others; and a new subjectivity from the 1940s to the 1960s when realism yielded to a new ambiguity and introspection in photographs by André Kertesz, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. Over the years, other exhibitions have categorized the motivations and achievements of great American photographers in other ways. The first comprehensive published study was completed by Time-Life Books in the 1970s. Several critics have contended that every decade, in effect, imposes its own aesthetic. But one can find books of photographers' works covering the New Deal era that, on the one hand, suggest an "unbounded belief in the potential of growth," and on the other, portray works by Farm Security Administration photographers of the dust bowl conditions that led to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The immediacy of repeated crime, warfare, and other shocking scenes on television may also have dulled the public's ability to appreciate or respond to doc-  < previous page page_840 next page >