Title: Eakins and the Photograph
Author: Susan Danly
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press
Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and his circle in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
236 pp., with 16 tritone, 52 duotone and 173 black and white illustrations.
One of the foremost American painters of the nineteenth century, Thomas Eakins was also a pioneer in the fields of artistic and scientific photography. His platinum prints broke new ground, but the most innovative aspect of his work was his emphasis on the nude, then part of the French repertoire of academic visual studies but rarely encountered in the United States. Eakins and the Photograph is the first catalogue of the Eakins photographs in the Pennsylvania Academy's Charles Bregler collection, which includes about three-fourths of Eakins's photographic output. The book describes the entire collection of 648 images. This is the first book to place Eakins's photographic works (and those of his circle) within the context of the transitional era between 1880 and 1900, when photography moved from the realm of commerce to that of art.
