Books.(Best of 2003)

Arthur C. Danto

Though photography was first believed to entail the death of painting, early photographs presented viewers with a dead world: Objects could be rendered with clarity only under the conditions of nature morte. Unlike paintings, which were able to depict the fact that, say, horses were in motion, the camera could capture animals only when immobile. Eadweard Muybridge's achievement in 1872--thirty-three years after photography's invention--was to bring the new medium abreast of painting by depicting the fact that a live horse was in motion. Muybridge had taken an ...

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