Celebrating the gallery’s 25th anniversary, a new exhibition tracing the history of photography – from its birth in the mid 1830s to the early 20th century – will be on view at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs from October 14 though November 20, 2009. Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914 is a survey of iconic works of extraordinary beauty and rarity by the preeminent photographers of the time who defined photography both technically and aesthetically.

Silver Anniversary is divided into three sections: The Period of Discovery (1835-1845), a fertile time during the Industrial Revolution when British and French inventors competed for primacy; The Golden Age (1850s-1860s), when European photographers, many trained as artists, used paper and glass negatives to explore their homes and distant lands; and The Pictorialist Movement (1885-1914), which represents a group of artist-photographers who consciously broke with mainstream photography.

The exhibition features work by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of paper negative photography, and some of the greatest photographers of their periods including Anna Atkins, Hippolyte Bayard, J. B. Greene, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Nègre, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. A fully illustrated catalogue by photographic historians Dr. Larry J. Schaaf and Russell Lord will be available.