By tradition and by design, the museum is an institution attuned to the historica

and aesthetic dimensions of the objects it places on view. Within the art museum s

repertory, photographs have a firmly established place, both as important documents

of times past and as finely crafted pictures. This exhibition, though it brings together

works spanning 150 years, does not rehearse a history of major moments, move-

ments, or masterpieces in photography. Notwithstanding the historical and visual

interest of the images in Making Light, and their relevance in that hybrid phenomenon

the social history of art, they have been brought together in service of a sectional

(rather than chronological) view of photography, centered upon a rhetorical (rather

than aesthetic) characteristic that unites them. Namely, they are liable to make you

crack up.