In its second photography exhibition, the Barnes presents nearly 250 iconic pictures created in Britain and France between the 1840s and the 1880s. Following the production of the first photographs in the 1830s, and before the advent of Kodak’s point-and-shoot camera in 1888, artists experimented with photography, creating innovative processes and uniquely compelling representational tropes.

When the influential French painter Paul Delaroche saw a photograph for the first time, he proclaimed, “From today, painting is dead!”

This exhibition explores the very fertile period in the early history of photography, when the medium’s pioneers were grappling with the complex inheritance of official, state-sponsored visual culture.