Captured Moments: 170 Years of Photography from the Albany Institute

Elephants marching down the street. A happy motorcyclist posing with his brand new bike. A batter stepping up to the plate, waiting for the pitch. These are just a few of the fleeting moments captured by the click of a camera, moments preserved for posterity on the delicate surface of a photograph. These images and more than one hundred others will highlight the Albany Institute’s extensive photography collections in the exhibition Captured Moments: 170 Years of Photography from the Albany Institute, on view January 28–May 21, 2017.

From the moment the daguerreotype—the first widely available form of photography—was made public in 1839 to the present-day selfie snapped with a smart phone, the medium of photography has been admired for its ability to document a particular moment in time with remarkable veracity. Early photographers spoke of the process as nature drawing itself with the action of the sun since photography uses light to capture images. But whether it’s the sun recording an image through chemical reactions or the algorithms on a nanoscale chip, the photograph has a way of revealing our world that other visual media like paintings and drawings cannot.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.