In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MoMA) became the first major American art museum to establish a curatorial department dedicated exclusively to photography. From the perspective of the photographers, curators, and critics who had sought institutional legitimacy for the medium, the founding of the Department of Photographs was a watershed event, marking the moment when photography finally came to be recognized as a museum subject equal to painting and sculpture. Although the department has since had a pervasive influence on the field and the history of photography, surprisingly little scholarship has addressed its contentious formation. This dissertation seeks to fill this significant gap in the literature by examining the department's inception and the six years Beaumont Newhall served as its curator.Of particular concern are the ideological battles waged over how photography would be presented at MoMA by Newhall, his wife Nancy--who served as acting curator when her husband enlisted in the army during World War II--and the department's co-founder and key advisor, Ansel Adams. As acolytes of the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who himself had long fought for the recognition of photography as a medium of art, the Newhalls and Adams took aesthetic quality as their guiding metric, asserting that in order to raise the profile of photographers, educate the public, and improve standards of taste, the museum should show only the very best work ever created--the "heavy cream" of photographic production. Their vision for photography at the museum was counterbalanced by that of the photographer Edward Steichen and many prominent writers and critics, who argued that MoMA should treat photography as a broad-ranging cultural phenomenon and means of communication, rather than merely as a medium of self expression. The debate between these two camps illustrates the considerable philosophical, interpretive, and museological challenges raised by photography's introduction into the museum, issues that remain as contentious as ever.

As a word, glamour is hard to define, but is instantly recognizable. Its association with Hollywood movie stars fully emerged in the 1930s in the close-up celebrity portraits by photographers like George Hurrell. The aesthetic properties in these images that help create glamour are characterized by the Modernist style, known for sharp focus, high contrast, seductive poses, and the close-up (tight framing). My essay will explore the origins of the visual aesthetics of glamour, arguing that their roots can be found in the still life photographs of the 1910s, produced by fine art photographers such as Edward Steichen. This essay will primarily focus on the photography of Edward Steichen because he used these same techniques found in his still life portraits on Hollywood celebrities when he began working for Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair and Vogue in 1923. Steichen changed the conversation on how to photograph celebrities and his practices eventually led to the creation of glamour portrait photography. This thesis documents the ways in which Steichen established the precedent for glamour photography when he applied the close-up and Modernist style on Hollywood stars. The result of Steichen’s application was photography that provided visually identifiable and mechanically reproducible glamour.