An "evanescent shadow, a delicate, just perceptible image, the trace of a small plant on a field of periwinkle blue." With this description of one of the very earliest photographic experiments, Maria Morris Hambourg begins the riveting story of photography's first century, a story that concludes on the eve of World War II with the dramatic photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Walker Evans, images imprinted indelibly into the consciousness of the modern era. The 253 works in the exhibition, many of them rare or unique and all of exceptional print quality, have been culled from the more than five thousand that comprise the legendary but seldom exhibited Gilman Paper Company Collection, the most important private collection of photographs in the world. Assembled over the past two decades, the collection is composed of images both ravishing and historically significant, setting the standard of connoisseurship in the field and illuminating the aesthetics of the medium.