Points of Departure

The early nineteenth century witnessed the birth of photography as well as the steam engine, the telegraph, and countless other life-altering innovations. Points of Departure, featuring European and American paintings, photographs, and works on paper from the BAM/PFA collection, surveys these rapidly moving currents of modernization and the various reactions to it through the lens of visual culture.

View of Providence, Rhode Island, painted in the mid-1820s by an unknown American artist, captures… Show more the coastal city on the brink of transition from a pioneer village to a bustling center of commerce. The First Unitarian Church (then called the First Congregational Church) dominates this compact panorama of the businesses along South Water Street. Photography, introduced in 1839, was also used to document urban progress, as in Charles Marville’s views of old Paris, commissioned by the city in the late 1850s as demolition made way for extensive modernization.

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