The New Yorker’s Louis Menand covered the “Photography and Discovery” show at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The exhibition displayed around 30 photographs, mostly pre-1900, that Menand calls curatorially unpretentious and “well worth a visit.” One the of photographs on display is, the one pictured above, Francis Frith’s “The Pyramids of El-Geezdeh from the Southwest” (albumen print, circa 1860). Menand says it is “almost an early-photography cliché” as the Pyramids of Giza were professional favourites because: “(a) they’re not going anywhere, and so they tolerate long exposure times, (b) they offer excellent formal elements for contrast, such as, for example, when a side of the pyramid that reflects light abuts a side in shadow, and (c) they enable photography to do what early photography (and, later, early cinema) loved to do, and what vacation pictures the world over do today, which is to bring the exotic back home. The level of detail Frith was able to render is virtually high-def. Each individual stone can be made out on a pyramid that must be half a mile from the camera.”