Cross-Pollinating Media

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artworks, scholarship that's actually interesting if not riveting, and an engrossing story of how a whirligig of forces shaped photography and painting on the Normandy coast in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a fascinating look at the beginning of photography and Impressionism and how each influenced the other. While UMMA has focused the lenses so we can see how social, technological, artistic, commercial, and industrial changes all played into one another, the thrill of the exhibit is to stand in front of these ninety-some works.

Before you are some of the first en plein air photographs--some with negatives, which is, McNamara says, a rare and "totally fabulous" thing. You can be inches away from originals of the massive cliffs at Dieppe and then move a few feet to the left to see pre-Impressionist paintings of the same scene, imitating the same tiny-slice-of-time attitude. Turn to the right to contrast them with earlier, more "finished" paintings.

Stand in the center of the Taubman Gallery for similar panoramas of skyscapes, waves, landforms, seascapes--even tourists themselves. It all makes perfect sense: Yes, of course the railroad opened the coast to the masses, which spawned the tourist trade in this gorgeous region, which attracted visual artists, often working on the same scenes.