Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946). Reflections, Night-New York. 1896. Photogravure print ca. 1897. Courtesy George Eastman House.

Miles Davis said that Louis Armstrong anticipated everything in jazz, “even modern [stuff].” The photographs featured in TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 at the Phillips Collection might seem like photographic Dixieland to twenty-first century eyes. But this old-fashioned band of photographers anticipated much of modern photography — by some accounts, even the Hipstamatic.

The exhibit is organized by the George Eastman House (also in the news recently with the announcement that the diaries of silent screen legend Louise Brooks are ready to be revealed to the public) and Vancouver Art Gallery. The Pictorialists found their precursors, their Buddy Boldens if you will, from the salted paper prints of Hill and Adamson (so fragile that they must be kept behind black curtains to protect them from the Phillips’ skylight) to the maudlin titles of Julia Margaret Cameron (Wist Ye Not That Your Father and I Sought Thee Sorrowing? is typical), and the soft focus and tonal range of these images certainly owe something to the impressionists.