The Visual Studies Workshop exhibition entitled "Degas' Visual World" has been mounted to complement the Degas show at the Memorial Art Gallery. Edgar Degas was deciding to become an artist in the 1850s just as a host of new photographic images was flooding his world. These photographs provided new, non-traditional ways of visualizing the flux of daily events in the active urban environment that Degas inhabited. Degas responded to this new visual environment in both his choice of subjects and in his manner of painting. Later Degas himself became an amateur photographer in the 1880s. The VSW exhibition includes photographs, prints and publications from Degas' time

Degas was five years old when Louis Daguerre announced his startling new discovery of "portraits made by the sun." Degas grew up looking at those magic daguerreotype portraits and at the lovely soft prints of buildings and views made in Fox Talbot's rival calotype process. But both these processes, magical as they seemed to their time, were slow and very limited in what kinds of subjects they could successfully represent. In the early 1850s, just as Degas began to paint, Frederick Scott Archer worked out a usable wet-collodion photographic process which could catch and freeze a slightly larger slice of the flow of daily life into an image. Millions of these new images quickly flooded the world as commercial photographers developed ways to find new mass markets for their photographs. Stereograph views, cartes-de-visite, and topographical scenes moved from a novelty to a commonplace tool of commerce, science and education. This flood of photographs provided a staggeringly large number of new images of how the world could be represented; images that -- sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately-- challenged traditional modes of representation. Degas, along with other perceptive artists, looked hard at this new visual source and drew from it ideas to enrich his own artistic vision. Again, in the 1880s, as further improvements in photography opened up the medium to amateurs, Degas briefly but ardently experimented with the visual potentials of medium itself, attempting to force a new "look" out of the process as he photographed his friends and acquaintances.

—William Johnson, Curator