Beautiful Londen

It was after these contacts that Stanislas Scott also reviewed New Photo Vision in the Nov 1, 1943 edition of The Architectural Review, reminding readers that it was Gernsheim “who took the magnificent photographs of Baroque monuments in Westminster Abbey which illustrated Sir Kenneth Clark’s article last July.”

For him the book hinges on Gernsheim’s firm belief “that camera art is art, and [he] only attacks those who can but think of it in terms of Ersatz-painting. His is a declaration of independence.”

It is despite The British Journal Of Photography‘s lukewarm review, and from these efforts, including his two postwar books on architecture, Focus on Architecture and Sculpture (Fountain Press, 1949) and Beautiful London (Phaidon, 1950), that Gernshheim attracted the attention of Beaumont Newhall. He, the curator of the landmark exhibition Photography 1839-1937 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged him to become an historian of photography and to take up collecting nineteenth-century photography that could be then had for a song. source; onthisdateinphotography.com