Abstract First a note about how this fascinating little book came into print. Over twenty years ago John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modem Art, New York, attended a lecture at the College Art Association in Baltimore (1963). He heard the late Professor Schwarz inaugurate a session on Art and Photography with a paper titled ‘Before 1839: Symptoms and Trends’. He was ‘deeply impressed by the lecture and its illustrative materials’, as we later learned from Peter Galassi, whose Before Photography (1981), a MOMA exhibition and book, extended the train of thought begun so many years before. The original lecture, however, had disappeared. Galassi's book prompted its re-emergence. As Park explains, Schwarz gave his lecture (somewhat revised) a second time: as keynote speaker for a Symposium on the History of Photography sponsored by George Eastman House, in collaboration with the Society for Photographic Education. On this occasion, in November 1964, the lecture was attended and taped by Nathan Lyons, at that time Associate Director and Curator of Photography at the George Eastman House, later Director of the Visual Studies Workshop, who had — Parker tells us — ‘also encouraged wider recognition of Schwarz's pioneering contributions to studies in photography’. Here, thanks to the goodwill of these gentlemen, the authorization of Mrs Schwarz, and a grant from the NEA, is the celebrated lecture from the years 1963–64.