“…For it was precisely such a photographer -Timothy O'Sullivan -(whose 1860s While O'Sullivan's photographs had occasionally landed on the museum walls, 3 it was their inclusion in Peter Galassi's 1981 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, an exhibition establishing the medium's "relationship to the traditional arts" (Galassi 1981, 11) and "its relationship to painting," (Galassi 1981, 12) that secured the landscape photograph's polemical status, one that prompted Krauss to redouble her efforts through O'Sullivan in bringing the "definitive ruptures" in that tradition to light (Krauss 1979, 44). If Galassi's ambition was "to show that photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition," (Galassi 1981, 12) Krauss's aim was precisely to leverage photography to discompose that tradition. For Krauss, it was because O'Sullivan was not any kind of painter and because the emergence of the photograph -something guided by causal, indexical relationships -ought not, she thought, be understood as an episode in the history of Art, that the landscape photograph could serve to displace rather than extend that tradition.…”