Maria Morris Hambourg and Pierre Apraxine are internationally recognized historians, curators, and scholars whose collaborative work has significantly advanced the study of the history of photography. By 1994, both had established distinguished careers dedicated to researching, preserving, and interpreting nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography. Their scholarship combined rigorous historical research with innovative curatorial practice, contributing to the recognition of photography as an essential component of art history and museum collections.
The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century (1993), published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to accompany a landmark exhibition presenting selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. The exhibition featured 253 photographs chosen from a collection of more than 5,000 works, offering one of the most comprehensive surveys of photography's first century ever assembled. Rather than presenting photography as a simple chronological sequence of inventions, Hambourg and Apraxine examined the medium's artistic evolution through six thematic and historical sections, tracing its development from the earliest photographic experiments to the emergence of modern documentary photography before the Second World War.