In his essay Making Meaning: Displaced materiality in the library and art museum in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (ed) Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart Glenn Willumson says:

In the United States, the elevation of photography into the sphere of the art museum is intertwined with the defined history of the medium. This process allowed photographs (always suspect because of their connection to mechanical reproduction) to move beyond amateur collectors and hobbyists and to attain the status of high cultural production. In the 1930s, the medium was of particular interest to the modern art museum because of its connection to technology and its availability to the popular imagination. These factors marked it as emblematic of the new machine age that was being celebrated by artists in the United States and Europe and by the Museum of Modern Art in New York

Until late in the nineteenth century, the majority of photographs produced in society were commodities intended for sale. In their efforts to legitimise photography as a fine art, curators mask this history behind formal criteria based on the tradition of the fine art print. Beaumont Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art articulated the methodology that addressed these issues and that shaped the curatorial practice towards photography in the United States. His exhibition Photography 1839–1937 and its associated publications codified a history of photography within a practice rooted in contemporary art historical methodology. Based upon formal analysis, attention to the moment of production and a concern for the contemporary audience, this set of practices brought attention to the surface quality of the photograph.... Although material quality defined the fine historical print, its ‘thingness’ was absorbed unarticulated into an aesthetic discourse.