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During the decades after World War II, the configuration of institutional forces that shape photographic practice assumed their current form. Although some scholarship has already addressed photography's incorporation into the museum, this panel strives to broaden the frame. While retaining an interest in the museum’s role in shaping the medium, we also aim to consider additional institutional forces that have determined photography: the emergence of photo-criticism as a genre of writing, and the related insertion of photography into the dealer-critic system; the introduction of photography into higher-education programs (BFA, MFA, Communications, etc.); the role of corporations such as Kodak in guiding photography; the emergence of the history of photography as a subject in the academy; and changing practices in exhibiting photography. By developing these vantages on the medium, we hope to illuminate the broader constraints within which photographic artists have worked, and to which they have responded. This panel aims to develop an alternative perspective on photography in the years in which photographs began circulating as artworks.