NGA - Photographs

PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION

In December 1948, when Georgia O'Keeffe was deciding where to place the largest and most significant collection of photographs by her late husband, the seminal American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she visited the National Gallery of Art. Astutely observing both small details as well as the larger symbolic importance of the still relatively new museum, she wrote to a friend a few days later, "as you probably know, [the Gallery] hasn't a speck of dust anywhere," and she noted, "Stieglitz worked for the recognition of photography as a fine art—the National Gallery means something in relation to that." The museum, she concluded, "seems like a peak—something finished—standing alone." One year later, O'Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate donated 1,311 works by Stieglitz, an auspicious beginning for the collection of photography at the Gallery.

Following a series of exhibitions in the 1980s, a separate department of photographs was established in 1990. Since then, the Gallery's holdings have grown to more than 10,000 photographs that span the entire range of photographic history, from the beginnings of the medium in 1839 through the present. Among the earliest works in the collection is a choice group by an inventor of the medium, William Henry Fox Talbot. One of his first photographic prints was Orléans Cathedral, 1843, made on a trip to France. With its delicate architectural details and its bold framing and composition, this image demonstrates Talbot's fascination not only with recording the world through photography, but also with the camera's ability to see it in new and exciting ways. Other nineteenth-century British photographers represented in the Gallery's collection include Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, and Peter Henry Emerson.

The Gallery also has fine examples by nineteenth-century French photographers, including Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Édouard-Denis Baldus, and Charles Marville. Many of these early photographers were trained as painters and brought highly refined aesthetic sensibilities to the new art of photography. Le Gray's Beech Tree, Forest of Fontainebleau, c. 1856, with its broad expanses of light and shade, evocatively describes an ancient tree barely rooted in the earth below. Nadar, celebrated for his portraits of the rich and famous, depicted his close colleague, the painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier, 1856–1858, wearing a peasant's jacket, thus demonstrating Daumier's humility.

Among the greatest strengths of the collection are groups of photographs by several major twentieth-century American practitioners: Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Frederick Sommer, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, and Lee Friedlander. Modeled after the Stieglitz collection, each of these holdings includes works from throughout the photographer's career and illustrates all aspects of the artists' contributions. For example, the Paul Strand collection contains the earliest known print of his groundbreaking modernist photograph The White Fence, 1916; nature studies of the 1920s; views of New Mexico, Mexico, and England taken in the 1930s and 1940s; and Strand's photographs of Italy, France, and the Hebrides from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The core of the Ansel Adams collection is the "Museum Set," a selection of seventy-five photographs made by Adams to represent his finest landscape photographs, such as The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, which encapsulates the monumentality of the American West.

The Walker Evans holdings range from his studies of New York cityscapes, made in the late 1920s, to Polaroids from the end of his life five decades later. The Robert Frank collection is especially impressive, reaching from Frank's early career in photojournalism to his highly personal compositions of the 1990s. Among the thousands of works contained in this collection are all the contact prints for Frank's epochal publication, The Americans (1958/1959), and supplementary work prints relating to that project. The Friedlander holdings include the only complete set of vintage prints he made for his book Self-Portrait (1970), and a complete set of prints for his book, Lee Friedlander (2000). Other important twentieth-century photographers represented at the Gallery include the Hungarian-born American photographer André Kertész and the Soviet photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko. More contemporary photographs have also been added to the collection, including most recently images by James Casebere and a group of photographs by Richard Misrach. The Gallery has expanded its holdings of photographs from the first half of the twentieth century with acquisitions of more than thirty works by Eugène Atget, and Charles Sheeler's images of his house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. A significant collection of works by women photographers, such as Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lotte Jacobi, and Alma Lavenson, were also added to the collection.

Photographs are fragile and subject to deterioration if exposed to light for extended periods, and the greatest part of the collection is kept in storage. Students and other visitors with a specific interest may take advantage of the Gallery's Photograph Study Room to examine and enjoy these important examples of the art of photography. Works are regularly drawn from the Gallery's collection or borrowed from other institutions and private individuals, and shown in temporary exhibitions in the West Building galleries dedicated to photography.

Selected Online Tours: Selected Photographs from the Collection; Modern Portraits in Photography

In-Depth Studies: Atget: The Art of Documentary Photography; Julia Margaret Cameron: The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty; Chim: David Seymour's Humanist Photography; Edward Steichen: Le Tournesol (The Sunflower)

Past Exhibition Resources: Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown; All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860; André Kertész; The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson; Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg; Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception; Charles Sheeler: Across Media; Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945; Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860; In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age; In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet; Irving Penn: Platinum Prints; Jaromír Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde; Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit; Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans"; Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries; Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters; Paris in Transition: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art; Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions; The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875; Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions; Richard Misrach: On the Beach; Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995; The Streets of New York: American Photographs from the Collection, 1938–1958

Podcasts: Amateur Photography and the Decisive Moment; An American Journey; Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg: Part 1, The Early Photos; Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg: Part 2, Revisiting and Reprinting; Conversations with Artists: Richard Misrach; Conversations with Artists: Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos and Other Landscapes; Conversations with Authors: Michael Fried on Photography, Modernism, and the Importance of Not Losing Faith in the Dialectic; Decoding Baltz's Prototypes; Elson Lecture 2009: Robert Frank; Exploring Photography at the National Gallery of Art; In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age; Jaromír Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde; Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit; Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe; Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945; My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933; The Paper Tiger: Calotypes in Great Britain (Parts 1 and 2); Photography between the Wars; Reading of The Fisherwoman by Toni Morrison from Robert Bergman's Book A Kind of Rapture, in Conjunction with the Exhibition Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995; Richard Misrach: On the Beach (Parts 1, 2, and 3); Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995: A Conversation with the Photographer; Robert Frank and the Photographic Book, 1930–1960; The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg; Snapshot Collecting; Transforming Destiny into Awareness: Robert Frank's "The Americans"

What's New Newsletters Calendar Recent Acquisitions Videos & Podcasts About the Gallery Pre-Raphaelites Faking it	PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION In December 1948, when Georgia O'Keeffe was deciding where to place the largest and most significant collection of photographs by her late husband, the seminal American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she visited the National Gallery of Art. Astutely observing both small details as well as the larger symbolic importance of the still relatively new museum, she wrote to a friend a few days later, "as you probably know, [the Gallery] hasn't a speck of dust anywhere," and she noted, "Stieglitz worked for the recognition of photography as a fine art—the National Gallery means something in relation to that." The museum, she concluded, "seems like a peak—something finished—standing alone." One year later, O'Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate donated 1,311 works by Stieglitz, an auspicious beginning for the collection of photography at the Gallery. Following a series of exhibitions in the 1980s, a separate department of photographs was established in 1990. Since then, the Gallery's holdings have grown to more than 10,000 photographs that span the entire range of photographic history, from the beginnings of the medium in 1839 through the present. Among the earliest works in the collection is a choice group by an inventor of the medium, William Henry Fox Talbot. One of his first photographic prints was Orléans Cathedral, 1843, made on a trip to France. With its delicate architectural details and its bold framing and composition, this image demonstrates Talbot's fascination not only with recording the world through photography, but also with the camera's ability to see it in new and exciting ways. Other nineteenth-century British photographers represented in the Gallery's collection include Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, and Peter Henry Emerson. The Gallery also has fine examples by nineteenth-century French photographers, including Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Édouard-Denis Baldus, and Charles Marville. Many of these early photographers were trained as painters and brought highly refined aesthetic sensibilities to the new art of photography. Le Gray's Beech Tree, Forest of Fontainebleau, c. 1856, with its broad expanses of light and shade, evocatively describes an ancient tree barely rooted in the earth below. Nadar, celebrated for his portraits of the rich and famous, depicted his close colleague, the painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier, 1856–1858, wearing a peasant's jacket, thus demonstrating Daumier's humility. Among the greatest strengths of the collection are groups of photographs by several major twentieth-century American practitioners: Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Frederick Sommer, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, and Lee Friedlander. Modeled after the Stieglitz collection, each of these holdings includes works from throughout the photographer's career and illustrates all aspects of the artists' contributions. For example, the Paul Strand collection contains the earliest known print of his groundbreaking modernist photograph The White Fence, 1916; nature studies of the 1920s; views of New Mexico, Mexico, and England taken in the 1930s and 1940s; and Strand's photographs of Italy, France, and the Hebrides from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The core of the Ansel Adams collection is the "Museum Set," a selection of seventy-five photographs made by Adams to represent his finest landscape photographs, such as The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, which encapsulates the monumentality of the American West. The Walker Evans holdings range from his studies of New York cityscapes, made in the late 1920s, to Polaroids from the end of his life five decades later. The Robert Frank collection is especially impressive, reaching from Frank's early career in photojournalism to his highly personal compositions of the 1990s. Among the thousands of works contained in this collection are all the contact prints for Frank's epochal publication, The Americans (1958/1959), and supplementary work prints relating to that project. The Friedlander holdings include the only complete set of vintage prints he made for his book Self-Portrait (1970), and a complete set of prints for his book, Lee Friedlander (2000). Other important twentieth-century photographers represented at the Gallery include the Hungarian-born American photographer André Kertész and the Soviet photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko. More contemporary photographs have also been added to the collection, including most recently images by James Casebere and a group of photographs by Richard Misrach. The Gallery has expanded its holdings of photographs from the first half of the twentieth century with acquisitions of more than thirty works by Eugène Atget, and Charles Sheeler's images of his house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. A significant collection of works by women photographers, such as Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lotte Jacobi, and Alma Lavenson, were also added to the collection. Photographs are fragile and subject to deterioration if exposed to light for extended periods, and the greatest part of the collection is kept in storage. Students and other visitors with a specific interest may take advantage of the Gallery's Photograph Study Room to examine and enjoy these important examples of the art of photography. Works are regularly drawn from the Gallery's collection or borrowed from other institutions and private individuals, and shown in temporary exhibitions in the West Building galleries dedicated to photography. Selected Online Tours Selected Photographs from the Collection Modern Portraits in Photography In-Depth Studies Atget: The Art of Documentary Photography Julia Margaret Cameron: The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty Chim: David Seymour's Humanist Photography Edward Steichen: Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) Past Exhibition Resources Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 André Kertész The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception Charles Sheeler: Across Media Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945 Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860 In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet Irving Penn: Platinum Prints Jaromír Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans" Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters Paris in Transition: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions Richard Misrach: On the Beach Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995 The Streets of New York: American Photographs from the Collection, 1938–1958 Podcasts Amateur Photography and the Decisive Moment An American Journey Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg: Part 1, The Early Photos Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg: Part 2, Revisiting and Reprinting Conversations with Artists: Richard Misrach Conversations with Artists: Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos and Other Landscapes Conversations with Authors: Michael Fried on Photography, Modernism, and the Importance of Not Losing Faith in the Dialectic Decoding Baltz's Prototypes Elson Lecture 2009: Robert Frank Exploring Photography at the National Gallery of Art In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age Jaromír Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945 My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933 The Paper Tiger: Calotypes in Great Britain (Parts 1 and 2) Photography between the Wars Reading of The Fisherwoman by Toni Morrison from Robert Bergman's Book A Kind of Rapture, in Conjunction with the Exhibition Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995 Richard Misrach: On the Beach (Parts 1, 2, and 3) Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995: A Conversation with the Photographer Robert Frank and the Photographic Book, 1930–1960 The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Snapshot Collecting Transforming Destiny into Awareness: Robert Frank's "The Americans"
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