Backgrounder:

The Collection of Photographs at The National Gallery of Art, Washington

The National Gallery of Art's collection of over 8,000 photographs encompasses the history of the medium, from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, and concentrates on the finest examples by the medium's masters. In December 1948, when Georgia O'Keeffe was deciding where to place the largest and most important collection of photographs by her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, the seminal American photographer, she visited the Gallery. With keen observation and astute judgment, she noted both small details as well as the larger symbolic importance of the newly opened museum. The Gallery, she wrote to a friend a few days later, "as you probably know, hasn't a speck of dust anywhere." More significantly, though, she realized that "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." With that auspicious visit, the National Gallery inaugurated its collection of photographs.

Collection Begins with Stieglitz "Key Set"

In 1949 Georgia O'Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate donated 1,311 photographs by Stieglitz and placed on deposit a remarkable collection of 331 portraits of O'Keeffe, which were later given to the Gallery in 1980. The Gallery's Stieglitz collection, known as the "Key Set," is an unparalleled selection of his photographs, containing at least one print of every mounted photograph in Stieglitz's possession at the time of his death. Carefully selected by O'Keeffe to include the finest examples of his work, it thoroughly documents all aspects of his seminal contribution to the art of photography. This remarkable collection—the world's largest—includes over 300 of his evocative studies of clouds, called Equivalents, made from 1922 to 1937, over 170 portraits of his friends and colleagues from throughout his career, and more than 300 portraits of O'Keeffe herself. Other highlights are exceptionally rare examples of Stieglitz's earliest work made in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, as well as studies of New York from the 1890s through the 1930s.

In 1990, a separate department of photographs was established, and since then the Gallery has expanded its holdings of photographs beyond the Stieglitz collection and now has work representing the finest examples of the art of photography from the last 160 years by more than 180 photographers.

19th-Century Holdings

Among the earliest works in the collection are a small but choice group of photographs by the inventor of the medium, William Henry Fox Talbot. A remarkably talented individual with exceptionally broad interests, Talbot, frustrated by his inability to draw on his honeymoon trip to Italy, embarked on a series of experiments in the 1830s to fix permanently the image of nature. One of his early works was Orléans Cathedral (1843), a photograph he made on a trip to France in 1843. With its delicate architectural details and its bold framing and composition, this photograph demonstrates Talbot's fascination not only with photography's ability to record the world, but also with the camera's capacity to see it in new and exciting ways. Other important 19th-century British photographers represented in the Gallery's strong holdings of work by Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, and Peter Henry Emerson. Cameron's photograph of her niece, Julia Jackson (1867), is one of one of the many powerful portraits of her friends and family for which she was celebrated.

The Gallery's collection also has fine examples by the first generation of 19th-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 and its evocative description of an ancient tree whose roots are barely connected to the earth below, succinctly represents the approach and concerns of many of these early French photographers. Nadar's study of the painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1856–1858) is another masterpiece from this period. Although Nadar was celebrated for his portraits of the rich and famous personages of the Third Empire in France, he depicted his friend and colleague wearing a simple peasant's jacket, thus demonstrating Daumier's touching humility.

20th-Century Photographers

Among the greatest strengths of the collection are large and important groups of photographs by several major 20th-century American practitioners: Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Ilse Bing, Frederick Sommer, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Irving Penn. Modeled after the Stieglitz collection, these holdings include works from throughout each photographer's career and illustrate all aspects of their important contributions. For example, the Paul Strand collection contains not only the earliest known print of his groundbreaking modernist photograph The White Fence (1916), as well as his compelling urban studies, such as People, Streets of New York, 83rd and West End Avenue (1916), but also superb examples of his nature studies from the 1920s, his views of both New Mexico and Mexico in the 1930s, his studies of New England from the 1940s, and his 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 75 photographs made by the photographer himself to represent his finest landscape photographs from the early 1920s through the 1960s, such as The Tetons and the Snake River (1942), which encapsulates the monumentality of the American West.
The Walker Evans holdings include significant examples of his work, from his earliest studies of New York City made in the late 1930s to some of his last Polaroids from the 1970s, and are distinguished by a large and important group of his photographs made in New York subways between 1938 and 1941.

The Robert Frank collection is equally as impressive. Including many unique and rare works from the beginning of his career as a photojournalist in Switzerland in the 1940s, up to his most personal and evocative studies from the 2000s, this collection contains all of the photographs from his 1989 retrospective survey The Lines of My Hand. It also includes bound volumes of photographs, such as Peru (1948), and Black, White, and Things (1952), as well as all of the contact prints for his seminal publication, The Americans (1958/1959), supplementary work prints, and vintage exhibition prints.

Other important photographers whose works have come into the collection include the renowned Hungarian-born American photographer, André Kertész, Soviet photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko, and American postwar photographers Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, and Lee Friedlander. 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).

More contemporary photographs have also been added to the collection including, most recently, a James Casebere work, Sing Sing (1992), and a group of photographs by Richard Misrach, as well as Lorna Simpson's Untitled (Two Necklines) (1989). The Gallery also expanded its holdings of photographs from the first half of the 20th century with acquisitions of more than 30 photographs 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, Lotte Jacobi, and Alma Lavenson, were also added to the collection.

With the opening of five new galleries for the permanent display of photographs in the West Building in 2005, these works, as well as others from the rapidly growing photography collection, will often be on view in temporary exhibitions at the Gallery. However, because photographs are fragile and subject to deterioration if exposed to light and atmosphere for extended periods of time, they are stored at other times. Each year numerous visitors—students, scholars, as well as the general public—take advantage of the Gallery's Photograph Study Room and are given the opportunity to examine and enjoy these important examples of the art of photography. Photographs not on view can be seen by appointment only by calling the Department of Photographs at (202) 842-6144.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

For additional press information please call or send inquiries to:

Press Office
National Gallery of Art
2000B South Club Drive
Landover, MD 20785
phone: (202) 842-6353 e-mail: pressinfo@nga.gov

Deborah Ziska
Chief of Press and Public Information
(202) 842-6353
ds-ziska@nga.gov

If you are a member of the press and would like to be added to our press list, click here.