The millions of photographs in the Museum's collections compose a vast mosaic of the nation's history. Photographs accompany most artifact collections. Thousands of images document engineering projects, for example, and more record the steel, petroleum, and railroad industries.
Some 150,000 images capture the history, art, and science of photography. Nineteenth-century photography, from its initial development by W. H. F. Talbot and Louis Daguerre, is especially well represented and includes cased images, paper photographs, and apparatus. Glass stereographs and news-service negatives by the Underwood & Underwood firm document life in America between the 1890s and the 1930s. The history of amateur photography and photojournalism are preserved here, along with the work of 20th-century masters such as Richard Avedon and Edward Weston. Thousands of cameras and other equipment represent the technical and business side of the field. |
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Selected Objects |
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Ambrotype of Mea-to-sa-bi-tchi-a, or Smutty Bear
This ambrotype portrait of Mea-to-sa-bi-tchi-a, or Smutty Bear, a Yankton Dakota, is among the first photographic images of Native Americans. Smutty Bear was part of a large Native American delegation ...
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Autochrome Portrait
William H. Towles, active from 1890 into the 1930s, is said to have made Washington, D.C.'s first autochrome. Autochromes are among the first commercially successful forms of color photography. The ...
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Civil War Soldier
Photographs can be powerful connections to the past. Soldiers, for example often had their portraits made before going off to war so that loved ones would have a rememberance of ...
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Evelyn Nesbit
Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. started taking photographs in 1884 while working at his father's engineering firm. In 1889, he joined the local camera club in Yonkers, New York, and began contributing ...
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Family Photo Album
Family photograph albums hold the history of generations, preserving the memories of birthdays, holidays, travels, and all general aspects of life. African American Mary Taylor used her 35mm Bell and ...
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Howard ankle camera
Press cameras were forbidden from the prison execution chamber in Ossining, New York, where Ruth Snyder was to be electrocuted on January 12, 1928, for the murder of her husband. ...
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Kodak Petite Camera
Since Kodak introduced the Brownie in 1900, a variety of easy-to-use cameras have been marketed, especially to women. The Kodak Petite from 1935, part of the Kodak Coquette set, came ...
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Morse Daguerreotype Camera
Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872), an artist and inventor of the telegraph, was in Paris in 1839 sharing the scientific and celebrity stage with Daguerre. The two inventors shared notes ...
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Muybridge Photograph of Walking, Turning Around, Action of Aversion
Eadweard Muybridge's cyanotypes are working proofs (contact prints) made from the more than 20,000 negatives he took at the University of Pennsylvania from 1884 to 1886 while photographing human and ...
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Photograph of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre
A popular portrait method of photography from the 1839 announcement of its invention to about 1860, the Daguerreotype was a unique photograph with no negative—each photograph was exposed on a ...
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Related Items from the Archives Center |
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Archives Center Photography Collections
The most notable collections are the Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereograph Collection, 1895-1921 (28,000 images); the Donald H. Sultner-Welles Collection, 1951-1980 (87,000 color transparencies taken around the world); and the Arthur d'Arazien Industrial Photographs, ca. 1939-1984, consisting of thousands of black and white and color photographs by a leading industrial and advertising photographer.
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