Photography Collection
The Museum's photography collection comprises more than 38,000 works spanning the full history of the medium. This world-renowned collection acknowledges the wide embrace of photography and the many roles it plays in modern culture, and it therefore includes exceptional examples of documentary, scientific, fashion, advertising, and vernacular photography, as well as works intended solely as art.
Virtually every photographic process is represented: from daguerreotypes, albumen prints, and salt prints in the 19th century; to platinum and gum-bichromate prints at the turn of the 20th century; gelatin silver prints and all manner of color photography in the modern era; and AI generated images. Among the collection's great strengths are American photography, with extensive holdings of civil-rights photography, the Photo League, and works by Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, Texas photography, and photography about the African American experience; avant-garde European and American photography between the two World Wars; photojournalism, including deep holdings of war photography; 19th-century European photography; and postwar Japanese photography. More than 4,000 photographers from around the world are represented, including important bodies of work from Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Russia, and the former Czechoslovakia.