Photographs At Metropolitan Museum

Established as an independent curatorial department in 1992, the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs houses a collection of more than 15,000 works acquired by the Museum over more than 70 years.

The Museum's collection spans the history of photography. Among the treasures from the early years of the medium are an extremely rare album of photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot made just months after he presented his invention to the public; a large collection of portrait daguerreotypes by the Boston firm of Southworth and Hawes; landscape photographs of the American West by Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins; and fine examples of French photography from the 1850s by Edouard Baldus, Eugène Cuvelier, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, and others.

In addition, the Museum recently announced the purchase and promised gift of 78 19th-century photographs from the renowned Rubel Collection. This group includes rare and beautifully preserved examples by each of the four major figures in early British photography -- William Henry Fox Talbot, the painter-photographer team David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, and Julia Margaret Cameron -- and constitutes one of the most extraordinary representations of Britain's rich photographic history in the United States.

The heart of the department's holdings are two collections that, together, cover the half-19th-century from 1895 to 1945: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection and the Ford Motor Company Collection. Stieglitz made gifts of more than 600 works, in 1928, 1933, and in a bequest following his death in 1946. In addition to superb examples of his own photography, his gift comprises the best collection anywhere of works by the Photo Secession, the circle of Pictorialist photographers shown at his influential gallery. The Stieglitz collection is especially rich in large master prints by Edward Steichen; of special note are three large, unique prints of the Flatiron, each a slightly different hue, evoking a different moment of twilight in the city. Also featured in the Stieglitz Collection are F. Holland Day, Adolphe de Meyer, Gertrude Käsebier, Paul Strand, and Clarence White.

Building on the Stieglitz Collection, in 1997 the Museum acquired 73 portraits of artist Georgia O'Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz through a major gift of Jennifer and Joseph Duke and The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. Documenting one of the most famous and intimate artistic collaborations of modern times, the photographs are part of Stieglitz's extraordinary composite portrait of O'Keeffe, a series of more than 300 images produced between 1917 and 1937 that he considered to be among his greatest achievements.

The Ford Motor Company Collection, 500 works collected by John C. Waddell and donated to the Museum in 1987 as a gift of the Ford Motor Company and Mr. Waddell, represents avant-garde European and American photography between the two World Wars. Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and some 70 other photographers chart the urban, technological, and psychological revolutions of the modern age.

The personal archive of Walker Evans, acquired in 1994, will provide scholars and the general public a unique opportunity to study the complete creative output of this seminal photographer. The archive contains nearly 40,000 of the artist's negatives, along with his personal papers and collections of postcards, clippings, and works by other artists. The archive will be open to researchers beginning February 2000.

The post-war years are represented by important American photographers such as Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand. The emphasis in contemporary collecting is on those artists who have brought new plasticity or transcendent content to the medium, among them Jean-Marc Bustamante, Adam Fuss, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sigmar Polke, Michal Rovner, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
A selection of photographs from the collection, ranging from the earliest years of the medium to the present, is on view at all times in the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery on the Museum's second floor. Installations are changed three times per year.

The Howard Gilman Gallery, the Museum's first permanent gallery dedicated exclusively to the display of photographs, opened in October 1997. Addressing a changing roster of themes and topics, installations in the Gilman Gallery change three times a year and are composed of photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection as well as from the Metropolitan and, on occasion, from other institutions.

Photographs and photographically illustrated books and albums from the collection, as well as reference books from the Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library, can be seen by appointment in the Study Room for Photographs. To schedule an appointment, call 212-570-3861. -- www.metmuseum.org