The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs surveys the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present. The collection of more than 20,000 works is largely European and American, with some representation of other parts of the world, particularly Japan. The Metropolitan's department includes several important collections: The Gilman Paper Company Collection, comprising exceptionally rich holdings in early French, British, and American photography, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods; The Rubel Collection, with superb examples of British photography from the first three decades of the medium's history; The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, with masterpieces of the Photo-Secession movement (1902–17) and related Pictorialist photography; The Ford Motor Company Collection of American and European photography between the World Wars; and the personal archive of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). All told, the Museum's collection reveals the medium's breadth of form and function—from documentation to refined aestheticism and from intimate explorations of identity to majestic expressions of the sublime.

Nearly every permutation of technique and support is represented: early experimental "photogenic drawings" of the 1830s; daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes (one-of-a-kind images exposed on silver-plated copper, glass, and iron, respectively); salted paper prints from paper negatives; albumen silver prints from glass negatives; gum bichromate prints; platinum and palladium prints; gelatin silver prints (the standard black-and-white photograph of the twentieth century); and a variety of types of color photography.

Highlights from the department are presented online, organized into a rough chronology. For preservation reasons, selected photographs are on view in the galleries on a rotating basis.

More about the Department and Its Collection

Thanks to the all-encompassing view of the graphic arts held by the Metropolitan Museum's first two curators of prints, William Ivins Jr. and A. Hyatt Mayor, photographs entered the collection as early as 1928. In that year, Alfred Stieglitz—editor of the luxurious and influential journal Camera Work and a passionate advocate for the acceptance of photography in the pantheon of the fine arts—made a gift of twenty-two of his finest photographs. In the decades that followed, the Department of Prints (renamed Prints and Photographs in 1970) cared for and enriched the Museum's photographic holdings until an independent curatorial department devoted to photographs was established in 1992.

Among the Museum's 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 Édouard Baldus, Eugéne Cuvelier, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, and others.

In addition, the Museum announced in 1997 the purchase and promised gift of seventy-eight nineteenth-century photographs from the renowned Rubel Collection, assembled during the 1970s by a young collector from California, William Rubel. Included are 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—which together constitute one of the most extraordinary representations in the United States of Britain's rich photographic history.

The gifts of Alfred Stieglitz to the Metropolitan—in 1928, 1933, and in a bequest following his death in 1946—ultimately numbered more than six hundred works. In addition to superb examples of his own photography, his legacy comprises the best collection anywhere of works by artists of the Photo-Secession, the circle of Pictorialist photographers shown at his influential gallery 291 and published in Camera Work. 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 H. White.

To build on the Stieglitz Collection, in 1997 the Museum acquired, through a major gift of Jennifer and Joseph Duke and The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, seventy-three portraits of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz. 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 three hundred images produced between 1917 and 1937 which he considered to be among his greatest achievements.

The Ford Motor Company Collection, assembled by John C. Waddell and donated to the Museum in 1987 as a gift of the Ford Motor Company and Mr. Waddell, consists of five hundred works of avant-garde European and American photography made between the two World Wars. In these photographs, Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and some seventy other photographers charted the urban, technological, and psychological revolutions of the modern age.

The personal archive of Walker Evans, acquired in 1994, provides 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.

In addition to these extensive holdings, the Metropolitan's representation of the first century of photography, 1839–1939, was immeasurably enriched by the 2005 acquisition of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world's finest collection of photographs in private hands. Propelling the Metropolitan to the topmost ranks of museums collecting the art of photography, the Gilman Collection consists of more than 8,500 photographs, including many unique and beautiful icons of photography by the medium's greatest masters as well as works by little known—even unknown—photographers and extensive bodies of work by pioneers of the camera.

The postwar years are represented in the Metropolitan's collection by important American photographers such as Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand. The Museum is especially strong in representing the varied paths of photography since 1960: its role in conceptual art, earth art, and performance art, as seen in works by Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Douglas Huebler; the "Dusseldorf School," featuring works by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky; the "Pictures Generation," including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince; and other important contemporary artists who use photography, such as Adam Fuss, Rodney Graham, and Charles Ray.

In September 2007 the Museum inaugurated the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, the Metropolitan's first gallery designed specifically for and devoted exclusively to the display of photographs created since 1960. The Menschel Hall, with installations that change every six months, allows the department to show its contemporary holdings within the broader context of photographic traditions on view in the nearby Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Also nearby is 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 drawn from the Metropolitan's collection and, on occasion, from those of other institutions.

Photographs and photographically illustrated books and albums from the collection, the Walker Evans archive, and reference books from the Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library can be seen by appointment in the Study Room for Photographs (see Educational Resources).