Photography

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.

Berenice Abbott's photograph, Pendulum (Small Arc), is a stop-motion photograph.
Description (Brief)
Berenice Abbott's photograph, Pendulum (Small Arc), is a stop-motion photograph. Although the photographer is more well-known for her 1930s abstracted views of New York City's architecture, she wanted to improve the quality of photography for scientists.
Abbott devised apparatus and techniques to capture various phenomena. Beginning in 1958, she created photographs for the Physical Science Study Committee, a program to reform high school physics teaching. This picture illustrating the swing of a pendulum appeared in 1969 in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space.
Description
During the 1920s, Berenice Abbott was one of the premier portrait photographers of Paris, her only competitor was the equally well-known Dada Surrealist Man Ray who had served as her mentor and employer before she launched her own career. An American expatriate, Abbott enjoyed the company of some of the great twentieth century writers and artists, photographing individuals such as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim and James Joyce. One of the critical elements of Abbott’s portraiture was a desire to neither enhance nor interfere with the sitter. She instead wished to allow the personality of her subject to dictate the form of the photograph, and would often sit with her clients for several hours before she even began to photograph them. This straight-forward approach to photography characterized Abbott’s work for the duration of her career.
Thematically and technically, Abbott’s work can be most closely linked to documentary photographer Eugène Atget (COLL.PHOTOS.000016), who photographed Paris during the early 1900s. Abbott bought a number of his prints the first time she saw them, and even asked him to set some aside that she planned to purchase when she had enough money. After his death in 1927, Abbott took it upon herself to publicize Atget’s work to garner the recognition it deserved. It was partly for this reason she returned to the United States in 1928, hoping to find an American publisher to produce an English-language survey of Atget’s work. Amazed upon her arrival to see the changes New York had undergone during her stay in Paris, and eager to photograph the emerging new metropolis, Abbott decided to pack up her lucrative Parisian portrait business and move back to New York.
The status and prestige she enjoyed in Paris, however, did not carry over to New York. Abbott did not fit in easily with her contemporaries. She was both a woman in a male-dominated field and a documentary photographer in the midst of an American photographic world firmly rooted in Pictorialism. Abbott recalls disliking the work of both photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his then protégé Paul Strand when she first visited their exhibitions in New York. Stieglitz, along with contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Edward Steichen, tended to romanticize the American landscape and effectively dismissed Abbott’s straight photography as she saw it. Not only was Atget’s work rejected by the Pictorialists, but a series of critical comments she made towards Stieglitz and Pictorialism cost Abbott her professional career as a photographer. Afterwards, she was unable to secure space at galleries, have her work shown at museums or continue the working relationships she had forged with a number of magazine publications.
In 1935, the Federal Art Project outfitted Abbott with equipment and a staff to complete her project to photograph New York City. The benefit of a personal staff and the freedom to determine her own subject matter was unique among federally funded artists working at that time. The resulting series of photographs, which she titled Changing New York, represent some of Abbott’s best-known work. Her photographs of New York remain one of the most important twentieth century pictorial records of New York City. Abbott went on to produce a series of photographs for varied topics, including scientific textbooks and American suburbs. When the equipment was insufficient to meet her photographic needs, as in the case of her series of science photographs, she invented the tools she needed to achieve the desired effect. In the course of doing so, Abbott patented a number of useful photographic aids throughout her career including an 8x10 patent camera (patent #2869556) and a photographer’s jacket. Abbott also spent twenty years teaching photography classes at the New School for Social Research alongside such greats as composer Aaron Copland and writer W.E.B. DuBois.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Abbott’s career was the printing of Eugène Atget’s photographs, one of the few instances in which one well-known photographer printed a large number of negatives made by another well-known photographer. The struggle to get Atget’s photographs the recognition they deserved was similar to Abbott’s efforts to chart her own path by bringing documentary photography to the fore in a Pictorialist dominated America. Though she experienced varying levels of rejection and trials in both efforts, her perseverance placed her in the position she now holds as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.
The Bernice Abbott collection consists of sixteen silver prints. The photographs represent a range of work Abbott produced during her lifetime, including her early portraiture work in Paris, her Changing New York series, Physics and Route 1, U.S.A. series.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1950s
photographer
Abbott, Berenice
ID Number
PG.69.216.15
catalog number
69.216.15
accession number
288852
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
ID Number
1983.0838.0064
accession number
1983.0838
catalog number
1983.0838.64
"Kremlin" by Jan Lukas; black and white image with street in foreground, snow covering grassy areas, woman walking along roadway in lower left; wall in mid-ground; two towers topped with crosses in backgroundCurrently not on view
Description (Brief)
"Kremlin" by Jan Lukas; black and white image with street in foreground, snow covering grassy areas, woman walking along roadway in lower left; wall in mid-ground; two towers topped with crosses in background
Location
Currently not on view
ID Number
PG.71.13.14
accession number
2018.0072
catalog number
71.13.14
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1957
maker
Erwitt, Elliott
ID Number
PG.007548
catalog number
7548
accession number
252364
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974-04-19
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.611
catalog number
2014.0112.611
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.613
catalog number
2014.0112.613
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
ID Number
2013.0327.0387
catalog number
2013.0327.0387
accession number
2013.0327
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.599
catalog number
2014.0112.599
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
maker
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2013.0327.1228
accession number
2013.0327
catalog number
2013.0327.1228
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1945
Associated Date
1944
1945
maker
Anonymous
ID Number
2013.0327.1145
catalog number
2013.0327.1145
accession number
2013.0327
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.584
catalog number
2014.0112.584
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1945
Associated Date
1944
1945
maker
Anonymous
ID Number
2013.0327.1144
accession number
2013.0327
catalog number
2013.0327.1144
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.604
catalog number
2014.0112.604
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.571
catalog number
2014.0112.571
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.602
catalog number
2014.0112.602
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.565
catalog number
2014.0112.565
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.558
catalog number
2014.0112.558
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1945
ID Number
2013.0327.0997
accession number
2013.0327
catalog number
2013.0327.0997
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.539
catalog number
2014.0112.539
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.601
catalog number
2014.0112.601
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1974
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.606
catalog number
2014.0112.606
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1978
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.567
catalog number
2014.0112.567
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
depicted (sitter)
Kennedy, Edward M.
photographer
Regan, Ken
ID Number
2014.0112.593
catalog number
2014.0112.593
accession number
2014.0112
Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1940s
maker
Acme Photo
ID Number
2013.0327.0746
accession number
2013.0327
catalog number
2013.0327.0746

Our collection database is a work in progress. We may update this record based on further research and review. Learn more about our approach to sharing our collection online.

If you would like to know how you can use content on this page, see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use. If you need to request an image for publication or other use, please visit Rights and Reproductions.