Photography

Leica 35mm Camera

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.

Resource Type: Photographs

Rising from chair, stooping and lifting handkerchief

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1884-1886
maker
Muybridge, Eadweard
ID Number
PG.003856.0198
accession number
98473
catalog number
3856.0198
maker number
797

T.C Grey

T.C. Grey, carte-de-visite, by unknown photographer, c.1860sT. C. Grey was a civilian newspaper reporter during the war. Originally from Middletown in Dutchess County, New York, Grey established himself as a newsman.
Description
T.C. Grey, carte-de-visite, by unknown photographer, c.1860s
T. C. Grey was a civilian newspaper reporter during the war. Originally from Middletown in Dutchess County, New York, Grey established himself as a newsman. During the Civil War, he was in the field with the Army of the Potomac as a special correspondent for the New York Tribune. He was associated with a group of men called the Bohemian Brigad-a band of journalists, photographers, and artists who were reporting back to newspapers, from the thick of the war. Before the war, he was a clerk for the U.S. Treasury. After the war, he became a successful civilian journalist for the Republican in Washington, D.C., managing editor of the Chronicle, city editor of the Star, and a member of the editorial staff of the Philadelphia Press. At the time of his death in 1885, he was writing for the Washington Post. In his personal life, Grey was married, but did not have children. His death was attributed to congested lungs and pneumonia. Grey passed away on April 2, 1885 at age 55.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1861-1865
depicted (sitter)
Grey, T. C.
maker
unknown
ID Number
PG.003955G
catalog number
3955G
accession number
117896

photograph

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
2001-09
maker
Rogers, Jane
ID Number
2011.0177.31
catalog number
2011.0177.31
accession number
2011.0177

Portrait of P.T. Barnum

P.T. Barnum got the blues (handwritten text on front); Portrait of portly man with curly hair; gold edges; Studio: Unidentified Cond: Fair; fading; slightly worn.Currently not on view
Description
P.T. Barnum got the blues (handwritten text on front); Portrait of portly man with curly hair; gold edges; Studio: Unidentified Cond: Fair; fading; slightly worn.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1860's-1870's
depicted
Barnum, P. T.
maker
unknown
ID Number
1995.0231.115
catalog number
1995.0231.115
accession number
1995.0231

former presidents and first ladies at President Barak Obama's Swearing in Ceremony

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
2009-01-20
depicted (sitter)
Carter, Jimmy
Carter, Rosalynn
Bush, George, H. W.
Bush, Barbara
Clinton, Bill
Clinton, Hillary Rodham
Bush, Laura Welch
maker
Morse, Paul
ID Number
2010.0179.02
catalog number
2010.0179.02
accession number
2010.0179

Woman in uniform standing in front of a monument

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1940s
ID Number
2017.0309.0017
accession number
2017.0309
catalog number
2017.0309.0017

Braceros at Movie Theater

Photograph: Braceros stand at the entrance to a movie theater in Watsonville, California.Currently not on view
Description
Photograph: Braceros stand at the entrance to a movie theater in Watsonville, California.
Location
Currently not on view
date photographed
1956
photographer
Nadel, Leonard
ID Number
2004.0138.29.42
accession number
2004.0138
catalog number
2004.0138.29.42

Braceros Receiving Documents

Photograph: An official distributes documents among braceros outside of the San Joaquin County Farm Production Association building in Stockton, California.Currently not on view
Description
Photograph: An official distributes documents among braceros outside of the San Joaquin County Farm Production Association building in Stockton, California.
Location
Currently not on view
date photographed
1956
photographer
Nadel, Leonard
ID Number
2004.0138.39.24
accession number
2004.0138
catalog number
2004.0138.39.24

Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich

Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich during a rehearsal, Kennedy Center Concert Hall, October 1977.Currently not on view
Description (Brief)
Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich during a rehearsal, Kennedy Center Concert Hall, October 1977.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1977-10
maker
Walker, Diana
ID Number
2003.0250.131
accession number
2003.0250
catalog number
2003.0250.131

Newsstand, 32nd St. and 3rd Ave.

Unmounted silver print by Berenice Abbott, "Newsstand, 32nd St. and 3rd Ave." Magazine stand with predominantly women's magazines.
Description (Brief)
Unmounted silver print by Berenice Abbott, "Newsstand, 32nd St. and 3rd Ave." Magazine stand with predominantly women's magazines. Coca cola ad top right in which woman in white swimsuit is holding a cola bottle; large sign in top left/center advertising cigars, smaller signs for ice-cream, milk and soda top left. Candy bars at bottom right beneath cash register. Verso: Stamp, "Photograph, Berenice Abbott, Maine 04406;" Recto: signed by the artist.
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
1935-11-19
maker
Abbott, Berenice
ID Number
PG.69.216.07
accession number
288852
catalog number
69.216.07

Hillotype, print of headless soldier

The Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History holds an extraordinary series of early color photographs: sixty-two color daguerreotype plates made by Rev. Levi L. Hill in the early 1850s in Westkill, Greene County, New York.
Description (Brief)
The Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History holds an extraordinary series of early color photographs: sixty-two color daguerreotype plates made by Rev. Levi L. Hill in the early 1850s in Westkill, Greene County, New York. This is the largest collection in the world of Heliochromy, a rare early color photographic process based on silver chloride.
Hill’s color process was extremely complex, consisting of coating a daguerreotype plate with multiple layers of a compound of different metals that reacted to the different colors in the spectrum. The achievement of inventing a color photographic process in 1850 was even more remarkable considering that Hill was not trained as a scientist and lived in a very remote area of New York State.
Yet Hill was undisputably an important figure in early history of American photography, an entrepreneur and an enthusiastic innovator. He wrote the first, and one of the best, manuals on daguerreotypy, "A Treatise on Daguerreotype" in 1850; and in 1856 he wrote the first manual on color photography, "Treatise on Heliochromy", which includes a description of his experiments and an overview of all the means of chemically producing pictures in natural colors with light.
Among the important works by Hill are many daguerreotype photographs of European color prints, and art reproductions such as this Hillotype copying a print of a headless soldier sitting on a golden cube in a studio room. X-ray analysis of this Hillotype plate shows traces of iron pigment in the yellow/gold area.
date made
ca 1850s-1860s
maker
Hill, Levi
ID Number
PG.003999.27
catalog number
3999.27
accession number
125759

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
depicted (sitter)
Monroe, Marilyn
Miller, Arthur
maker
Avedon, Richard
ID Number
PG.006985A
catalog number
6985-A
accession number
246871

In a Street of Tunis

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1920-1927
maker
Petrocelli, Joseph
ID Number
PG.006024.35
accession number
224379
catalog number
6024.35

Stuyvesant Town Roof Patterns

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
maker
Falk, Sam
ID Number
PG.69.99.006
accession number
281224
catalog number
69.99.006

Bird's-Eye View of Washington, D.C.

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1868
maker
Peale, Titian Ramsay
ID Number
PG.66.23.02
catalog number
66.23.02
accession number
263090

(untitled)

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
maker
Baur, Max
ID Number
2013.0327.0087
catalog number
2013.0327.0087
accession number
2013.0327

Ancien Hotel, 10 rue Barbette, 1907

Unmounted silver albumen photograph by Eugène Atget, "Ancien Hotel, 10 rue barbette, 1907." Two and a half story building, sign over door reads "Sossler & Mobel"; other descriptive text includes the words "Produits Chimiques et Pharmaceutiques" (Pharmaceutical and Chemistry produ
Description (Brief)
Unmounted silver albumen photograph by Eugène Atget, "Ancien Hotel, 10 rue barbette, 1907." Two and a half story building, sign over door reads "Sossler & Mobel"; other descriptive text includes the words "Produits Chimiques et Pharmaceutiques" (Pharmaceutical and Chemistry products) and "Droguerie - Herboristerie" (drugstore). Horse drawn flat-bed cart with two horses carrying wooden crates and sacks; cobblestone. Recto, "10 Rue Barbette 1907 - 3/3" Verso, handwritten by Atget, "Ancien Hotel 10 Rue Barbette," "1111" underlined in top right.
Description
Le Pére Atget, as Man Ray fondly called him, was born in Libourne, France in 1857. As a young man, he was drawn not to photography, but to the stage. Although he was drafted into the army in 1878 and remained on active duty for several years, Atget began studying at the National Conservatory of Music and Drama in 1879. By 1881, however, his teachers decided he could not handle the joint responsibilities of acting and military duty, and did not ask him to return the following year. Despite his dismissal, Atget went on to perform in small productions for the next ten years. However, by the time he was forty, he had realized that he was not going to succeed as an actor. After an initial attempt at painting and a few years of photographic experimentation, Atget finally settled into a Parisian apartment on Rue Campagne Premiere between 1890 and 1891 and hung a small painted shingle above his door that would define his work for later generations: “Documents pour artistes.”
While Atget is considered to be one of the great early photographers, his work was by no means considered groundbreaking at the time. The first push to document historical architecture in France, and especially Paris, began in the 1850s when the Commission des Monuments Historique was formed to photograph the city. Among the photographers appointed by the commission were Henri Le Secq, who photographed Chartes Cathedral and Reims, Edouard Baldus, and Charles Nègre (COLL.PHOTOS.000054). Atget began his work during a second push around the turn of the century, and was greatly facilitated by technological advances in the mid-1890s that made it easier to photograph for professionals and amateurs alike. What distinguished Atget from his contemporaries was his decision not to work for an institution, where his photographs would be on public record, but to instead carve his own niche in the market as a freelance photographer.
As a result, in addition to any commissions he received from clients, Atget had the opportunity to seek out subjects that were of personal and professional interest, such as the trees that figure so frequently in collections of his work. Between 1898 and 1927 Atget systematically photographed streets, monuments, historic buildings and dwellings both in Paris and in the outlying areas. His meticulously categorized work was arranged in albums, and he recorded in detail his client’s preferences for different subjects so that he would be prepared when he met with them. To his credit, Atget’s body of work remains perhaps the best pictorial record available of Paris in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
By 1920, when most photographers had switched to smaller and technically superior cameras, Atget continued to use the same 18x24 view camera he had been using since 1888. Professionally, he was isolated as he did not enjoy the company of a group of peers with whom he could discuss his work. The first publication of his photographs was in “La Revolution Surrealiste” in 1925. Though Atget had been well-known in his business since 1901, this was the first time his work had been identified as artistic rather than merely documentary. Atget himself refused to have his name included in the magazine, and by implication in the movement, explaining that he was simply a purveyor of documents that could be used by other artists. While his work belies this statement, he continued to disassociate himself from Surrealism until his death in 1927.
Both a businessman and artist, Atget sold his work to artists, historians and even institutions such as the Bibliotheque Nationale during his lifetime. In 1920 the Service Photographique des Monuments Historiques purchased just over 2600 of Atget’s negatives. The remainder of the negatives, as well as any prints that remained following his death, went to his good friend Andre Calmette. Shortly thereafter, Berenice Abbott (COLL.PHOTOS.000017), a young American photographer, persuaded Calmette to sell her the collection so that she could properly introduce it to the world. She and American photographer Walker Evans (COLL.PHOTOS.000024) are testaments to the style and rigor that characterized Atget’s work, and both followed his tradition of documenting the urban landscape and its details.
The Eugène Atget collection consists of fourteen silver albumen prints made between 1907 and 1908. On the back of each print the title and dates are handwritten by the artist. On a few, a number is etched in the negative. All of the photographs present different scenes in Paris, France. Most are architectural in subject matter, but some do include individuals as well. Each print is approximately 7 x 8.5 inches and is not mounted.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1907
maker
Atget, Eugene
ID Number
PG.006294.02
accession number
238,258
catalog number
6294.02

Braceros Receiving Paychecks

Photograph: An official distributes paychecks to braceros outside an office in California.
Description
Photograph: An official distributes paychecks to braceros outside an office in California.
date photographed
1956
photographer
Nadel, Leonard
ID Number
2004.0138.44.17
accession number
2004.0138
catalog number
2004.0138.44.17

At the Stock Exchange

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
maker
Falk, Sam
ID Number
PG.69.99.071
accession number
281224
catalog number
69.99.71

Women in a department store

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1984
maker
Zalesky, Roy Joseph
ID Number
2017.0306.0032
accession number
2017.0306
catalog number
2017.0306.0032

Sky Circuit Panorama, September 3, 1913 at 5:15PM

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1972
associated date
1913-09-03
referenced
Mueller, Frederick W.
maker
National Museum of American History
ID Number
1986.0711.0468
catalog number
1986.0711.0468
accession number
1986.0711
maker number
SP-64-67v

Basketball Team in Mount Pleasant, Ohio

Glass plate negative made by Walter J. Hussey, circa 1890. A basketball team of young men with their coach (who is wearing a suit) in Mount Pleasant, Ohio.The collection in the Photographic History Collection consists of over two hundred glass plate negatives made by Walter J.
Description
Glass plate negative made by Walter J. Hussey, circa 1890. A basketball team of young men with their coach (who is wearing a suit) in Mount Pleasant, Ohio.
The collection in the Photographic History Collection consists of over two hundred glass plate negatives made by Walter J. Hussey (1865-1959). These glass plate negatives consist of daily life in and around Mount Pleasant, Ohio, Mr. Hussey's friends and family, studio portraits, his trips to the Washington, D.C. area, and Florida.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1890
maker
Hussey, Walter J.
ID Number
2011.0090.24
accession number
2011.0090
catalog number
2011.009.024

West Side of Capitol

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
2009-01-20
depicted (sitter)
Obama, Barack H.
maker
Ballard, Karen
ID Number
2010.0165.01
catalog number
2010.0165.01
accession number
2010.0165

President George H. W. Bush, Roger Ailes, and Craig Fuller

President George H. W. Bush, Roger Ailes, and Craig Fuller preparing for the President's acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Houston, Texas, August 20, 1992.Currently not on view
Description (Brief)
President George H. W. Bush, Roger Ailes, and Craig Fuller preparing for the President's acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Houston, Texas, August 20, 1992.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1992-08-20
depicted (sitter)
Bush, George, H. W.
maker
Walker, Diana
ID Number
2003.0250.108
catalog number
2003.0250.108
accession number
2003.0250

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