MUSEUMS
The Two Families of Museums
There are well-known institutions that have, apart
from paintings or other art forms, or those dedicated
to history, culture, or science, some generous, unique
collections of photographs, negatives, plates, or cam-
eras; while other museums and galleries exclusively
dedicate themselves to photography. What sets
museums apart from the many other institutions that
have extraordinary collections of photographs—pub-
lic archives, national libraries, private foundations,
newspapers and press agencies, various governmental
agencies and departments—is that museums have a
mission to collect, conserve, exhibit, and educate.
Famous institutions such as the Centre national de la
photographie in Paris or the Royal Photographic
Society in London are not museumsper se,butare
nonetheless very dynamic because of their conferences,
publications, and learning programs.
In the first category are respected institutions
like the Metropolitan Museum, or the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City (MoMA), the Mu-
se ́e d’Orsay in Paris, the Victoria and Albert in
London, and the McCord Museum in Montre ́al,
which are multidisciplinary, or ‘‘general museums,’’
some featuring incomparable collections dedicated
to photography.
On the other side, the International Museum of
Photography and Film at the George Eastman
House, Rochester, New York, the Muse ́eNice ́phore
Nie ́pce in Chalon-sur-Saoˆne, France, the Alinari Mu-
seum in Florence, Italy, the Muse ́e Suisse de l’appareil
photographique (The Swiss Camera Museum), Vevey,
Switzerland, could be ranked in the second category of
specialty museums of photography.
Although there are notable exceptions, specialty
museums often tend to focus on ‘‘artistic’’ photo-
graphy and the avant-garde, while most art and
science museums that exhibit photographs have a
broader conception, sometimes with a more histor-
ical, ethnological, and technical approach.
The Role of the Museum in the Acceptance of
Photography
During the nineteenth century, photographs were
acquired by only a handful of institutions. In Eng-
land, as early as 1857, the South Kensington
Museum, which became the Victoria and Albert,
had collected the new medium. Thus in the early
years of the twentieth century, the presence of
photographs in art museum collections, along with
the opening of galleries and specialized museums in
photography, are seen as eloquent proofs that
finally acknowledged the recognition of photogra-
phy as an art form.
The collecting of photographs by museums clo-
sely followed the passion for the medium by some
of its leading practitioners. Since 1905, Alfred Stie-
glitz had run the Little Galleries of the Photo
Secession, on 291 Fifth Avenue, in New York
City. In 1910, Stiegliz organized an exhibition of
Pictorialist photographs at the Albright Art Gal-
lery, which was well attended and widely written
about, beginning that institution’s early interest in
the medium. Stieglitz played a major role in the
acceptance of photographs by the Museum of
Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston.
According to its website, the MFA ‘‘was one of
the earliest museums in the country to collect photo-
graphy.’’ This initiative began in 1924, when Stieglitz
made a donation of some 27 of his photographs,
now held in the MFA Department of Prints, Draw-
ings, & Photographs, a typical departmental struc-
ture for many general art museums. Again reflecting
how photography was truly valued, while donations
were accepted, the MFA’s first purchase of photo-
graphs (a group by Edward Weston) was not until
the late 1960s.
Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), freed from traditional notions about
what constituted fine arts by the very definition of
its founding, innovated by establishing a special
department for photography under art historian
Beaumont Newhall in 1940. When photographer
Edward Steichen, well known in the fine-arts com-
munity for his sequence of leading French sculptor
Auguste Rodin’sBalzac, was appointed as director
for the photography section in 1947, it was another
confirmation that the profession was recognized as
a dynamic part of contemporary art.
If most museums dedicated to photography con-
centrate on the visual result of the medium, othersMUSEUMS