phy in the last century. Nevertheless, public museums
have often generated discussions about the nature,
dissemination, and explication of photographs
through their exhibition, acquisition, and preserva-
tion practices. Representing the breadth of form and
function of the medium, these practices show some
signs not of disappearing, but of pliability and inno-
vation, at the outset of the twenty-first century.
The Library of Congress was the first public insti-
tution in the United States to add a photograph to
its permanent collection (1845). This act is particu-
larly noteworthy in the history of photographic
institutions since it predates such notable early col-
lections as theSocie ́te ́Heliographiquefounded in
Paris in 1851 and the Royal Photographic Society
established in London in 1853. Photographs enter-
ing the Library of Congress for most of the nine-
teenth century were meant as supporting visual
documents to such major historical events as the
Civil War or as records of development of cities,
towns, and even individual buildings. This approach
to photography fueled certain photographers’ fights
at the turn of the century to claim photography as
one of the fine arts. This fight for artistic legitimacy,
most often linked to the Photo-Secessionist group in
New York, longed for photography to be collected
and displayed in the same fashion as painting. This
directive inspired Stieglitz’s seminal International
Exhibition of Pictorial Photographywhich, in 1910,
filled the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New
York, and broke all that museum’s previous atten-
dance records. Eventually, Stieglitz and his cohorts
hoped to find similar institutional success in the
country’s leading art museums.
While there were some other early photography
exhibitions (in 1900 at the Art Institute of Chicago,
for example), a single institution and its librarian
remain responsible for the first comprehensive
effort to present photography’s history in the con-
text of an art museum exhibition. Nearly a century
after the Library of Congress’s first photography
acquisition, the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, (MoMA) became one of the only museums
in the United States to regularly exhibit photogra-
phy. In a 1932 exhibition of murals by leading
American artists Lincoln Kirstein—with the help
of Julien Levy—invited photographers Berenice
Abbott and Edward Steichen to participate. The
following year, Kirstein displayed Walker Evans’s
photographs of American Victorian architecture.
But it was not until Beaumont Newhall was hired
as the museum’s new librarian that photography
was given its most constant institutional advocate.
Newhall immediately set about organizing an
exhibition that would become a touchstone in all
subsequent histories of photography, to say nothing
of its impact on exhibitions of photography.Photo-
graphy 1839–1937 incorporated more than 800
works, grouped according to their technical pro-
cesses (e.g., daguerreotype, calotype) and cultural
application (e.g., journalism, science, artistic expres-
sion). The exhibition aimed to trace and locate
developments that were medium-specific, even tech-
nique-specific as in Newhall’s proposal that certain
photographic methods yielded images notable for
their significant details while others were distin-
guished by their array of tonal masses. In choosing
to include astronomical photographs, X-ray images,
sports photography, film stills, and aerial photogra-
phy, Newhall seems to have been more interested in
how to look at—and subsequently comprehend—
wide-ranging photographic practices. This outlook
remains remarkable, especially given that a more
restricted view of the medium would certainly have
better championed photography’s artistic merit, a
position that continued to appeal to many mu-
seums’ interests and acquisitions as photography
gradually came into its own.
In 1940, Newhall was appointed the museum’s
curator of photography, the first such post in any
museum. Over the next seven years, Newhall con-
tinued to consider the specificity of photography in
nearly 30 separate exhibitions ranging from histor-
ical French photography to emerging artists such
as Helen Levitt. Increasingly, he became more
interested in the medium as a means of personal
expression, a view that seems to have been helped
by his close working relationship with Ansel
Adams. Despite Newhall’s efficacy, MoMA’s trus-
tees chose to appoint Edward Steichen as director
of the department in 1947 and Newhall resigned.
Christopher Phillips has interpreted this sudden
changing of the guard: ‘‘Simply put, it seems clear
that Newhall’s exhibition program failed equally to
retrieve photography from its marginal status
among the fine arts and to attract what the
museum could consider a substantial popular fol-
lowing’’ (Phillips, 23). If this was the case, MoMA
had chosen wisely. For in Edward Steichen they
found someone whose primary interest in photo-
graphy by that time was not its artistic aims, but its
illustrative and persuasive capabilities.
Elsewhere in the United States during these
years, photography began to enter the collections
of other museums. Alfred Stieglitz made gifts of his
photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
1928 and 1933. Upon his death in 1946, the Metro-
politan received a bequest that expanded the collec-
tion to over 600 works. The Art Institute was
another beneficiary of Stieglitz’s bequests, receivingMUSEUMS: UNITED STATES