PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Collecting photographs derives from multifarious
impulses: the desire for investment, the challenge of
connoisseurship, and even the excitement of the
pursuit, but for many it evolves as a result of a
passion for the medium. Photography’s innate
capacity to possess reality and to be possessed is
what makes it such a desired collectible.
The first collections of photography were limited
to the artists, scientists and wealthy upperclass
amateurs who formed the ranks of theSocie ́te ́
Franc ̧aise de Photographiein Paris and the Royal
Photographic Society of London in the early 1850s.
From an early date, the collecting of photographs
was also seen as the responsibility of historical
societies, libraries, and government archives. The
private collector and private collection is some-
times a little-known entity until the collection is
acquired by a larger, more visible institution.
During the first decade of the twentieth century,
photographer, art connoisseur and magazine editor
Alfred Stieglitz began collecting photographs, in
part as a result of 291, the Photo-Secession gallery
he operated in New York until 1917. Ranging from
views of Victorian life to icons of the modern world
and the extraordinary portraits and nudes he made
of his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, the initial Stieglitz
Collection was donated to the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, in 1922 and 1924, respectively. In
1949, another portion of the Stieglitz collection,
150 photographs and photogravures by Stieglitz
as well as 50 photographs by his contemporaries
were given to the Art Institute of Chicago as a gift
from Georgia O’Keeffe.
The Julien Levy Collection, also housed at the Art
Institute of Chicago, originated in the late 1920s
when Julien Levy traveled to Paris with Marcel
DuchampandManRayinhopesofmakingafilm
with the two avant-garde artists. While in Paris,
Levy purchased his first photographs from Euge`ne
Atget in 1927, the last year of the photographer’s
life. Returning to New York, Levy continued to
collect photographs and by 1931 opened a gallery.
At that time, there was little interest in art photo-
graphy and Levy turned to the sale of paintings
instead, but maintained his intense interest in collect-
ing photography. The strength of the collection lies
in works by Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre ́
Kerte ́sz, Man Ray, and La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy.
Between the end of World War II and the early
1950s two encyclopedic collections of the history
of photography were begun in Europe by Helmut
Gernsheim, an architectural photographer based
in Germany, and Andre ́Jammes, a rare book dealer,
with his wife Marie-The ́re`se Jammes, of France. By
nature of the act of collecting, Gernsheim and
Jammes became photo-historians—establishing the
aesthetic framework that future collectors would
emulate. A self-taught specialist, Gernsheim as-
sumed the Bernard Berenson model of discernment
and taste,
Once bitten by the collector’s bug, you can’t leave off.
Having been an inveterate collector in other art fields, I
applied the same criteria to photography. I only bought
what appealed to me, yet with the connoisseur’s eye for
quality.
(Hill & Cooper 1979)
In 1963 the Photography Collection of the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the Univer-
sity of Texas Austin was established when Harry
Huntt Ransom acquired at the time the largest pri-
vately owned photography historical archive amassed
by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim.
The Jammes collection, comprised of some of the
finest Second Empire French calotypes and mid-
nineteenth-century British works, became one of
the cornerstones of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s
Department of Photographs when it was established
in 1984. It was joined by several other important
collections including those of Samuel Wagstaff, a
curator and art historian associated with Detroit,
Arnold Crane, a Chicago attorney, Bruno Biscofber-
ger of Zurich, Ju ̈rgen and Ann Wilde of Cologne,
and William Schurmann of Aachen, Germany.
Starting in the 1950s, photojournalistic as well as
aesthetic photographs began to appear more fre-
quently on gallery and museum walls and in private
and corporate art collections. For many the idea of
collecting photography came in the late 1970s and
1980s, an era of intense activity in an international
art market in which photography was a more ‘‘rea-
sonably priced’’ investment compared to its paint-
ing counterpart.PRIVATE COLLECTIONS