The profile of the photography collector during the
last decades of the twentieth century thus tends to be
the non-historian amateur without great means who
simply became enamored of the field, and discovering
its relative inexpensiveness, began collecting. The
Peter Eric Palmquist Photography Collection, as-
sembled between 1971 and 2002, reflects the ‘‘acci-
dental’’ collector, although Palmquist was himself a
photographer. According to Palmquist, ‘‘My obses-
sion with collecting photographs began unceremo-
niously in the spring of 1971 when, by chance, I
found myself in an antique shop in McKinleyville,
California, only a few miles north of my Arcata
home.’’ The handful of images the shop owner con-
vinced him to buy had multiplied over 30 years into a
collection numbering approximately 250,000 photo-
graphs, including rare images from the earliest days
of western American photography.
Palmquist also was especially drawn to the work
of women photographers in California. By the mid-
1980s, the emphasis included the collecting of data
on women in photography globally, and by 1994
the Women in Photography International Archive
was formally established. By the late 1990s, it fea-
tured more than 17,000 biographical files on female
photographers past and present; 1,800 books and
4,000 articles ‘‘by and about’’ women photogra-
phers; and approximately 8,000 vintage photo-
graphs taken by women—many of them produced
during the nineteenth century. Palmquist’s hold-
ings have been acquired by the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Many smaller regional museums, such as the Mil-
waukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, have established
photography collections through the acquisition
(often by donation) of such avid collectors. Featuring
modern and contemporary photographers, particu-
larly those with ties to Milwaukee, collected by
Floyd and Josephine Segel, the museum was able to
leverage this 1986 gift into a more comprehensive
photography collection, a typical strategy of institu-
tions with limited acquisition funds. A collection put
together by Joseph and Elaine Monsen, professors at
the University of Washington, Seattle, forms the basis
of the Henry Art Gallery, the UW’s art museum,
contemporary art collection. Widely acknowledged
as the most important collection of photography on
the west coast, the collection was begun in 1960 when
photography was little more than a curiosity to most
serious art collectors and was acquired through pur-
chase and donation in 1997.
The Henry Buhl Collection exemplifies a narrow
view of acquiring—this collection, amassed in the
1990s, specializes in photographs of hands and was
sparked by Stieglitz’s famous photograph of Georgia
O’Keeffe’s hands with a thimble. At the end of the
century, Buhl’s collection spanned 160 years of
photography beginning with a work by William
Henry Fox Talbot dated to about 1840 and continu-
ing through the present day. Vintage works of
the early twentieth-century masters ranging from
artists like Ansel Adams, Alfred Eisenstadt, Walker
Evans, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Edward Steichen,
Weegee, and Edward Weston; to modernists Diane
Arbus, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, Louise
Lawler, and Garry Winogrand are featured as well
as selected works by contemporary figures ranging
from conceptual artist John Baldassari, Adam Fuss,
Nan Goldin, and Sally Mann; and, to the lesser
known Jed Devine and Thomas Roma. Photography
particularly lends itself to such ‘‘subject collections.’’
Bill Hunt has amassed a collection notable for work
that feature subjects with their eyes closed or obscured.
Another collector of photographs of hands is Dr. Leo
Keoshian and his wife Marlys.
More commonly private collections are amassed
around a region or genre, such as the Judy and
Sidney Zuber Collection, which focuses on Latin
American photography, or the Helen Kornblum
Collection of twentieth century women photogra-
phers now housed at the Saint Louis Art Museum
in Missouri.
It is common that private photography collec-
tions gain their stature and maturity as part of a
larger whole once contextualized by their place-
ment as part of the greater collection of a major
institution. A typical case is four collections, some
private, some corporate, that form the cornerstones
of the photographic collection of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, an institution that
did not aggressively collect the medium early on,
but now houses a fine, comprehensive collection.
The gifts of Alfred Stieglitz to the Metropolitan—
in 1928, 1933, and in a bequest following his death in
1946—ultimately numbered more than 600 works. In
addition to superb examples of his own photography,
his legacy comprises the best collection anywhere of
works by artists of the Photo-Secession, the circle of
Pictorialist photographers shown at his influential
gallery 291 (also known as the Little Galleries of the
Photo-Secession), and published inCamera Work.
The Stieglitz Collection is especially rich in large
master prints by Edward Steichen. The Ford Motor
Company Collection, assembled by John C. Waddell
and donated to the Museum in 1987 as a gift of the
Ford Motor Company and Mr. Waddell, added 500
works of avant-garde European and American
photography made between the two World Wars.
This collection was joined by that of the Gilman
Paper Company Collection, widely considered to bePRIVATE COLLECTIONS