The Hallmark Photographic Collection was amassed by Hallmark Cards, Inc. and donated to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri in December 2005. [1] [2] At the time of donation, the collection consisted of 6,500 images by 900 artists, with an estimated value of $65 million.
The collection spans the history of photography, from 1839 to the present, with works by Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, Jerry N. Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman. [3]
First started in 1964, the collection was one of the earliest corporate photography collections. Hallmark vice president David Strout made the first acquisition of 141 prints by Harry Callahan. These were exhibited in New York in fall 1964, at the Hallmark Gallery store at 720 Fifth Avenue. In the next 12-years, bodies of work by major leading photographers, from Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham to László Moholy-Nagy and Linda Connor were acquired.
Since 1979, the collection was expanded by Keith F. Davis from 650 works by about 35 photographers, to 6,500 works by about 900 artists. [4] [5] He organized dozens of exhibitions from the collection for tours, and authored a number of publications, [6] including An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999). Other publications include Harry Callahan: New Color, Photographs 1978-1987 (1988); George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman's Campaign (1990); Clarence John Laughlin: Visionary Photographer (1990); and The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (1995).
To accompany a 2007 exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, a survey by Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall of the collection's key 19th century contents was published: The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, from Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate (2007). [7]
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art.
Harry Morey Callahan was an American photographer and educator. He taught at both the Institute of Design in Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Joseph Saxton was an American inventor, watchmaker, machinist, and photographer from Pennsylvania. A daguerrotype taken by Saxton in 1839 is one of the oldest surviving photographs taken in the United States.
Emmet Gowin is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of places that had been changed by humans or nature, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. Gowin taught at Princeton University for more than 35 years.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) was founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography. The museum houses a permanent collection as well as the Midwest Photographers Project (MPP), which contains portfolios of photographers and artists' work who reside in the Midwestern United States. The Museum of Contemporary Photography began collecting in the early 1980s and has since grown its collection to include more than 15,000 objects by over 1,500 artists. The MoCP is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
Benjamen Chinn was an American photographer known especially for his black and white images of Chinatown, San Francisco and of Paris, France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Homer Page (1918–1985) was an American documentary photographer whose most famous photographs were taken in New York City in 1949–1950, after he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Todd Webb was an American photographer notable for documenting everyday life and architecture in cities such as New York City, Paris as well as from the American west. He traveled extensively during his long life and had important friendships with artists such as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Harry Callahan.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Keith F. Davis is an American photography curator, collector, and the author of several books on photography.
Robert Stiegler (1938–1990) was a Chicago filmmaker and photographer, whose work grew out of the approaches to photography and design taught at the Institute of Design (ID) in the 1960s and 1970s. Stiegler received his Bachelor's degree in 1960 and his Master's degree in 1970 from ID, where he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind and was part of a group of students that included Barbara Crane, Kenneth Josephson, Tom Rago, and Richard Nickel. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the University of Illinois Chicago. His films Traffic (1960), Capitulation (1965), Licht Spiel Nur 1 (1967), and Full Circle (1968) are housed at the Chicago Film Archives.
Thomas O’Conor Sloane, Jr. (1879–1963) was an American photographer.
This is a timeline of women in photography tracing the major contributions women have made to both the development of photography and the outstanding photographs they have created over the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
David Lebe is an American photographer. He is best known for his experimental images using techniques such as pinhole cameras, hand-painted photographs, photograms, and light drawings. Many of his photographs explore issues of gay identity, homoeroticism, and living with AIDS, linking his work to that of contemporaries such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Though his style and approach set him apart from these contemporaries, "Lebe is now incontrovertibly part of the history of twentieth-century queer artists."
Joni Sternbach is an American photographer whose large-format camera images employ early photographic processes, including tintype and collodion. Using an 8×10 Deardorff large format camera, Sternbach focuses on in situ portraits of surfers. Sternbach's photographs are particularly notable for highlighting women surfers and surf culture, and for her ethnographic rather than action approach.
The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, honors those who have made great contributions to the field of photography.
David Stephenson is an American-Australian fine art photographer known for his representations of the sublime. His photographic subjects have included landscapes from America to Australia, the Arctic and Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, European sacred architecture, and day- and nighttime skyscapes. He has lived in Tasmania since 1982.
Nude, 1925, also known as Torso, is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Edward Weston in 1925. It is part of a series of six nude photographs that he took of his model and lover, Miriam Lerner.