Americana: Photographs 1850–1950

Philadelphia, July 16, 2026–The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is happy to announce Americana: Photographs 1850-1950, an exhibition exploring how people and communities used the digicam to doc their lives and outline their place inside a altering nation. On view alongside A Nation of Artists and marking 250th anniversary of American independence, Americana will spotlight the various histories and views that images has helped document and maintain.

On view from July 23 – October 11, 2026, Americana will reveal an expansive and complicated imaginative and prescient of American id. From its earliest years within the 1840s, Americans embraced images as a medium that introduced self-representation inside attain of extra individuals than ever earlier than. Spanning a century marked by the Civil War, the nation’s centennial, industrialization, mass immigration, and two world wars, this exhibition will current a variety of photographic practices and codecs. Many photos had been made not by celebrated photographers, however by unknown professionals and amateurs whose photos protect experiences that may in any other case have been misplaced to historical past.

“This summer marks a momentous time in Philadelphia as we welcome visitors from around the world,” stated Daniel Weiss, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Americana highlights the strength and diversity of the museum’s photography collection, including compelling depictions of people and communities historically overlooked or ignored in dominant narratives of American identity. The exhibition opens a timely discussion of what it means to be an American as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial.”

Americana locations a highlight on a number of of images’s most vital in style codecs, starting with tintypes, that are among the many most ubiquitous images from the 1800s on account of their cheap and sturdy nature. By the late 1850s, most portrait studios supplied tintypes, and plenty of itinerant practitioners traveled with their wares, establishing tents at carnivals, festivals, and city facilities for a number of days earlier than transferring on. These touring photographers primarily made portraits, however had been usually commissioned to take photos of properties, companies, and different scenes. Many of the tintypes on this exhibition had been collected by the artist and artwork vendor Paul Cava, who centered on large-format examples and sought out topics with mysterious and charged qualities.

By 1907, a fad for photographic postcards took maintain within the United States. For a small payment, the Eastman Kodak Company printed any {photograph} for its prospects on postcard inventory, with room for senders to incorporate stamps, addresses, and private notes on the again. Millions of those postcards had been made and despatched over the following few a long time. Their topics are innumerable, starting from notable native landmarks to prank photos and mundane dwelling scenes for far-away buddies. The exhibition features a group that document small-town baseball groups, which had turn into a near-universal presence in communities throughout the land by the early 1900s.

Also on show will likely be uncommon examples of American collage, highlighting three notably massive and bold productions donated to the PMA by Jennifer Anne Tucker and Gerald Lang, and Robert Yoskowitz and Elissa Orlandi-Young.

“What makes something quintessentially American? The term ‘Americana’ often conjures artifacts, traditions, and symbols preserved as distinctly American—apple pie, baseball, and ideals such as democracy, simplicity, hard work, and civic engagement. But these references are often selective, elevating certain stories and experiences while obscuring others,” stated Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center. “This exhibition aims to invite an open-ended, ever-evolving definition of what it is to be American.”