Photography | Princeton College Art Museum

The Museum’s pictures assortment spans the historical past of the medium, from the 1840s to the current. Photographs have been on show on the Museum since 1929, with the primary {photograph} getting into the gathering in 1949. In 1971, David Hunter McAlpin, Class of 1920, donated greater than 500 pictures, and within the following 12 months Peter C. Bunnell grew to become the primary McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art—the primary devoted appointment of its form within the United States. Both the McAlpin present and the endowed professorship signaled an early dedication to pictures as a subject of examine, one thing uncommon amongst each museums and artwork historical past packages on the time.  

Today, with over 27,000 pictures by greater than 900 artists, Princeton boasts one of many main museum collections of pictures within the nation. The assortment displays pictures’s various makes use of and modes of circulation throughout historical past, cultures, and geographies within the spheres of artwork, science, know-how, drugs, journalism, and commerce. Strengths embrace nineteenth-century British pictures; French pictures of the 1850s–70s; American Pictorialism, anchored by the Clarence H. White Collection and the archives and scholar collections of the Clarence H. White School; Japanese postwar pictures; and midcentury American modernist pictures, constructing on the energy of McAlpin’s foundational present and the bequest of the photographer-educator Minor White’s archive in 1976. Other photographic archives held on the Museum embrace these of Ruth Bernhard and William B. Dyer in addition to the papers of David H. McAlpin. 

In 2024, the Museum was chosen because the repository for the Emmet Gowin Archive, which would be the topic of a serious retrospective in 2028. Other current acquisitions embrace works by conceptual and efficiency artists working in China within the Nineties and early 2000s; classic prints from image magazines together with Life; modern South African photographers, notably with one of many largest teams of pictures by Zanele Muholi on the earth; nineteenth-century painted portrait studios; and feminist artists using the medium within the United States within the Seventies and ’80s, together with the current acquisition of Nan Goldin’s landmark Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-1986).