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Visiting the Museum

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Cornell University
114 Central Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14853
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Open to Cornell classes
by appointment only.

The Museum is temporarily closed
to the general public.

Cornell Information for Visitors
 

Admission is free.
For more information, call 607-255-6464 or send an e-mail to museum@cornell.edu.

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Collections

Photographs & Video

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19th Century Photographs

Explore the collection

20th Century Photographs

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21st Century Photographs

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Video

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The story of photography at the Johnson Museum echoes that of photography in art museums internationally: a slow start, a fitful path, and finally a dizzying rise, following an explosion of interest on the art market and in the academy in the 1980s. The Johnson began collecting photography early for an American museum, two years after it opened as the A. D. White Museum in 1953. Purchases of...

The story of photography at the Johnson Museum echoes that of photography in art museums internationally: a slow start, a fitful path, and finally a dizzying rise, following an explosion of interest on the art market and in the academy in the 1980s. The Johnson began collecting photography early for an American museum, two years after it opened as the A. D. White Museum in 1953. Purchases of photographs began four years later with three works by Paul Caponigro. The Museum would not purchase another photograph for ten years.

By the 2000s, the photography collection was outpacing the Museum’s print collection, and in the 2010s, more photographs have been acquired than work in any other medium. Photographs now constitute almost a third of the Museum’s nearly 40,000 objects. The Rona Hollander Citrin ’80 and Jeffrey Citrin Photography Center opened in 2012, providing new opportunities for the Museum to integrate the study of photography into Cornell’s curriculum and ensuring that the collection is seen, studied, and taught to its maximum potential.

The collection contains fine examples of work from all areas of photographic practice from the 1840s to the present day. A strength is photojournalism and mid twentieth-century art photography from the United States and Mexico, with significant holdings of the work of Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White (Cornell Class of 1927), Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Larry Fink, William Klein, Leon Levenstein, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Joel Meyerowitz, Aaron Siskind, and Garry Winogrand. It also contains about 1,600 photographs from Meiji-era Japan, largly hand-colored genre scenes and landscapes created for Western tourists. Contemporary art is well represented with works by Teresa Margolles, Zanele Muholi, Thomas Struth, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.

With a few examples of early work, the video collection mainly represents the Johnson’s recent engagement with the medium. The Picket Family Gallery provides a dedicated space for video and other time-based art.

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