Photographs & Video

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...

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. It is strongest in American photojournalism and mid twentieth-century art photography, with significant holdings of the work of Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White (Cornell Class of 1927), Harry Callahan, 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, primarily hand-colored genre scenes and landscapes created for Western tourists.

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.

Photographs & Video

19th Century Photographs

20th Century Photographs

21st Century Photographs

Video