Photography
Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006; born Berlin, Germany; died San Francisco, CA), Lifesavers, 1930. Gelatin silver print; 26.7 × 32.7 cm. Bequest of Ruth Bernhard. Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. © Trustees of Princeton University.
The Museum’s photography collection spans the history of the medium, from the 1840s to the present. Photographs have been on display at the Museum since 1929, with the first photograph entering the collection in 1949. In 1971, David Hunter McAlpin, Class of 1920, donated more than 500 photographs, and in the following year Peter C. Bunnell became the first McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art—the first dedicated appointment of its kind in the United States. Both the McAlpin gift and the endowed professorship signaled an early commitment to photography as a field of study, something rare among both museums and art history programs at the time.
Today, with over 27,000 photographs by more than 900 artists, Princeton boasts one of the leading museum collections of photography in the country. The collection reflects photography’s diverse uses and modes of circulation across history, cultures, and geographies in the spheres of art, science, technology, medicine, journalism, and commerce. Strengths include nineteenth-century British photography; French photographs of the 1850s–70s; American Pictorialism, anchored by the Clarence H. White Collection and the archives and student collections of the Clarence H. White School; Japanese postwar photography; and midcentury American modernist photography, building on the strength of McAlpin’s foundational gift and the bequest of the photographer-educator Minor White’s archive in 1976. Other photographic archives held at the Museum include those of Ruth Bernhard and William B. Dyer as well as the papers of David H. McAlpin.
In 2024, the Museum was selected as the repository for the Emmet Gowin Archive, which will be the subject of a major retrospective in 2028. Other recent acquisitions include works by conceptual and performance artists working in China in the 1990s and early 2000s; vintage prints from picture magazines including Life; contemporary South African photographers, notably with one of the largest groups of photography by Zanele Muholi in the world; nineteenth-century painted portrait studios; and feminist artists utilizing the medium in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, including the recent acquisition of Nan Goldin’s landmark Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-1986).