Fogg Museum

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), 1855, Josiah Johnson Hawes, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. More

The invention of photography, announced to the public in 1839, is often associated with the great social and industrial revolutions of the 19th century, as it at once emancipated visual culture and threatened its traditions. Heralded as a purveyor of objective information in the age of positivism, photography played a vital role in the rise of the modern research university, where discipline-based collections were assembled as specimens for use in comparative study. Among Harvard’s most enthusiastic apologists for the new medium, Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1859 forecasted that photography would usher in a “new epoch in the history of human progress.” A testament to his prescience, today the university holds approximately 7.5 million photographic images distributed across scores of repositories, among them the Fogg Museum’s distinguished collection.

Despite Harvard’s early and ongoing use of photography as historical and scientific evidence, it was not until well more than a century after its invention that the medium's place in the history of art and visual culture began to be seriously explored at the university, leading to the establishment of fine art-based photography collections at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in 1966 and the Fogg in 1972. Davis Pratt, the founding curator of both collections, identified important images from libraries and archives throughout the university to form the collections’ core. Among them is this cerebral daguerreotype portrait of Holmes made by Josiah Johnson Hawes around 1855. While Pratt privileged what he termed the medium's “aesthetic impact” as he shaped the Fogg’s photograph collection, his successor at the Carpenter Center, the sociologist and photographer Barbara Norfleet, expanded that collection's representation of American social documentary practice. After Norfleet's retirement in 2002, the Carpenter Center photograph collection was transferred to the Fogg, creating a resource for the study of fine art and documentary photography much greater than the sum of its parts.

Fine Art Photography Collection (15,000 photographs)

The Fogg Museum’s core anthology collection of fine art photographs contains key images that represent the history of aesthetic photography and the aesthetic use of photography primarily in the United States and Western Europe from the invention of the medium to the present, with strengths in artists’ portraits, documentary, and contemporary photographic practice. Among the highlights are unique daguerreotypes by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes; large-scale portraits by Mathew B. Brady and Studio; photographs of the American West by Timothy O’Sullivan; the documentary tradition from Walker Evans to Robert Frank and from Diane Arbus to Nan Goldin; and mid-century abstract and experimental photography by Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, their mentors, colleagues, and students, from László Moholy-Nagy and Minor White to Kenneth Josephson and Eileen Cowen. Recent acquisitions of contemporary photographs include significant works by Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons, Nan Goldin, Laura McPhee, Abelardo Morell, Vik Muniz, Gary Schneider, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Carrie Mae Weems.

American Professional Photographers Collection (19,000 negatives and 1,000 photographs)

Between 1975 and 1977, Barbara Norfleet assembled for the Carpenter Center a collection of approximately 16,000 negatives and 1,000 photographs by over 25 American professional photographers active from the late 1930s through the early 1960s. According to Norfleet, “The materials collected have been used to form a photographic archive on the social history of America. The archive has been and will be used as the resource for exhibitions, books, and research on Americans' values, attitudes, institutions, organizations, ceremonies, and social behavior as portrayed in the work of commercial professional photographers.” Many of Norfleet’s groundbreaking exhibitions and publications during her nearly 30 years as curator of the Carpenter Center's photograph collection were based on the holdings of this special archive. Some publications include The Champion Pig (1979), Wedding (1979), Killing Time (1982), Looking at Death (1993), and When We Liked Ike (2001).

Ben Shahn Collection (4,000 photographs and 1,000 negatives)

Early in his career, the American social realist Ben Shahn (1898–1969) used newspaper imagery as source material for his polemical paintings, murals, and graphic art. In the 1930s he began to make social documentary photographs in New York, and from 1935 to 1938 he extensively photographed the rural South and Midwest for the government′s New Deal programs. While Shahn's small-format Leica camera gave him a way of seeing that informed his painting, mural, and graphic work, his photographs are much more than simply raw materials and source inspiration for his work in other media; they are compelling pieces of social realist art in their own right. In 1970, Bernarda Bryson Shahn gave the Fogg her late husband's photographic archive, including Shahn’s earliest photographs made in New York City, New Deal prints, and tourist pictures taken in the U.S., Europe, and Asia from the 1940s through 1960—making it the most comprehensive repository of Shahn's photographs.

The Social Museum Collection (4,500 photographs and 1,500 diagrams)

The Social Museum at Harvard University was established in 1903 “to promote investigations of modern social conditions and to direct the amelioration of industrial and social life,” in the words of its founder, Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody. Peabody, a leader in social reform, taught popular courses on social ethics as early as the 1880s and formed the Department of Social Ethics in 1906. To support this program he and his staff assembled a large collection of photographs, diagrams, and publications related to the burgeoning international social reform movement, which were accessible to students, scholars, and the public in the Social Museum at Emerson Hall through at least the 1930s. The Social Museum collection is thematically organized and covers such topics as Charity, Crime, Education, Health, Housing, Industrial Problems, Recreation, Religious Agencies, and Social Settlements. Its astonishing pictures and related documents include important bodies of work by such pioneering documentary photographers as Lewis Hine, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Waldemar Franz Herman Titzenthaler.