Photography at the Carter

The Carter’s photography collection began within months of the Museum’s 1961 opening with a gift of three prints from Dorothea Lange and has since grown to over 45,000 exhibition-quality prints that span the history of the medium. It is one of the major repositories of American photography in the world, with special depth in landscape photography and bodies of work that explore the idea of the West, from historic collections dealing with 19th-century colonization and settlement to a complete set of Richard Avedon’s In the American West, a Museum commission. The Carter also holds the archives of photographers Carlotta Corpron, Nell Dorr, Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter, Erwin E. Smith, and Karl Struss; significant monographic collections of work by Berenice Abbott and Helen Post; and complete sets of Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian and Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Notes and Camera Work.

Photographs are light-sensitive and susceptible to fading. As a result, they may only be exhibited occasionally and for short periods of time. Photographs not on view may be seen by appointment in the Museum’s Study Room.