The camera has played many overlapping roles in the history of artful communication on the page. A defining visual practice of the modern age, photography has exerted an ever-evolving influence as a medium of fine, commercial, and folk art; as a transformative mode of mass-market technology; and as an unparalleled means of visual documentation. The Morgan collects visually arresting photographs from fields of endeavor that the medium has helped to invent or to reinvent, including (to name but a few) advertising, art, book design, cartography, cinema, criminology, exploration, family history, glamour, journalism, medicine, politics, sports, and zoology. In these areas of activity and in others, the photograph has redefined what is beautiful, credible, memorable, shareable, and even perceptible.
Amphitheatre, Arles
Gift of Sam J. D. Lehr
Rue de Noailles, Marseille
Purchased on The Charina Endowment Fund
Edith, Lorina, and Alice Liddell on a sofa
Gift of Arthur A. Houghton, 1987
Cour de Rouen
Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund,
City Hall Subway Station
Purchased on the Goldsmith Fund for Americana
Ninety-One Brandle & Smith Candies
Gift of David Winter
Spectators on a hillside, some perched in trees
Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Grate
Purchased as the gift of Jane Watkins
Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. © John Lehr
Full-length portrait of Chloe Finch, seating facing front and bouncing a ball between her knees. Taken in Hujar's studio.