The Collected Photograph, 1970–1989

In the early 1970s, as galleries and dealers of photography multiplied in New York City and other major cities, the medium began to gain a firm foothold in the art world. Richard L. Menschel, who would become one of the field’s most prominent patrons, avidly collected not just photographs but also the printed matter that reflected the burgeoning market, such as gallery and museum announcements, price updates, invitations to lectures and symposia, and fliers offering guidance to novice collectors.

The items included in this installation, delivered to Menschel by mail between 1970 and 1989, have been selected from his 2025 donation to the Morgan of more than eleven thousand pieces of print ephemera. They chronicle the “photo boom” through which photography, historical and contemporary, came into its own as a fine art. These promotional materials illustrate evolving design and marketing trends, the canonizing of camera artists past and present, and developments such as the rise of color photography as a collectible mode of art. By 1989, photography’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, scores of museums, galleries, and publishers that had not been engaged with the medium twenty years earlier joined in celebrating its history and looking ahead to its future.

Exhibition location:

Lower Level
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