Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Photography at the National Portrait Gallery

Photographic Memory marks fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National Portrait Gallery's photographs collection, which now accounts for nearly half of the museum’s total holdings. Encompassing more than one hundred works, from the Daguerreian era to today’s digital age, the exhibition explores the evolution of photographic portraiture through treasures from the Portrait Gallery’s wide-ranging collection. It highlights the role played by photography in democratizing the museum’s collection to include likenesses of those who have shaped the nation’s history but never posed for a painted or sculpted portrait.

Among the earliest works to be featured is the recently acquired daguerreotype of Dolley Madison by John Plumbe Jr.; Alexander Gardner’s original “cracked-plate” portrait of Abraham Lincoln; British camera artist Julia Margaret Cameron’s image of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and rare cabinet card photographs of Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Sallie E. Garrity, and Ko K’un-hua by George K. Warren. Twentieth-century portraits include W.E.B. Du Bois by Addison N. Scurlock; Lee Miller by Man Ray; John Steinbeck by Sonya Noskowiak; Eleanor Roosevelt by Yousuf Karsh; Anna May Wong by Nickolas Muray; Bessie Smith by Carl Van Vechten; Isamu Noguchi by George Platt Lynes; Ruth Asawa by Imogen Cunningham; Rachel Carson by Alfred Eisenstaedt; Mahalia Jackson by Roy DeCarava; Cesar Chavez by Richard Avedon; James Brown by Diane Arbus; and Venus and Serena Williams by Annie Leibovitz.