Photography Collection
Over a century of photographic art — from daguerreotypes and albumen prints to gelatin silver and beyond. Includes work by Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Walker Evans, Eugène Atget, and many more.
The first century of a medium that changed what seeing meant.
hen photography arrived it broke the old monopoly of the hand: suddenly the world could record itself, in detail no painter could match, for anyone who could work a lens. The Getty assembled this collection to treat that disruption as art history rather than mere documentation.
Carleton Watkins hauled glass plates up the American West to prove its scale; Felice Beato shipped home the first widely seen views of Asia; Walker Evans stripped his subjects to plain fact; Mapplethorpe controlled every inch of the studio. A century and a half of people deciding, frame by frame, what was worth keeping.
