Photographs
One of the most comprehensive photography collections in the world, spanning the medium's 180-year history from daguerreotypes to contemporary digital works.
A hundred and eighty years of deciding what's worth a frame.
rom the moment a silvered plate first held an image, photography forced a new question onto everyone who picked up a camera: of everything in the visible world, what deserves to be fixed and kept? The Met's collection is a running record of those decisions.
Stieglitz pointed the camera at nothing but clouds; Walker Evans at unsparing American fact; Irving Penn at the controlled emptiness of the studio; Stephen Shore at a deadpan parking lot. The medium keeps changing. The choice at its center — this, not that — never does.
