Director’s Office with information on the Collection

Director’s Office of The American Museum of Photography with information on the Collection

M E E T___T H E ___ D I R E C T O R

Undeterred by a recent New York Times report confirming an alarming national shortage of Museum Directors, Wm. B. Becker blithely tackled the job of establishing The American Museum of Photography. A noted historian of photography whose research has been published in American Heritage, History of Photography: An International Quarterly and other forums, Bill Becker is also a broadcast journalist and writer whose work has been honored with four EMMY® awards. He is the author of Brady of Broadway, a one-man play about the photographer Mathew Brady that’s been performed at the Smithsonian Institution and other venues.

The American Museum of Photography is “A Museum Without Walls…for an Art Without Boundaries.” Its award-winning predecessor, Photography’s Beginnings: A Visual History, made its debut on the World Wide Web May 25, 1996.

A B O U T …. T H E …. C O L L E C T I O N

Exhibitions at The American Museum of Photography are drawn from the Collection of Wm. B. Becker. This privately-held collection is concentrated on the first 75 years of photography–from shortly after the medium’s invention in 1839 until the first World War. Assembled over a period of 30 years, the Collection includes five thousand individual images, from the earliest daguerreotype portraits through the first practical color photographs. Each photograph has been chosen for its visual impact as well as for the importance of its content.

L O A N S ,__R I G H T S__ & __P E R M I S S I O N S

Curators, Picture Researchers, Television Producers and Historians have all made use of photographs in the Collection.

Images have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum, Krannert Art Museum and the Southeast Museum of Photography–among other institutions.

Photographs from the Collection have been published in Life, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, and History of Photography: An International Quarterly as well as in numerous books. A daguerreotype from the Collection was recently selected for the cover of the debut CD by the band Ruby Brown.

Other recent projects include spirit photographs for The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities as well as images for PBS series “The U.S.–Mexican War,” “The Irish in America: Long Journey Home,” and the Ken Burns production, “The West.” A number of images were selected by Drs. Naomi Rosenblum and Barbara Tannenbaum for the traveling exhibition “A History of Women Photographers.”

Researchers and curators are invited to use t his e-mail link to inquire about the Collection’s holdings in any particular subject or category.

On this page: Elz. Brochu (location unknown): Man Pouring a Drink.

Tintype, approximately 2-1/2″ x 4″, circa 1890

Schmedling Studio (Chattanooga, Tennessee): Advertising Cabinet Card for Cole the Hatter

Albumen Print, 6-1/2″ x 4-1/2″, circa 1885