The Department of Photographs was established in 1984 with the acquisition of several of the most important private collections in the world, including those of Bruno Bischofberger, Arnold Crane, Volker Kahmen/Georg Heusch, and Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. Through a continuing program of acquisitions by purchase and donation, the Getty Museum has assembled the finest and most comprehensive corpus of photographs on the West Coast.
The collection is particularly rich in works dating from the time of photography’s invention in England and France in the late 1830s and early 1840s. International in scope, it encompasses substantial holdings by some of the most significant makers of the 19th through the 21st centuries active in Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, and Africa.
Photographs are sensitive to light and cannot be kept on permanent display. Rotating exhibitions drawn from the collection and supplemented by loans are on view in the galleries of the Center for Photographs at the Getty Center.
