How We're Shaping a More Inclusive Photography Collection

The dramatic racial reckoning of 2020 has deeply affected art institutions across the country.

At the Getty Museum, the Department of Photographs is the only curatorial area to actively collect modern and contemporary art, and we have acquired many works by artists outside the European tradition. With our broader reach, we have the unique opportunity to address the need for greater diversity in our acquisition and exhibition program. The entire curatorial team is committed to the exciting goal of shaping a more inclusive canon of photography for current and future generations.

The department’s founding collections—more than 40,000 photographs acquired from prominent European and American collectors in 1984—emphasized 19th- and early-20th-century photography, with large concentrations of recognized figures from William Henry Fox Talbot to Carleton Watkins and Walker Evans. The decision to concentrate on historical artists rather than going into the contemporary field was influenced by the Museum’s overall collecting program. Adding photography to the Museum’s collection introduced the work of several noteworthy women, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, and Imogen Cunningham, but only one identifiable African American photographer—James Van Der Zee—was represented, and by a single photograph. Meanwhile, no artists of color at all were included among the 200+ works selected for Getty’s first Handbook of the Photographs Collection (1995), and men outnumbered women 20 to one.

We began to truly diversify our holdings in 2005 when we launched the Getty Museum Photographs Council (GMPC), a donors’ group that would help us expand the collection’s geographical and temporal parameters by funding acquisitions of contemporary works by unrepresented or under-represented artists. Over time, the GMPC has enabled us to add photographs from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, and Taiwan, in addition to works by artists of color from the United States. Acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications of Japanese and Latin American photography have increasingly enriched our program, while a new emphasis on fashion photography, and the joint acquisition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art and archive with the Getty Research Institute and LACMA, have helped us reach new audiences. Additions to the collection have coincided with a series of major monographic exhibitions devoted to women photographers including Sally Mann (2018–19, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC); Dora Maar (shown in Paris and London, 2019–2020); Imogen Cunningham (fall 2020 at the Seattle Art Museum and arriving at Getty in March 2022); and Uta Barth (November 2022–February 2023).

One area where the Department of Photographs has made significant progress in recent years is in the field of Japanese American photography. Since our transformative 2019 acquisition of Dennis Reed’s groundbreaking collection of this work dating from the 1920s and ’30s, we have continued building a major concentration of photographs by these long-neglected artists, many of whom were active in Los Angeles. Although they received recognition in international publications and exhibitions before World War II, much of what they produced was subsequently suppressed, discarded, and forgotten for decades.

The rediscovery of figures like Hisao Kimura (now represented by a substantial group of photographs we acquired in 2020) dramatically enhances our understanding of pictorialist and modernist photography in this country by providing a fuller picture of the important contributions by West Coast artists to these global movements. In general, pictorialists sought ways to manipulate their photographs to mimic effects seen in paintings and graphic arts, while the modernist tradition which followed emphasized straightforward, unadulterated imagery. Camera Clubs like the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, based in L.A’.s Little Tokyo neighborhood, disseminated technical information and provided non-professional artists with opportunities to exhibit and publish their work. Visually arresting photographs like Kimura’s view of reflected oil derricks reveal a fresh perspective on the Southern California landscape, where towering steel structures altered the environment, providing compelling symbols of industrial progress and urban blight.

Back east, meanwhile, the history of photography was being written by institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which published the first edition of Beaumont Newhall’s Photography, 1839–1937 to coincide with the landmark exhibition he organized in 1937. The book soon gained stature as a foundational text that would be expanded, translated, and reprinted over the next 60+ years, even though Newhall’s narrative remained racially myopic, ignoring the work of non-white photographers like Kimura and African American artists.

“When I was in school a book came out called The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall and there were no Black people in that,” recalled Adger Cowans at the time of the touring exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983. Even highly gifted photographers like Cowans, a founding member of the Kamoinge collective of Black New York artists in 1963, struggled to enter mainstream institutions. And then as now, marginalization was self-perpetuating. During the lead-up to the Getty Museum’s presentation this summer of Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, an exhibition circulated by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, we have been expanding our holdings of many of the artists featured in the show: not only Cowans, but also Ming Smith, Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Herb Robinson, among others.

The Getty exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA, organized by independent curator jill moniz in 2021, featured a small number of works from Getty’s collection—photographs by Laura Aguilar and Paul Mpagi Sepuya funded by the GMPC in 2019—but was largely devoted to artists not yet represented in the Museum. In moniz’s words, “Los Angeles is a space where photographers are rejecting boundaries and investigating new ideas. The artists featured here revolutionize photography through dynamic images that explore how color, race, class, and gender are constructed, signified, and validated within their communities, despite outside forces that often ignore or destabilize them.”

Getty curators took the opportunity to look closely at the roster of Photo Flux artists, adding to the collection works by April Banks, Andrea Chung, Christina Fernandez, Todd Gray, Texas Isaiah, Melodie McDaniel, George Rodriguez, Kyungmi Shin, and Ken Gonzales-Day, whose haunting series Searching for California’s Hang Trees casts light on a hidden history of racial violence that surrounds us. The artist explains how the medium itself plays a role in the message. “In Nightfall I photographed a single tree in Griffith Park to stand in for many cases across Los Angeles County because the trees and makeshift gallows have long since disappeared. The image was taken around midnight in keeping with the history of so many lynching cases. The flash was meant to foreground the impact of flash photography in shaping the spectacle of death depicted in lynching post-cards and newspaper coverage in the first decades of the 20th century… The tree was intended to stand in for California’s missing history of lynching and its impact on BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], Latinx, and other immigrant communities.”

Getty has also recently acquired photographs by Mickalene Thomas and Deana Lawson, who favor intricately staged domestic scenes of African American life. Thomas draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including European paintings of the 19th century, Blaxploitation films, and the magazines she grew up with, Jet and Ebony. “I see all of my work as self-portraits, even though I’m working with others,” she has said. “And I’m more comfortable working with women I know.” One frequent model is Qusuquzah, whom she has painted and photographed since 2008. “Women are beautiful, sexy, and possess a power that is insatiable. Most of the women I work with are women with confidence, strength, and sensuality—all of the attributes I covet. There’s an energy about them that I see in myself. They are a mirror of self-reflection.”

Lawson’s photographs, on the other hand, are largely populated by strangers whom she encounters by chance and emphasize working-class African American culture, as in her family portrait of a mother and her two young sons at Christmastime in a modest Brooklyn apartment. The setting also plays an important role in Lawson’s work, and like Thomas, she produces large-scale color prints that accentuate her subjects’ direct gaze and let the viewer closely scrutinize the myriad details. Her sitters always seem to transcend their mundane surroundings. “People are creative, godlike beings,” she has said. “I don’t feel like we carry ourselves like that all the time, or that we know how miraculous we are. When I speak of potential, teasing out this incredible, powerful person in front of me, I am trying to locate the magnificent and have it come through in the picture.”

New York photographer John Edmonds also focuses on Black subjects and identity, often including sacred objects. In Enduring, his model faces away from the camera, emphasizing his dreadlocks and muscular back as he strains to hold up a ceremonial Kuba cloth from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “A major part of my work is this oscillation between what I’m actually showing, and what’s being withheld or concealed,” Edmonds has said. “I would have the subjects hold these clothes over a period of time, until they collapsed, which as an act, I think, is a metaphor for life and work. It’s supposed to symbolize the Black man holding up history, trying to endure it.” On the back of the photograph’s frame, Edmonds inscribed the following dedication: “Power and struggle can coexist. / We are taking back our power. / Look at our power. / in honor of the life of George Floyd, 11/05/20.”

The first work made in the 2020s to enter Getty’s collection, Summer Azure (as in the butterfly species) is by transgender artist and activist Tourmaline. “Freedom dreams are born when we face harsh conditions not with despair, but with the deep knowledge that these conditions will change—that a world filled with softness and beauty and care is not only possible, but inevitable,” Tourmaline says. A photographic freedom dream, it is an enchanting Afrofuturist-themed self-portrait of the photographer floating free of the Earth’s bonds, symbolizing trans Black liberation. “The world that I dream of is filled with ease. I’m not satisfied with Black trans lives mattering; I want Black trans lives to be easy, to be pleasurable, and to be filled with lush opportunities. I want the abundance we’ve gifted to the world—the art, the care, the knowledge, and the beauty—to be offered back to us tenfold.”