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  • Photograph
    Attributed to LOUIS-JACQUES-MANDÉ DAGUERRE: A French artist and photographer, Daguerre is recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype, a significant achievement in the history of photography.
  • Photograph
    GUSTAVE LE GRAY: This 1856 photograph by Gustave Le Gray is part of the Gernsheim Collection, a cornerstone of the Center's photography holdings, comprising more than five million prints and negatives.

Photography

Founded on the acquisition of the internationally renowned Gernsheim Collection in 1963, the Ransom Center's photography collection has grown to more than five million prints and negatives, ranging from the earliest photographic trials to the latest contemporary works. The collection's encyclopedic scope makes it one of the world's premier sources for the study of photography and its history.

Nineteenth-century holdings include rare experiments by inventors Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Sir John Herschel, and celebrated works by Victorian photographers Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Lewis Carroll. Pivotal twentieth-century figures Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams are well represented, as are influential post-war artists Aaron Siskind, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Robert Heinecken, and Joan Lyons. LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alison Rossiter, Alejandro Cartagena, and Marco Breuer are just a few of the twenty-first-century artists represented in the ever-expanding collection. Boasting both breadth and depth, the Ransom Center holds the archives of David Douglas Duncan, Elliott Erwitt, Arnold Newman, and Anne Noggle, as well as the New York Journal-American photographic morgue and the New York print library of Magnum Photos, Inc.

Whether you are conducting a broad historical study or analyzing a single work, figure, or process, start your research here.