From Daguerreotypes to Digital: National Portrait Gallery Celebrates 50 Years of Collecting Photography

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of its photography collection, which now makes up nearly half the museum’s holdings.

Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting will go on view at the museum on November 14, 2026. The exhibition will bring together more than 120 photographic portraits belonging to National Portrait Gallery, spanning the Daguerreian era through the digital age, tracing the development of photography and its role in documenting U.S. history and culture.

The National Portrait Gallery began collecting photography in 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial, when it expanded its collecting mandate to include the medium. Photographs provided a way for the museum to represent many people who had shaped the nation’s history but had never sat for a painted or sculpted portrait.

Organized chronologically and curated by Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs, Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting will examine the evolution of photography and highlight influential photographers and photographic processes from 1843 to the present. An introductory timeline will outline major photographic processes and technological innovations.

Among the works on display will be an 1846 quarter-plate daguerreotype of Dolley Madison by John Plumbe Jr., which will be shown for the first time since the Portrait Gallery acquired it in July 2024. It will be displayed alongside an 1843 half-plate daguerreotype of President John Quincy Adams. The pairing will mark the first time the earliest known photographs of a U.S. president and first lady have been exhibited together.

Other historical works include Alexander Gardner’s original “cracked-plate” portrait of Abraham Lincoln, British camera artist Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and rare cabinet-card photographs of Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Sallie E. Garrity and Ko K’un-hua by George K. Warren.

The exhibition will also feature photographs by influential figures including Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz.

Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting will be on view on the second floor of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from Nov. 14, 2026, through November 7, 2027.