Photography

Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River, Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington

Messenger Boy (Portrait of Richard Pierce)

About Photography

The first significant group of photographs to enter the Gallery’s collection were two extraordinary sets of images by Man Ray. A group of fifteen “Rayographs” came to the Gallery in 1941 from Marcel Duchamp and Katherine S. Dreier as part of the Société Anonyme collection of modern art, followed in 1953 by an additional group of photographic prints and Rayographs in a bequest from Dreier’s estate. The Gallery began to actively collect photographs in 1971, with the acquisition of twenty-five prints by Walker Evans, who taught at the Yale School of Art from 1964 to 1974, and today the collection holds over 700 of Evans’s prints and Polaroids.

The collection holds sets of master prints by Robert Adams, Donald Blumberg, and Lee Friedlander, along with significant holdings of work by Lucien Aigner and Inge Morath. The collection also includes strong examples from the tradition of street photography, including works by Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, and Garry Winogrand, and notable images of war and social upheaval by Larry Burrows, Dorothea Lange, Charles Moore, and W. Eugene Smith.

Committed to collecting the work of significant figures working today, the Gallery has acquired key works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Zhang Huan, An-My Lê, Christian Marclay, Judith Joy Ross, Mark Ruwedel, James Welling, and others. The Gallery proudly features photographs by some of the medium’s most influential educators—including Richard Benson, Carl Chiarenza, Emmet Gowin, Nathan Lyons, and Tod Papageorge—as well as examples by prominent graduates from the Yale School of Art.

The collection is available to students and scholars through exhibitions and by appointment. Please email yuag.photo@yale.edu at least two weeks in advance to view original photographs. All appointment requests must be made in writing.

Note from the Curator

The Gallery recently received a gift of 64 prints by the 20th-century American photographer Milton Rogovin, including 39 works from his Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York series. In 1972 Rogovin began a 30-year project photographing the residents of Buffalo’s Lower West Side, a historic neighborhood adjacent to his optometry practice. The series presents a dynamic image of the community, which has long been home to a mix of ethnic groups, immigrant families, and working-class people—subjects who traditionally have been underrepresented in American visual culture. His sensitive portraits convey the mutual trust and positive regard that he established with his collaborators. Upon completing his initial survey, Rogovin reengaged his subjects on two more occasions, first in the mid-1980s and again in the early 1990s. The resulting triptychs introduce a narrative element to the series, revealing how individuals grow and families change through the steady passage of time.

Make an appointment to see this compelling series or other prints in our new photography space.

Carl Fuldner

The Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow, Department of Photography

with Judy Ditner

The Richard Benson Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media

Milton Rogovin, Untitled, from the series Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York, 1973, printed later. Gelatin silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Milton Rogovin, Untitled, from the series Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York, Revisited, 1985. Gelatin silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Milton Rogovin, Untitled, from the series Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York, Revisited, 1992. Gelatin silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Meet the Curator

Judy Ditner

Judy Ditner is the Richard Benson Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media. Her research interests in photography span the history of the medium, with emphases on documentary and conceptual practices. Ditner has worked on exhibitions for the International Center of Photography and the New Museum in New York, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto. She holds a PH.D. in art history from Boston University with specializations in the history of photography and contemporary art, an M.A. in curatorial studies from Bard College, and a B.F.A. in photography from Ryerson University in Toronto.

judy.ditner@yale.edu

Download Judy Ditner’s CV

Meet the Fellow

Jenna Marvin

Jenna Marvin is the Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow, Department of Photography. Jenna earned a B.A. in Art History and Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She has held internships at the Clark Art Institute, the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Kentucky, and MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), in North Adams. In addition to performing collection-based research, Jenna coordinates and leads visits of the Gallery’s photography collection in the James E. Duffy Study Room for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

jenna.marvin@yale.edu

About Photography