WASHINGTON, DC.- Marking the culmination of a year-long celebration and a three-year initiative for photography at the National Gallery of Art, a major exhibition unveiled a selection of some 200 works acquired in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Gallery's photography program. Celebrating Photography at the National Gallery of Art: Recent Gifts, on view from November 1, 2015, through March 13, 2016, presents pictures made from the dawn of photography in the 1840s to work by contemporary photographers. Two exhibitions mounted earlier in 2015 inaugurated the celebration.

All of the photographs on view were given or promised in honor of the 25th anniversary of photography at the National Gallery of Art and are part of a major initiative launched in 2012 to broaden and enrich the Gallery's collection and program for photography. Some 1,330 photographs were acquired through gifts or pledges as part of this undertaking including major donations of work by photographers whose art is held in depth by the Gallery—such as 172 photographs by Robert Adams, 99 by Robert Frank, 39 by Walker Evans, and 13 by Harry Callahan. Important pieces by photographers whose work was previously under-represented—such as 12 photographs by Diane Arbus, 6 by Thomas Struth, and 10 by Edward Weston—as well as artists who were not previously included in the museum's holdings—such as Joseph Vigier, Duchenne de Boulogne, Adam Fuss, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, and Henry Wessel—were also acquired through gifts and pledges.

Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad, and Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, as well as numerous individuals and foundations from across the country have made these acquisitions possible.

To celebrate this accomplishment, the Gallery has published The Altering Eye: Photography at the National Gallery of Art, a landmark volume on the permanent collection of photographs timed to coincide with the final commemorative exhibition. With general essays as well as more focused studies on individual photographers whose work the Gallery holds in depth, this publication includes over 325 reproductions and shows how the museum can now tell the history of photography from 1839 to the present day through its own collection.

"We are deeply grateful for the recent gifts of photographs to celebrate this important anniversary of the Gallery's photography program," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We wish to thank the generosity of our donors, in particular, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad and Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker. Their gifts, along with the long-standing support of Betsy Karel and the Trellis Fund for our photography exhibitions and many other donors who contributed to our 25th Anniversary Photography Initiative, have substantially enhanced the depth and breadth of the Gallery's collection and program for photography."

Recent Gifts Exhibition Highlights
Organized thematically, Recent Gifts brings together an exquisite group of photographs, ranging from innovative examples made in the earliest years of the medium's history to key works by important post-war and contemporary artists that examine the ways in which photography continues to shape our experience of the modern world.

The exhibition celebrates the first acquisitions by the Gallery of work by the 19th-century photographers Joseph Vigier, 20th-century artists Lola Álvarez Bravo, Richard Avedon, Joe Deal, and Albert Renger-Patzsch, and contemporary photographers Paul Graham, Matthew Jensen, Simon Norfolk, and Leo Rubinfien, among others.

The exhibition begins with works that affirm the vitality and flexibility of the medium from William Henry Fox Talbot's pioneering study of architecture—An Ancient Door, Magdalen College, Oxford (1843), the earliest photograph in the exhibition—to Adam Fuss's elegiac Untitled, from the series "My Ghost" (1999), which explores the themes of mourning, loss, and the brevity of life. Other influential photographs in the history of the medium are also on view, such as László Moholy-Nagy's Untitled (Decorating Work, Switzerland) (1925).

Several landmark works by Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, who revolutionized postwar photography, are on view. Vintage prints from Frank's seminal photobook The Americans hang alongside Avedon photographs, including his famous The Family series, a suite of 69 portraits of the political, media, and corporate elite, commissioned in 1976 by Rolling Stone.

The third room of the exhibition explores photography's multifaceted relationship to the representation of the human body, showing pseudo-scientific experiments documented by the 19th-century French doctor Duchenne de Boulogne; provocative studies by Diane Arbus; and Deborah Luster's One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (1998–2002), which humanizes those on the margins of society.

New approaches to landscape in postwar photography are revealed in the fourth room in stunning works by Lewis Baltz, Henry Wessel's depictions of Southern California suburbia in Real Estate, and Emmet Gowin's aerial photographs of landscapes transformed by human intervention.

The final section of the show explores new approaches to the representation of time in two series by Paul Graham titled Pittsburgh (2004) from his award-winning publication, A Shimmer of Possibility, as well as Simon Norfolk's series Stratographs (2014) and John Divola's photographs of an abandoned house on Zuma Beach in California (1977–1978).