ABSTRACT
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first effort to put on display images of and by African Americans was also its first major exhibition of photography. When Beaumont Newhall became Museum of Modern Art's first curator of photography in 1940, on the heels of mounting his survey of the medium at the museum in 1937, he set out to situate photography within an art-historical narrative. Among the great photographic masters Newhall counted Alfred Stieglitz and contemporary artists Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. While the 1970s ushered in the formation of a modern canon for African American photography, the 1980s saw the emergence of its first historical surveys. Despite its subtitle, the Addison Gallery’s The Black Photographer was not a survey in the traditional art-historical sense of the term. In the twenty-first century, museums with collections of photography by African Americans have begun to eschew modernist sensibilities and embrace vernacular traditions.
