Photo Museums: Louisiana  Another State

LASM’s holdings include works by photographers of regional and national reputation, such as William Greiner, A. J. Meek, Arnold Newman, Thomas Neff, Julia Sims, and others. A family photograph and memorabilia collection of Civil War photographer Andrew Lytle is also included.

The earliest photographs in the collection date to the early 1840s, and include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, vintage albumen prints, salt paper print, hand colored or enhanced photographs, tintypes, glass plate negatives, 16mm films and contemporary digital inkjet prints. The Louisiana State Museum has major holdings of work by Samuel T. Blessing, George François Mugnier, Theodore Lillenthal, Robert W. Tebbs, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Joseph Woodson "Pops" Whitesell, Fonville Winans, and Achille Simon.

Since the 1970s, NOMA has built an extensive collection of photographs that represents a wide range of achievement in that medium from the 1840s to the present. Today the collection comprises over 8,500 works with images by some of the most significant photographic artists including Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, among many others. The collection includes examples that reflect photography’s international scope, from an 1843 view from his hotel window in Paris by William Henry Fox Talbot to a view of Mount Fuji by Kusakabi Kimbei, but it is particularly strong in work about New Orleans by regional and national photographers such as E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Clarence John Laughlin, and Robert Polidori. NOMA is dedicated to presenting the photography collection in exhibitions, publications and educational programs and to continuing to build the collection to better reflect recent scholarship on the history of photography. Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs is responsible for the care, development, and interpretation of the collection.

The Museum's holdings include Southern artworks from Washington, D.C. and 15 Southern states spanning the 18th-21st centuries, and include paintings, prints, watercolors, photographs, ceramics, sculpture, crafts and design.