National Portrait Gallery marks 50 years of its photography collection: ‘Photographic Memory’ opens in November

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington (part of the Smithsonian Institution) is marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of its photographic collection, created in 1976, the year of the United States’ bicentennial, as PetaPixel reports. From a modest number of works, photography today makes up almost half of the museum’s holdings, becoming one of its main pillars.

To celebrate this anniversary, the museum opens the exhibition ‘Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting’ on November 14, 2026, curated by Ann Shumard, the senior curator of photographs. The exhibition will remain open to visitors on the gallery’s second floor until November 7, 2027.

The exhibition brings together more than 120 photographic portraits from the museum’s collection, from the daguerreotype era to digital photography. The journey follows the development of photographic techniques and the role photography has played in documenting American history and culture over a century and a half.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the daguerreotype of Dolley Madison, made by John Plumbe Jr. in 1846. The museum is showing this work for the first time since it bought it in July 2024 — alongside the 1843 daguerreotype of President John Quincy Adams. It is the first time the earliest known photographs of a U.S. president and a first lady are exhibited together.

Also among the works on display are Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln, known as the “cracked-plate” portrait, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The exhibition also gathers work by the great names of American photography: Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and Annie Leibovitz.