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A color photograph of Stevie Wonder shows him sitting singing and playing keyboards on an outdoor stage. The perspective is from the stage looking out on a sea of people in the audience.

Inside the Exhibition
In the Key of Soul: The Photographs of Kwame Brathwaite

Best known as the photographer of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, Brathwaite created images that were inspired by jazz and popular music of the 1960s and 1970s.

From the Conservation Lab
Souvenir from Bamako: Conserving a Photograph by Seydou Keïta

Part of this photograph’s power lies in the deterioration that seems to threaten it, as if the image were going to disappear soon.

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Interpreting the Collection
A Voyage of Seeing: On Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes

The photographer feels “a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home,” when looking at the sea, a feeling that resonates with others who have crossed their waters.

A medium-skinned woman with dark hair, red lipstick, jewelry, and a beige turtleneck looks out a big window with a cup on the sill, eyebrow raised, skeptical.

Inside the Exhibition
Photographer, Subject, Viewer: A Triangulated Relationship

Since its invention in the 19th century, photography has both engaged with and changed the world.

New Acquisitions
August Sander Takes His Camera to the Circus

Curator Elizabeth Siegel peers into the mirror that modern photographers revealed when they pointed their cameras at the circus.

Sepia toned photograph by J.B. Greene that shows a statuette of the Venus de Milo in silhouette

New Acquisition
The Mystery and Allure of John Beasley Greene

Curator Liz Siegel discusses a new acquisition from a 19th-century artist who advanced the fields of both photography and archaeology.

Two children lay in the shadow of their house on the ground

Artists at Work
In Conversation: Abelardo Morell Explores the Universe in His Home

Curator Elizabeth Siegel and photographer Abelardo Morell discuss how years of working at home have helped him to rediscover the magic of lenses and vision.

Meet the Staff
Jonathan Mathias, Senior Photographer

Get to know the man behind the camera, whose images of the museum’s artworks reach virtual visitors across the globe.

A Black family of four rests together in bed against a seafoam-green wall while reading a newspaper. They are all under seafoam-green and teal blankets except for the baby, who is nestled in a white bassinet adjacent to the mother, whose arm reaches out from behind the paper to tend to the child. Between the mother and father, who are both obscured by the papers, a young boy turns his head to look at the paper his father is reading.

Inside the Exhibition
In the Room with David Goldblatt

One family’s morning in bed offers a window into South African life under apartheid—and a photographer’s efforts to reckon with its legacies.

From the Conservation Lab
Encounter with Unusual Photo Paper

In a dark warehouse space, a single shaded floor lamp illuminates various rectangular wood-trimmed works, each elevated by two supports and arranged in a circle. Criss-crossed lengths of wood tied with brightly colored material lean in the foreground on the right.

Inside the Exhibition
“With No Fear or Fence”: An Experiment in Collective Exhibition Making

The Chicago art collective Floating Museum, several curators, and dozens more artists and art supporters came together to create a brand-new and highly collaborative presentation.

Dorothea Lange's photo Plantation Owner, Mississippi Delta, Near Clarksdale, Mississippi, which shows a white man with his foot on the bymper of a car and behind him, a group of African American men

Perspectives
Dorothea Lange’s Plantation Owner: Context Is King

The same photograph appears in three publications and tells three different stories.

Insights from the Conservation Lab
Mirrors with Memory: The Magic of Daguerreotypes

Conservator Jim Iska shows that looking at a daguerreotype is not a passive activity—and that the reward is an image unsurpassed in the history of photography.