While focused on fine-art photography, the collection acknowledges the wide embrace of photography and the many roles it plays in modern culture, and it therefore includes exceptional examples of documentary, scientific, fashion, advertising, and vernacular photography, as well as works intended solely as art.

The collection includes virtually every photographic process, from daguerreotypes, albumen prints, and salt prints in the 19th century; to platinum and gum-bichromate prints at the turn of the 20th century; and gelatin silver prints and all manner of color photography in the modern era. Among the collection’s great strengths are American photography, with extensive holdings of civil-rights photography, Texas photography, and the Photo League; avant-garde photography between the two World Wars; photojournalism; 19th-century European photography; and Japanese photography. Examples from every continent are represented, including important bodies of work from Argentina, Mexico, Russia, and the former Czechoslovakia.

Well known for its holdings of work by Robert Frank, the Museum’s collection features more than 400 of his photographs and the original maquettes for his seminal books “The Americans” and “The Lines of My Hand.” The Museum also houses and distributes all of Frank’s films and videos.