The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston started exhibiting photography almost as soon as it was founded. The first photography exhibition was a juried show of Texas photographers in May 1926 and juried exhibitions of regional photographers were held annually until 1953. This hometown pride is underscored by the first group of photographs acquired for the collection, a commission from the 1965 project The Galveston That Was, by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ezra Stoller. Today, the museum’s photography collection boasts about 35,000 prints with works made on every continent and spanning the entire history of the medium. 

In those early years, some of the museum’s proudest achievements are mixed with a pinch of chagrin. For example, MFAH was the first museum to show Edward Weston’s vegetable series, including his famed peppers. The department archive contains his 1930 letter offering the museum anything in his show, for $7 (about $102 in 2019 dollars), and offer which the museum declined. In 1976, however, the museum realized its mistake and began its acquisition of Weston’s work with “Pepper No. 30” acquired two years later.

While MFAH exhibited photography from the beginning, there was no official department, curator, or collecting strategy until Anne Wilkes Tucker was hired in 1976 as a consultant. Tucker likes to say that when she started, the museum owned enough photographs to display on her refrigerator. Her tenure certainly changed that. Tucker started off with a bang, overseeing the first donation from Target Stores, Inc. to begin the Target Collection of American Photography in 1976.

In 2002, the MFAH acquired The Heiting Collection: a comprehensive collection of over 4,000 photographs from 1840 through 2000, assembled by the Amsterdam-based collector Manfred Heiting. Recognized as one of the most important photography collections in the world, it contains at least one photograph by almost every major photographer, and in many cases, the iconic images for which a photographer is best known.

In addition to the Target Collection of American Photography and The Heiting Collection, the department has also acquired many other substantial collections. Formed by different collectors, each group of photographs tells a different history of the medium, adding to the comprehensive vision pursued by the museum. Recent acquisitions include the work of internationally recognized, contemporary photographers Thomas Struth, Laurie Simmons, and Sarah Charlesworth. The museum also maintains a commitment to supporting the work of emerging photographers, both locally and internationally. The Anne Tucker and Clint Willour Young Photographers Endowment is an annual acquisition that celebrates the outstanding achievement of an emerging photographer under the age of 35 who is not yet represented in MFAH’s collection. Kris Graves’ haunting “The Murder of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri” was the inaugural purchase. More recently, John Edmonds’ stunning “Untitled (Head I)” won the acquisition prize. Several months later, Edmonds was chosen for the Whitney Biennial.

Of course, with 35,000 photographs, the museum is constantly rediscovering photographs already in its collection which have never been displayed. John Vachon’s “New York City Detective” packs all the punch and intrigue of a pulp story into a single photographic frame. Following his work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), Vachon continued to travel the country photographing scenes of American life, staking out police departments, alert for dramatic scenes akin to those in a paperback crime novel of the era.

The unforgettable images captured by Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne and Adrien Tournachon have yet to be exhibited in their entirety. Duchenne’s illustrations of expression grew out of his experimental use of electrical stimulation to treat various neurological disorders and his efforts to better understand the function of individual facial muscles and combinations thereof. At the same time, he hoped that his illustrations would serve to prevent the sort of errors he found in even the greatest works of painting and sculpture.

Mickalene Thomas’ “Lovely Six Foota” is powerfully evocative of 1970s feminist and Black Power movements and daringly confrontational. Thomas’ work—with the model’s legs spread, blouse unbuttoned, eyebrow arched, and eyes staring directly at the viewer—seduces and challenges the viewer’s gaze. “All of the women in my work have a profound sense of inner confidence and recognize themselves as the visible subject,” Thomas has said. “Their directness is filled with agency and self-knowledge. They have all the power and control to demand the viewer to meet them in their own space, rather than being exploited or scrutinized.”

In October 2020, the MFAH will open the doors to a major expansion, the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, which will house modern and contemporary art and which will include the first exhibition space devoted to photography, signaling a new era for display and acquisition.  

This article first appeared in Issue 13, The Museum Issue.

Lisa Volpe is the Associate Curator, Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The museum’s entire collection can be searched online at www.mfah.org/art.