“In 2026, the National Portrait Gallery will observe the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of its photographs collection, which now accounts for nearly half of the museum’s total holdings. Encompassing more than one hundred works, from the daguerreian era to our own digital age, the exhibition explores the evolution of photographic portraiture through treasures from the Portrait Gallery’s wide-ranging collection. In doing so, it will highlight the role photography has played in expanding the museum’s collection to include likenesses of those who have shaped the nation’s history but never posed for painted or sculpted portraits.”

“Among the earliest works on view will be the recently acquired daguerreotype of Dolley Madison by John Plumbe Jr.; Alexander Gardner’s original “cracked-plate” portrait of Abraham Lincoln; British camera artist Julia Margaret Cameron’s image of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and rare cabinet-card photographs of Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Sallie E. Garrity and Ko K’un-hua by George K. Warren. Twentieth-century portraits will include W. E. B. Du Bois by Addison N. Scurlock; Lee Miller by Man Ray; John Steinbeck by Sonya Noskowiak; Eleanor Roosevelt by Yousuf Karsh; Bessie Smith by Carl Van Vechten; Isamu Noguchi by George Platt Lynes; Ruth Asawa by Imogen Cunningham; Rachel Carson by Alfred Eisenstaedt; Mahalia Jackson by Roy DeCarava; James Brown by Diane Arbus; and Venus and Serena Williams by Annie Leibovitz.”