A Lexicon for Positioning ‘The Idea Photography’ in Our Nation’s Art Museum

Abstract

Between the 1930s and the 1990s, as art museums across the USA began contending with what place photography might hold within their programmes, key individuals framed photography’s value in language that itself deserves consideration. Amid this museological reckoning with the medium, at the National Gallery of Art, which was established in the 1930s as a national public repository for Western art of the highest standards, the question of whether and how photography might fit into that lineage presented new questions. How would the greatness of photography be defined? What would its presentation look like? Sarah Greenough joined the National Gallery of Art in 1978 with a PhD in Art History and an expertise in the work of Alfred Stieglitz. I argue that as she aimed to integrate photography seamlessly into the set of values established by Andrew W. Mellon at the founding of the Gallery, she drew upon Stieglitz’s own terminology for valuing the medium, modelling her own philosophy of its import on his notion of ‘the idea photography’.