Learning to Collect Photographs in the 1970s

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In 1976, Anne Wilkes Tucker became the founding curator of the Photography Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, going on to organise more than forty exhibitions, publish dozens of articles and books, and fundamentally shape the museum’s collection of more than thirty thousand photographs. This article situates Tucker’s early career in the context of the 1970s ‘photo boom’ in the USA, a period of fervent interest and activity around the medium of photography. The article particularly examines the reframing of (some) photographs as serious art collectibles, and the intersection of the nascent market for photographs, the establishment of new museum collections and the proliferation of different forms of photographic scholarship during this period.