Smithsonian doubles African American photography holdings

Hooks Brothers, ‘Pullman Porters,’ undated silver emulsion photograph. Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dr. Robert L. Drapkin collection, museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen endowment, TL-20-2022-114. Courtesy of SAAM
Hooks Brothers, ‘Pullman Porters,’ undated silver emulsion photograph. Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dr. Robert L. Drapkin collection, museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen endowment, TL-20-2022-114
Hooks Brothers, ‘Pullman Porters,’ undated silver emulsion photograph. Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dr. Robert L. Drapkin collection, museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen endowment, TL-20-2022-114. Courtesy of SAAM

WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has acquired a wide-ranging collection of photographs that represent African Americans from the medium’s early years to the near present — roughly the 1840s to the 1970s — from Dr. Robert Drapkin. The collection includes 404 objects, including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes, as well as mixed paper prints. The Dr. Robert L. Drapkin collection looks broadly at how photography was adapted by Black makers and consumers to self-represent, and how it was used by others to recast racial tropes using the new medium to represent and to misrepresent African American history and culture.

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