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.