Twenty years of collecting photographs at the Getty: in only two decades the J. Paul Getty Museum has assembled one of the world's finest public collections of photographs. To mark an exhibition celebrating this achievement, Deborah Gribbon, the Getty's director, and Mikka Gee Conway explain how the collection was created

upon 8 June 1984, the J Paul Getty Museum announced that it had acquired eighteen thousand photographs from a number of American and European private collectors. Virtually overnight, in what was the largest photography purchase at any time the Getty had assembled a collection that matched or surpassed in size and quality those of all other American art museums and made sees Angeles a centre for the close attention and connoisseurship--and enjoyment--of photography.

The Getty is generally celebrating twenty years of collecting photographs with the exhibition 'Photographers of Genius at the Getty' Conceived by the agency of Weston Naef, who has been the curator of the collection since its founding, the exhibition features thirty eight major photographers whose work is showed in depth by the Getty A forcible but necessarily small, sampling of the Getty's holdings, the exhibition provides an opportunity to describe the history of the photography collection, its succeeding growth, and even to gaze toward its future development.

J Paul Getty did not himself muster photographs. The museum he rested in 1954 was based upon his personal collection of hellenic and Roman antiquities, French furniture and decorative arts, and European paintings. on the contrary upon his death in 1976 Getty left a massive bequest that, one time finalised in 1982, radically altered the museum's fortunes and ambitions.

In early 1983 the Getty Trustees appointed John Walsh director of the museum, ushering in a of recent origin era of collecting. The Board was committed to strengthening the museum's holdings of paintings, antiquities, and decorative arts; Getty's will had no restrictions, thus expanding the scope of the collection appear to beed a logical next step. Thus, the museum began to acquire European plastic art and old master drawings and purchased an important collection of medieval and renaissance illuminated manuscripts. These made obvious connections to the original collections, and had potential to become important holdings in themselves.

A collection of photographs was les obviously appropriate. The idea first arose in a conversation between Walsh and the novel York dealer Daniel Wolf. Wolf allude toed that with the simultaneous purchase of several lock opener private collections the Getty could create a collection of profundity and distinction, including not solitary the earliest French and English photographs on the contrary also works by the best early-to mid-twentieth-century artists. Walsh considered the proposal, take counseled with experts, and examined photograph collections in southern California and elsewhere; he became convinced it was the right thing to do.

'Photography was the greatest in quantity important new art form of our time', Walsh said newly reflecting on the beginnings of the photographs collection. 'It carried upon the conquest of the visual world by dint of painters and draftsmen that the museum's collection already represented; it emergencyed to be well-represented in looks Angeles, of all places; and it was unlikely that any other institutions had the means to do this'. Walsh persuaded then-President Harold Williams and the Getty Board that photography showed an opportunity, increasingly rare flat then, to build a collection of real significance, single that would make the Getty Museum a leader in the field. Rare photographs by means of the most important artists were still upon the marker, for prices comparable to unpretending drawings and old master prints.

sum of two units collections formed the core of the Getty's of recent origin holding, those of Sam Wagstaff in of recent origin York and Arnold Crane in Chicago. Wagstaff, a renaissance scholar and former museum curator, had been collecting photographs for single ten years in 1984. His holdings, predominantly from the nineteenth hundred comprised significant groups of prints by means of French photographers Gustave Le Gray (Fig. 2) and Nadar, the Scottish team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Fig. 4) British practitioners Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton, and the American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins, as well as exceedingly rare photographs by the agency of artists more famous in other media, including Lewis Carroll and Edgar Degas. The Wagstaff purchase also included a sizable library of photographically illustrated works and albums.

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Crane, a Chicago attorney and photographer, had amassed great holdings of William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Bayard, and Fenton, early British and French travel photography, stately daguerreotypes, key groups of photographs by the agency of Man Ray (Fig. 8) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and above a thousand photographs by Walker Evans. Among the highlights of Crane's collection were the fabled Bayard Album (a unique cache of early salt prints and cyanotypes) and rare daguerreotypes, including a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe

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Several smaller European collections, or fractions thereof, formed part of the 1984 acquisition, adding highlights like as the Brewster Codex (a personal compendium of rare early photographs, prints and sketches assembled above many years by the Scottish inventor Sir David Brewster) and might in the work of Le Gray's French contemporaries. Important bodies of work by the agency of the Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, Czech modernists Josef Sudek and Jaromir Funke and above seven hundred photographs by the German social documentarian August Sander (Fig. 1) helped to circular out the geographical range of the collection.