Photography | Denver Art Museum

Overview

The photography department is recognized for its extensive holdings of landscape images from the American West, 1865-present. Collectively, these reflect both the achievements of outstanding artists and the shifting environmental attitudes of the last century and a half. The collection also has strong holdings of European and American modernist photography and of contemporary work.

Highlights

The Daniel Wolf Landscape Photography Collection encompasses the work of early photographers from Maine to California and gives special emphasis to Western landscapes by pioneering figures such as William Bell, W.H. Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Carleton E. Watkins. Additional 19th century holdings include important works, such as William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1845 A Scene In York and several Henry Bosse cyanotypes from the album, Views on the Mississippi River. Collectively, the museum’s works of early photography reflect both the achievements of the medium’s outstanding practitioners and the shifting environmental values of the 19th century.

Modernism also is a strength of the photography collection, and one with special affinity to artworks in other curatorial departments. Important photographs by Herbert Bayer, Jaromír Funke, Man Ray, and others express the spirit of the European modernist vision and show a remarkable command of technique perfected through experimentation. Works of American modernism by Berenice Abbott, Laura Gilpin, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others show a rich variety of responses to light, form and subject matter found in American cities as well as in wilderness.

Other photographs from the 20th century reflect changing perceptions and values, both in the art world and in the world at large. Works by Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Larry Clark find dignity, frailty, and pathos in marginalized people, while photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, and Paul Strand find poetry in the everyday lives of Latin American people. Albert Chong, Wesley Kennedy, Shirin Neshat, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz explore race and identity through their work. Our substantial collection of Robert Adams photographs addresses environmental dilemmas in the American West through plain-spoken images of human-altered landscapes, while works by Juan Enrique Bedoya explore similar issues in Peru.

Since 1950, photographers frequently have blurred the line between their medium and other artistic disciplines. Photographs by Aaron Siskind, Miloš Koreček, and Henry Holmes Smith, for example, parallel developments in Abstract Expressionist painting. Works by Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Petah Coyne, and Tom Friedman display the rich cross-fertilization that occurs when painters, sculptors and conceptual artists explore ideas through photography. And artists such as Matthew Brandt, Sharon Harper, Jungjin Lee, and Abelardo Morell discover new ways to represent landscape as a fluid and many-layered experience.

White splotches against a black backdrop

Collection Highlights

Explore objects from the Photography department in our online collection.

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Department Staff

Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography

Eric Paddock has been Curator of Photography at the Denver Art Museum since 2008. In that capacity, he has presented 17 exhibitions, including portraits of refugees and marginalized people in Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh and New Territory: Landscape Photography Today, a survey of contemporary landscape photography that emphasized experimental work. A fifth generation Coloradoan, he graduated from Colorado College and was assistant to photographer Frank Gohlke for three years before he entered the master of fine arts photography program at Yale University. He was curator of photography and Film at the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado) from 1983 to 2008.

Kimberly Roberts, Curatorial Associate

Kimberly Roberts is the Curatorial Associate in the department of photography at the Denver Art Museum. Prior to joining the museum in 2017, she was a research fellow at the Clyfford Still Museum where she researched the photography collection in the museum archives. Kimberly has given public lectures at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado State University Art Museum, Clyfford Still Museum, and has been an affiliate art history faculty member at Metropolitan State University since 2013, teaching courses in the history of photography and 20th/21st century European and American art. She received a bachelor's in art history from Colorado State University and a master's in art history with an emphasis on photography from Tufts University.

Danielle Stephens, Senior Interpretive Specialist
As a Senior Interpretive Specialist in the department of Learning and Engagement at the Denver Art Museum, Danielle Stephens specializes in the development of interpretive materials for the museum’s collections and special exhibitions. This includes labels, audio guides, videos, and participatory experiences that encourage visitors to create, share, and connect with each other and the work on view. She also hosts community advisory committees, conducts visitor evaluations, trains volunteer docents, leads gallery tours, and works with cross-departmental staff to deliver live programming related to the collection.

Since joining the DAM in 2013, Danielle has served as the interpretation lead for Modern Women, Modern Visions: Works from the Bank of America Collection, New Territory: Landscape Photography Today and Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013. Prior to the DAM, Danielle worked as the Docent Program Manager at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Education Curator at the Aspen Art Museum. Danielle has her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Oklahoma in art history and photography, and a master’s in art history from Southern Methodist University.

Department History

The Denver Art Museum’s library and as many as eight curatorial departments collected photography until 2008, when the photography department was established to bring focused expertise and an overarching vision to the care and development of the photography collection. The department’s “prehistory,” spanning from the 1937 to 2007, resulted in a rich collection of masterworks side-by-side with reference snapshots and copy prints obtained from government and academic repositories. The great strengths of the collection are American landscape photography from 1860 to the present; abstract and experimental Modernist photography from 1915 to 1965; and contemporary photography by local and international artists. Prominent among these holdings are works by Robert Adams, Danny Lyon, and Garry Winogrand, and important photographs by Barbara Bosworth, Matthew Brandt, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Dorothea Lange, Abelardo Morell, Lorna Simpson, and Paul Strand.

Lewis Story, who went on to serve as the museum’s deputy director and twice as interim director, inaugurated a robust photography exhibition program in 1971. During the ensuing decade, the museum received grants from the General Services Foundation that underwrote photography exhibitions and made possible the purchase of works by such twentieth-century masters as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Diane Arbus. Adjunct curator of photography Ted Strauss intensified the program in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of exhibitions, including Lens and Landscape: American Photography 1860–1910; Experimental Vision: The Evolution of the Photogram Since 1919 and The Eye & the Hand of Lucas Samaras.

After Strauss’s departure in 1994, staff members in the modern and contemporary art department—Dianne Vanderlip, Jane Fudge, and Blake Milteer—continued to mount exhibitions and collect photography, but it was not until 2010 that the photography department opened its first dedicated gallery, with support from Delisa and Anthony Mayer, with Eric Paddock as the museum’s first full-time curator of photography.

Today, the collection has grown to include important contemporary photographs as well as foundational works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Generous gifts from Joyce and Ted Strauss significantly expanded the collection before the department was created, as did important gifts and support from Nancy Benson and I. J. and Gertrude Shore. The museum’s 1991 acquisition of the Daniel Wolf Collection of 19th-century photography was transformational, adding signature works by William H. Bell, Alexander Gardner, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O’Sullivan. More recently, the Photography Acquisitions Alliance has supported targeted acquisitions that will provide a more comprehensive historical context for all works in the collection and inspire future exhibitions.

Publication History

Companion Guide to the Strauss Photography Collection at the Denver Art Museum. Eric Paddock. Denver Art Museum, 2014.

Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash. Eric Paddock. Denver Art Museum in association with George F. Thompson Publishing, 2013.

Robert Benjamin: Notes from a Quiet Life. Eric Paddock. Denver Art Museum in association with Radius Books, 2012.

Robert Adams, Prairie. Eric Paddock. Denver Art Museum in association with Fraenkel Gallery, 2011.

Exhibition History

Recent exhibitions organized by the Photography department include:

Featured Articles

Dive deeper into the stories behind some of the artworks in the collection by reading through articles written by our curators, conservators, and museum staff.

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