Product details
- ISBN 9781785516429
- Dimensions: 216 x 280mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Scala Publishers Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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From the Daguerreian era to today’s digital age, this stunning volume explores the evolution of photographic portraiture through treasures from the National Portrait Gallery’s wide-ranging collection at the Smithsonian Institution.
Published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the photography collection, the book highlights the medium’s role in democratizing portraiture. Works by leading photographers, including Richard Avedon, Mathew Brady, Annie Leibovitz, and James Van Der Zee, portray some of America’s most significant figures, including Abraham Lincoln, John Steinbeck, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, emphasising the remarkable people on both sides of the camera.
Ann M. Shumard joined the National Portrait Gallery’s department of photographs in 1979 and has served as the museum’s senior curator of photographs since 2001. Throughout her tenure, she has played an integral role in the development and interpretation of the museum’s photography collection, which now numbers more than 11,000 objects—from daguerreotypes to born-digital images.
