National Portrait Gallery Marks 50 Years of Photography with 'Photographic Memory' Exhibition

Key facts

• The exhibition 'Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting' opens November 14, 2026, at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
• It celebrates the 50th anniversary of the museum's photography collection, which began in 1976 during the U.S. bicentennial.
• Over 120 photographic portraits will be on view, spanning from the Daguerreian era to the digital age.
• The exhibition is curated by Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs, and organized chronologically from 1843 to the present.
• An 1846 daguerreotype of Dolley Madison by John Plumbe Jr. will be shown for the first time since its acquisition in July 2024.
• The Madison portrait will be displayed with an 1843 daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams, marking the first joint exhibition of the earliest known photographs of a U.S. president and first lady.
• Works by Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz will be featured.
• The exhibition runs through November 7, 2027, on the second floor of the National Portrait Gallery.