The Hallmark Photographic Collection was amassed by Hallmark Cards, Inc. and donated to the

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art gallery, art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of A ...

Kansas City, Missouri Kansas City, Missouri, abbreviated KC or KCMO, is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri by List of cities in Missouri, population and area. The city lies within Jackson County, Missouri, Jackson, Clay County, Missouri, Clay, and Pl ...

in December 2005. At the time of donation, the collection consisted of 6,500 images by 900 artists, with an estimated value of $65 million. The collection spans the history of photography, from 1839 to the present, with works by

Southworth & Hawes Southworth & Hawes was an early photographic firm in Boston, 1843–1863. Its partners, Albert Sands Southworth (1811–1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901), have been hailed as the first great American masters of photography, whose wor ...

Carleton Watkins Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916) was an American photographer of the 19th century. Born in New York, he moved to California and quickly became interested in photography. He focused mainly on landscape photography, and Yosemite Valley was ...

, Timothy O'Sullivan,

Alvin Langdon Coburn Alvin Langdon Coburn (June 11, 1882 – November 23, 1966) was an American photographer who became a key figure in the development of pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints an ...

Edward Steichen Edward Jean Steichen (; March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter and curator and a pioneer of fashion photography. His gown images for the magazine ''Art et Décoration'' in 1911 were the first modern ...

Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz (; January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was k ...

Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange' ...

, Harry Callahan,

Jerry N. Uelsmann Jerry Norman Uelsmann (June 11, 1934 – April 4, 2022) was an American photographer. As an emerging artist in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann received international recognition for surreal, enigmatic photographs (photomontages) made with his uniqu ...

Lee Friedlander Lee Friedlander (; born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fra ...

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

, and

Cindy Sherman Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often co ...

. First started in 1964, the collection was one of the earliest corporate photography collections. Hallmark vice president David Strout made the first acquisition of 141 prints by Harry Callahan. These were exhibited in New York in fall 1964, at the Hallmark Gallery store at 720 Fifth Avenue. In the next 12-years, bodies of work by major leading photographers, from Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham to László Moholy-Nagy and Linda Connor were acquired. Since 1979, the collection was expanded by Keith F. Davis from 650 works by about 35 photographers, to 6,500 works by about 900 artists. He organized dozens of exhibitions from the collection for tours, and authored a number of publications, including ''An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection'', 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999). Other publications include ''Harry Callahan: New Color, Photographs 1978-1987'' (1988); ''George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman's Campaign'' (1990); ''Clarence John Laughlin: Visionary Photographer'' (1990); and ''The Photographs of Dorothea Lange'' (1995). To accompany a 2007 exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, a survey by Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall of the collection's key 19th century contents was published: ''The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, from Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate'' (2007).

References

Photographic collections Hallmark Cards {{Photo-stub