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

Apollo, May, 2004 by Deborah Gribbon, Mikka Gee Conway

On 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 ever, the Getty had assembled a collection that matched or surpassed in size and quality those of all other American art museums and made Los Angeles a centre for the study and connoisseurship--and enjoyment--of photography.

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

J. Paul Getty did not himself collect photographs. The museum he founded in 1954 was based on his personal collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, French furniture and decorative arts, and European paintings. But upon his death in 1976, Getty left a massive bequest that, once 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 new 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, so expanding the scope of the collection seemed a logical next step. Thus, the museum began to acquire European sculpture 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 less obviously appropriate. The idea first arose in a conversation between Walsh and the New York dealer Daniel Wolf. Wolf suggested that with the simultaneous purchase of several key private collections the Getty could create a collection of depth and distinction, including not only the earliest French and English photographs but also works by the best early-to mid-twentieth-century artists. Walsh considered the proposal, consulted with experts, and examined photograph collections in southern California and elsewhere; he became convinced it was the right thing to do.

'Photography was the most important new art form of our time', Walsh said recently, reflecting on the beginnings of the photographs collection. 'It carried on the conquest of the visual world by painters and draftsmen that the museum's collection already represented; it needed to be well-represented in Los 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 represented an opportunity, increasingly rare even then, to build a collection of real significance, one that would make the Getty Museum a leader in the field. Rare photographs by the most important artists were still on the marker, for prices comparable to modest drawings and old master prints.

Two collections formed the core of the Getty's new holding, those of Sam Wagstaff in New York and Arnold Crane in Chicago. Wagstaff, a renaissance scholar and former museum curator, had been collecting photographs for only ten years in 1984. His holdings, predominantly from the nineteenth century, comprised significant groups of prints by 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 artists more famous in other media, including Lewis Carroll and Edgar Degas. The Wagstaff purchase also included a sizable library of photographically illustrated books 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, superb daguerreotypes, key groups of photographs by Man Ray (Fig. 8) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and over 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 such as the Brewster Codex (a personal compendium of rare early photographs, prints and sketches assembled over many years by the Scottish inventor Sir David Brewster) and strength in the work of Le Gray's French contemporaries. Important bodies of work by the Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, Czech modernists Josef Sudek and Jaromir Funke, and over seven hundred photographs by the German social documentarian August Sander (Fig. 1) helped to round out the geographical range of the collection.