Historic American photograph from the Americana exhibition

Philadelphia Museum of Art · Fairmount / Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Americana: Photographs 1850-1950

Orain ikusgaiNoiz arte: 2026(e)ko azaroaren 1(a)·30 $

A century of American photography from the museum's collection, showing how individuals and communities used the camera to define their place in a changing nation.

Erosi sarrerak

In the late 1850s a portrait could come from a tent. Travelling photographers set up at fairs and town squares for a few days, made cheap, hard-wearing tintypes and moved on. Many of the large tintypes here come from the artist and dealer Paul Cava, who looked for sitters with something mysterious about them.

The rest of the century, to 1950, is daguerreotypes, stereoviews, snapshots and photomontages from the museum's collection, mostly by photographers nobody recorded. From 1907 Kodak printed any photo on postcard stock, so much of what you're looking at was made to be mailed, from local landmarks to pranks. One group shows small-town baseball teams.

Curator Peter Barberie says "Americana" usually means apple pie and baseball and leaves a lot of people out, and the show is built to argue with its own title. It fills Honickman Galleries 156 and 157 in the Main Building, is included with general admission, stays open until 8:45pm on Fridays, and has been extended to 1 November.

Ez galdu

The small-town baseball postcards
A group of real photo postcards of local baseball teams, from the years when nearly every American town fielded one and Kodak would print any snapshot as a mailable card.
Paul Cava's large tintypes
Large-format portraits on metal plates, picked by the collector for strange, charged sitters, among them an 1860s man standing in a tilted hat.