Once ubiquitous silver-based, chromogenic, and Polaroid snapshots are rapidly being replaced by images on Instagram and other digital forms of photography. Today the vast majority of people experience photographs almost solely on screens and younger generations have less and less experience of photographs as actual objects. All of this makes it increasingly important for the Museum to create strong holdings of this rapidly disappearing aspect of our medium’s larger history. This gift of 179 early Kodak prints, and Black family snapshots, studio portraits and photo booth pictures comes to us from New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who over the last three decades has acquired more than 60,000 lost, discarded, or disowned personal photographs dating back as early as 1890 and ranging across the entire 20th century. This significant donation of vernacular photography was inspired by our recognition that the previous donations of more than 1000 snapshots from Cohen’s collection were sorely lacking in representations of Black family life and African American experience. Trying to rectify that obvious imbalance, led the collector to actively seek out these difficult-to-find photographs on our behalf and, in the process, to realize that the majority of such pictures of Black families and individuals do not neatly fit into the same categories that he had assigned to his previous holdings of mostly white subjects.

---