Hallmark Photographic Collection

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The Hallmark Photographic Collection was amassed by Hallmark Cards.

It was donated to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri in January 2006. It consists of 6,500 images by 900 artists. At the time of its donation, it had an estimated market value of $65 million.

The collection spans the entire history of photography, from 1839 to the present, with works by such renowned pioneers and masters as Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman.

The Hallmark Photographic Collection, begun in 1964, was one of the earliest corporate collections of its kind in the world, and perhaps the first in the United States. The first acquisition, guided by Hallmark vice president David Strout, was of 141 prints by Harry Callahan. These were presented in a major exhibition in New York in the fall of 1964--Callahan's first one-man show in the city. In the next dozen years, bodies of work by major leading photographers--from Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jerry Uelsmann, and Linda Connor were acquired.

Since 1979, the collection was guided by Keith F. Davis, who expanded the collection from a total of 650 works by about 35 photographers to 6500 works by some 900 artists. He organized dozens of exhibitions from the collection for national and international tour, and authored a number of publications on the collection. The most significant single volume on the collection is Davis's An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999).