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 Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman.

The collection was started in in 1964, and was one of the earliest corporate collections of photography in the world, and perhaps the first in the United States. The first acquisition, 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. In the next dozen years, bodies of work by major leading photographers, from , Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Linda Connor were acquired.

Since 1979, the collection was guided by Keith F. Davis, who expanded the collection from 650 works by about 35 photographers, to 6,500 works by about 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).