A gift of more than 1,300 photographs from the collection of New Orleans photographer Tina Freeman will make up the largest donation of photographs to the New Orleans Museum of Art in its history, museum officials said Tuesday.
Freeman, the former curator of photographs at NOMA and a noted photographer in her own right, has over the past forty years collected the works of 350 photographers dating from the 1840s to today.
NOMA said the photos include works by photography pioneers Hill & Adamson, as well as vintage prints by Eugene Atget, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Alfred Stieglitz, Doris Ullman, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.
The collection is particularly strong in work by women photographers, many of whom are not currently in NOMA's collection. For example, the bequest gives NOMA its first photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston, an important photojournalist in the first half of the 20th century who is best known for her work in the American South and who lived in the French Quarter in New Orleans at the end of her life.
Freeman's promised gift also marks the occasion of the centennial of NOMA’s first photography exhibition and the tricentennial of the city of New Orleans.
“For years, Tina Freeman has had a profound impact on photography at NOMA,” said a statement from Susan Taylor, the Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Her remarkably generous gift is a reflection of her knowledge and passion for photography and the great photographers that define the medium. It is a milestone moment in the history of NOMA.”
A selection of 23 works from Freeman’s promised gift will be featured in the exhibition "Past Present Future: Building Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art," on view now through March 17, 2019. NOMA plans to produce a catalogue of the full collection in the coming years.
