Memo to: The Corcoran Re: Sharpening Your Focus

Get the Picture

The Corcoran would have to do plenty of borrowing until it builds up its own holdings. Over the past 10 years, photography curator Philip Brookman has built the nucleus of a fine photography collection -- holdings have grown from 2,000 to 8,000 works -- but there's still a way to go before it counts as major. With clever strategizing, however, that might only be a matter of another decade or so.

Jane Corkin is a veteran photo dealer with clients across the United States. She says that there are so many smallish photo collections in this country -- and few enough heirs likely to share their parents' interest in them -- that they could never be absorbed by the handful of fine art museums in Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles that are already famous for collecting photographs. That's where our new National Museum of Photography would step in.

As a high-profile institution in the nation's capital, the Corcoran's photo museum could tap into a whole stratum of photo geeks who would be keen to see their favorite medium getting the attention it deserves. Greenough says she has noticed far more visitors festooned with cameras in her photo shows than elsewhere in the National Gallery. She thinks a "new" Corcoran could draw on this niche market for its supporters.

"Getting donations of pictures isn't hard," explains Corkin, the dealer, especially if you're building almost from scratch, and need pictures by photographers whom all the established public collections already own in depth. Washington was once the home of pioneering photo dealer Harry Lunn. Many of the landmark photos that he sold are still hanging in Washington homes, according to John Gossage, a senior photographic artist who has lived here since the 1960s, and they might land at the Corcoran. A dozen Cartier-Bressons here, a Diane Arbus or 10 there, a handful of Mathew Brady pictures given by a local Civil War buff -- a Gossage archive, even, said that artist with a laugh -- and before you know it, the new museum has the holdings it takes to mount all kinds of shows, and to fill an impressive suite of permanent-collection galleries.

You might even get some of those donors of pictures to become donors of funds.

Museums the size of the Corcoran have a hard time competing for substantial patrons who are also courted by the boards of prestigious institutions such as the National Gallery or the Museum of Modern Art. Make the Corcoran board a special haven for photography enthusiasts, however, and you give even the wealthiest collectors a reason to join the board, and stay on it. The Corcoran becomes a club for those across the country who share its unique vision, rather than a consolation prize or steppingstone for philanthropists who haven't been invited onto fancier boards. Who knows, even current patrons who aren't photography buffs might stick around: Some might even take the money they've pledged for a new building at the old Corcoran, and let it be used instead to fund an entirely fresh idea of what the Corcoran could be.

Even if it took a while for the Corcoran's newly committed board to give or get a great spread of photography, the museum's curators would have plenty of images to build impressive shows around.

Ever since this city's founding as the seat of U.S. government, Washington institutions of all kinds have accumulated huge stores of photographs that almost never see the light of day. The Smithsonian Institution alone owns something like 13 million photographs -- scientific, anthropological and sometimes artistic -- which it has only recently begun to take stock of. The Library of Congress and National Archives have more than 20 million, including works by many of the country's great photographers. Between them, they house the fantastic pictures shot during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, as well as the many striking landscape photos commissioned by the U.S. government as it explored the West.

Many government departments also hold their share of images, not to mention all the local nonprofits -- from the AFL-CIO to the National Geographic Society -- whose archives are stuffed with photographic images. Merry Foresta, the curator recently charged with sorting out the Smithsonian's photographs, says that 100 million wouldn't be a crazy guess at the region's total photo holdings -- but points out that no one has ever come near counting them.

Any curator could think of dozens of exhibitions to mount based on such photographic plenty. Almost the entire world, and our reaction to it looking through a camera's lens, would be there for the showing.

Early Building Blocks

If our new museum were to tap into all this, it wouldn't be the radical departure die-hard supporters of the "old" Corcoran might think. The institution was founded in 1869, when photography was hitting its stride, and a few of its first objects were photographs. William Wilson Corcoran himself donated a bound volume of photos of the American West, not long after they'd been commissioned from Timothy O'Sullivan and William Bell by the U.S. Geological Survey. The album is one of the photography department's prize possessions.

Muybridge, the great pioneer of freeze-frame photography, sold a set of his "animal locomotion" pictures to the Corcoran. In the early years of the last century, the Corcoran hosted yearly exhibitions of the capital's very active camera club, and in 1904 it held a show of the "Photo Secession," a movement whose explicit mission was to give photography the status of art.