The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is throwing photography a golden anniversary party! Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting opens November 14, 2026, marking 50 years since the museum began collecting photographs in 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial. The collection now makes up nearly half of the museum’s total holdings.
The exhibition brings together more than 120 photographic portraits tracing the evolution of the medium from the Daguerreian era of the 1840s to today’s digital age, all organized chronologically with a timeline of photographic processes and innovations.
History lovers are in for a treat: for the very first time, the earliest known photographs of a U.S. President and a First Lady will hang side by side — an 1843 daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams and an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolley Madison, newly acquired in 2024. The show also features Alexander Gardner’s famous “cracked-plate” portrait of Abraham Lincoln, plus unforgettable faces from sports, music, and culture: Muhammad Ali, Althea Gibson, James Brown, Billie Holiday, Celia Cruz, and portraits of Venus and Serena Williams by Annie Leibovitz.
Curated by senior curator of photographs Ann Shumard, the exhibition runs through November 7, 2027, on the museum’s second floor. And like all Smithsonian museums, admission is free — so bring the whole family to Eighth and G Streets NW and see how 180 years of faces tell the story of America.
Photo: Jonathan L. Kang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
