The Hallmark Photographic Collection was amassed by Hallmark Cards, Inc..
It was donated to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri in December 2005. At that time, it consisted of 6,500 images by 900 artists, with 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 N. Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and many others.
The collection was started in 1964. It 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, at the gallery space in the Hallmark Gallery store at 720 Fifth Avenue. 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). Other notable publications include Harry Callahan: New Color, Photographs 1978-1987 (1988); George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman's Campaign (1990); Clarence John Laughlin: Visionary Photographer (1990); and The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (1995).
To accompany a major 2007 exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, a book by Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall surveying the key 19th century contents of the collection was published: The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, from Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate (2007).
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