The Photographs Collection contains outstanding examples of both 19th and 20th century photography, including work by widely recognized photographers as well as exploratory work by newer talents. It contains important holdings by one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (English 1800-1877); by David Octavius Hill (Scottish 1802-1870), one of the first trained artists to adopt the new medium; by Charles Nègre (French 1820-1880), painter and photographer, whose photographs in the early 1850s are among the most poignant visual records of the Paris of Napoleon III; by Auguste Salzmann (French 1824-1872), painter, photographer and archaeologist who documented the ruins of pre-Greco Roman Jerusalem; and by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), founders of the English pictorialist school.

The National Gallery owns important 20th century photographic works including one of the major collections in North America of works by French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who is noted for his innovative use of photography as well as his nostalgic views of old Paris. Equally significant are its collections of work by the American Walker Evans (1903-1975), who produced the most evocative images made of the Great Depression, and by August Sander (1876-1964), the German photographer whose epic project Man in the Twentieth Century was a powerful statement about all levels of German society between 1900 and 1950.