The Eskenazi Museum of Art established a photography collection in the 1960s, benefitting greatly from the eye of museum’s second director Thomas T. Solley and the university’s first professor of photography, Henry Holmes Smith.

The collection ranges from examples by important mid-nineteenth-century innovators to significant holdings by modernist photographers. Work by photojournalists, portraitists, and documentary photographers, including over 800 images from Roy Stryker’s personal study collection, round out the holdings.

The photo archives of Henry Holmes Smith and Art Sinsabaugh provide comprehensive surveys of those photographers’ oeuvres and as well as many examples by their contemporaries.