Telfair Museums announces the opening of A Decade of Collecting Photography: 2015-2025. This exhibition is on display from Aug. 15, 2025 to Jan. 4, 2026 in the Jepson Center’s Lewis Gallery, 207 W York St., Savannah. The exhibition explores how photography has served to capture our world and become a powerful presence in our culture since its invention nearly 200 years ago. 

“We are delighted to present a small, but choice selection of the many photographs that Telfair Museums has acquired in recent years,” said Dr. David Brenneman, Director and CEO of Telfair Museums. “Many of the works on view take as their subject the people and places of Savannah and the coastal South. We want to thank the donors who made it possible to showcase our region’s rich visual history through this collection.”

A Decade of Collecting Photography: 2015-2025 explores the evolution of photography as a fine art form and celebrates the rapid growth of Telfair’s photography collection from 400 works in 2015 to over 1,100 today. Telfair’s collection features prominent figures like Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, both amateurs turned professional photographers whose careers as professors in North Carolina, Chicago, and Providence influenced generations of emerging practitioners. Women interested in photography as a career encountered a largely male-dominated field, but artists such as Helen Levitt found success in the 1940s presenting her engagingly candid street scenes. The Southern landscape, and Savannah in particular, are frequent subjects of the works in the collection. These range from moving portraits that invite contemplation of the subject and their circumstances, like Walker Evans’ portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs on her farm in Alabama in 1936, to George Barnard’s skillfully framed post-Civil War photographs of Savannah’s River Street. This exhibition is organized by Telfair Museums and curated by Erin Dunn, curator of modern and contemporary art.

After opening in 1886, Telfair Museums is the oldest public art museum in the South and the first US museum founded by a woman. The museum features a world-class art collection in the heart of Savannah’s National Historic Landmark District and encompasses three sites: the Jepson Center for the Arts, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, and the Telfair Academy. For more information on Telfair Museums, please visit www.telfair.org.