This volume is both a catalogue of the museum’s photographic holdings and a celebration of its recent exhibition Legacy of Light: Master Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The catalogue and exhibition provided the opportunity to reflect on what the museum has accomplished since making a curatorial and financial commitment to collect photography thirteen years ago. Determined by availability and, at times, good fortune, the photographs assembled illuminate the particular era in which they were made and simultaneously yield insights into the universal human condition. Ultimately, they can simply be enjoyed as expressions of individual creativity at its highest level.

In this elegantly produced volume, the full scope of the collection is represented faithfully and with bibliographic accuracy. Twenty-eight artists are accorded full-page reproductions of signature works, accompanied by the artist’s profile and discussion of the work.

Among the many master photographers represented here are Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Édouard Baldus, Margaret Bourke-White, Mathew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Francis Frith, Lewis Hine, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Richard Long, Duane Michals, Irving Penn, Aaron Siskind, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, William Henry Fox Talbot, Jerry Uelsmann, Edward Weston, and Minor White.