Materials in the Bradford Brinton Memorial Collection include numerous family and travel albums accumulated by Mr. Brinton as well as individual photographs by J. E. Stimson and Jessamine Spear Johnson.

The Brinton Museum’s collection has grown to more than 2,000 nineteenth- and twentieth- century photographs of the American West by important photographers, especially in the period between 1857 and 1955.

Photographs by well-known photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, John K. Hillers, Joshua Crissman, and others are included in this historically important collection. 

Selections by the American photographers Alexander Gardner and Edward Curtis have been highlighted in special exhibitions on display in the S. K. Johnston, Jr. Family Gallery.  A special survey exhibition of this collection is planned for 2026 – 2027, including geological survey photographs, American Indian portraits, and early National Park landscape photography.  

Please note that Historic Photographs in the holdings of The Brinton Museum are available by appointment for scholarly research.

A growing collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography focuses on the American West past and present, including the photographs of contemporary Western ranch life by Barbara Van Cleve.  A collection of 110 black-and-white documentary photographs of small town main streets, churches, grain elevators, steam trains, sweeping panoramas of farmland and endless skies by David Plowden was gifted to the permanent collection by the artist in 2016.