On Wednesday the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced promised gifts of 473 photographs from three separate collectors, including a pledge of 26 photographs by Diane Arbus, from the San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel, that will double the museum's holdings of her images. The museum got a lot of attention in 2003 when it organized an especially personal traveling exhibition about Arbus's life and work.
Two other gifts â€" one from an anonymous donor, the other from the Kurenboh Collection in Tokyo â€" include nearly 350 examples of Japanese photographs, which will make SFMOMA home to what it says is the biggest collection of Japanese photography in the United States. Also included in the gifts are works by celebrated photographers the museum already collects like Robert Adams, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Irving Penn and Garry Winogrand.
