TUCSON, AZ.- This spring, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona reaches a milestone as it celebrates 50 years of leading exhibitions, programs, and scholarship that have shaped the field of photography. The CCP will mark the anniversary with Picture Party: Celebrating the Collection at 50, a playful and wide-ranging exhibition that revels in the depth and breadth of the CCP’s holdings.

“Picture Party opens what promises to be a wonderful year for us here at the CCP,” said Todd J. Tubutis, director of the CCP. “Fifty years of a cultural institution is no small achievement—especially one dedicated to a single medium—and what makes this anniversary even more meaningful is that it comes at a time of great strength for the CCP. We have internationally touring exhibitions and loans from the collection, extremely popular programs serving both campus and community, and a solid foundation of support, evidenced most recently by a $1 million anonymous gift to support exhibitions and programming in a gallery dedicated to interdisciplinary inquiry, which will be the home of our celebratory exhibition.”

On view from May 3 to December 20, 2025, in the Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery, Picture Party is an ingeniously organized selection of the CCP’s holdings—including iconic images, rarely seen works, recent acquisitions, and archival objects—brought together in conversation. The works on view span the entire history of the medium, from one of the earliest daguerreotypes made in the United States to those created just a few years ago. A deliberate departure from a more linear exhibition structure, Picture Party revels in both the landmark and lesser-known works in the institution’s deep and unparalleled collection, inviting viewers to engage with the CCP in a more open-ended and improvisatory way.

Just as at a party—where unlikely pairings and groupings can lead to surprising connections, new relationships, and illuminating dialogue—the exhibition invites more than 100 photographs and archival objects together to be seen in this new light. One example of this approach is a group of nine landscape prints created between 1921 and 2013. Together the photos tell stories they could not tell individually: about the relationship between abstraction and realism; about the range of expressive potential of ice, snow, rock, and sky; about the effects of technology on the landscape. Another example is the exhibition’s wall of portraits hung salon-style, which features more than 20 photographs, inviting connections among people, places, bodies, cultures, and time periods.

Photographers with works on view include Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Tseng Kwong Chi, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, Robert Heinecken, Graciela Iturbide, Eadweard Muybridge, Susan Meiselas, Sonya Noskowiak, Alison Rossiter, Minor White, and Carrie Mae Weems. Simultaneously rigorous and fluid, Picture Party invites viewers to engage with the CCP’s collection from an entirely different perspective.

In its wide scope, the exhibition celebrates five decades of the field-defining work of the CCP, a unit of a major land-grant university with service to students and faculty at its core. Recognized as one of the world’s premier academic art museums and research centers dedicated to the medium, the CCP has contributed significantly to the scholarly literature about photography—its history, practitioners, techniques, processes—since the institution’s inception in 1975. Born of a meeting between then–University President Dr. John P. Schaefer and photographer Ansel Adams, the collection originated with the archives of five living photographers: Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. Since then, the collection has grown to include more than 300 archive collections with millions of objects, including negatives, work prints, contact sheets, albums, scrapbooks, correspondence, writings, audiovisual materials, and memorabilia, representing some of the most recognizable names in twentieth-century North American photography. In addition to whole archives, the Center also stewards a research collection of some 120,000 fine prints by more than 2,000 individual artists.

The CCP’s reach extends beyond its walls through an active program of loans and traveling exhibitions as well as an innovative partnership with the Phoenix Art Museum that, since 2006, has brought the CCP’s collection to new and larger audiences in Arizona. While Picture Party is on view in Tucson, exhibitions and works from the institution can be seen in the United States in Cleveland, Des Moines, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix, with prints from the CCP’s Edward Weston Archive being prepared for a major three-venue exhibition in Spain and Italy.