GREENWICH, CT.- The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, was recently given over one hundred photographs by leading 20th century photographers. Approximately thirty selections from these gifts are on view at the Museum in the exhibition New Acquisitions: Photography from the Bruce Museum Collection from March 3 through May 27, 2007. These include outstanding examples of soft-focus pictorialism, 20th-century modernism, photojournalism, Italian street photography of the 1940s and 1950s, and contemporary mixed media.

The Bruce Museum�s photography collection is growing more rapidly than any other at the Bruce. The Museum�s fine arts photography collection was created in 2002; since that time over 750 outstanding 19th- and 20th-century photographs have been donated by twenty generous donors.

Of special note, among these gifts are two of the most famous images of the 20th century. The first is the iconic shot of General Douglas MacArthur landing in the Philippines at Lingayen Gulf on the island of Luzon, January 9, 1945. The second is a later print of the 1945 Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay with General Yoshijiro Umezu signing the surrender document while General MacArthur looks on. Both are by the LIFE photojournalist Carl Mydans and were part of a gift of eight of his photographs given by his estate to the Museum.

Another highly important gift this year is the donation of 24 vintage photographs by Mike Disfarmer, a selection of which will be featured in the exhibition. Disfarmer has recently become the darling of the photography world - arguably its most talked about and highly sought-after photographer this year- due to the unprecedented two-year historical reclamation project that resulted in the discovery of over 3000 vintage prints when none had been known before. His work consists largely of portraits of the middle and working class taken in Heber, Arkansas, where he had a studio. A true American eccentric, Disfarmer captured the faces of the American heartland in a defining time in history when the Great Depression yielded to World War II. Posed with simple directness, the portraits have an authenticity that recalls the farm couple in Grant Wood�s famous painting American Gothic; Disfarmer has, in fact, been termed the �American Gothic� photographer. The Museum is especially honored to have received this extraordinary gift.

Also in the show will be vintage photographs by San Francisco photographer William Dassonville (1879-1957), an active member of the Arts and Crafts movement who hobnobbed with naturalist John Muir. While Dassonville created an outstanding body of fine photographs in the pictoralist tradition, he was, as well, an innovative and skillful craftsman and self-taught chemist. He developed and marketed his own line of photographic printing papers called

Charcoal Black, prized by the most demanding of photographers. Ansel Adams, who printed the photographs for his book Taos Pueblo on Dassonville�s paper, later lamented that he never again �found a paper that had the particular qualities of Dassonville�s Charcoal Black.�

Garry Winogrand, one of the great masters of 20th century photography, is another featured photographer. Winogrand more or less invented and defined the genre known as street photography. He developed his characteristic style of candid 35-mm snapshots using available light in the early 1960s, and throughout the following decades, his seemingly casual photographs would capture striking moments of anonymous people in public spaces. While his images appear to be simple snapshots, they are often visually complex. The 1975 volume Women are Beautiful collected Winogrand�s images of anonymous women taken throughout the 1960s and early �70s.

The exhibition will also show works by Thomas Barrow, a contemporary photographer who uses a broad range of media to produce highly unique and original works of art. The gift includes his House on Fire series of large-scale 24-inch x 20-inch color Polaroid prints, as well as unique spray-painted photograms and other mixed-media works.

Also among the numerous treasures of this year�s gifts of photography are prints by Paul J. Woolf, including shots of the Rockefeller Center and moody views of the Manhattan skyline, a selection of which will be included in the exhibition.