Celebrating the heyday of magazines, this exhibition explores the significant types of photographs made for the printed page.

Photographs have come a long way since the first halftone—a picture of Steinway Hall in Manhattan—was published in the New York Daily Graphic in 1873. The images needed to command a reader’s attention and entice a passerby to stop and purchase the publication. Magazines grew quickly in number and specialty, to a peak reached between 1920 and the 1980s. With the rise of the Internet, print media has been on the decline, but the impact of important images made for magazines still resonates in the 21st century.

Drawn entirely from the MFAH collection, Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs surveys this richly historic era through some 80 images published by magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Life, Texas Monthly, and Vogue. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, first published in newspapers and later in magazines, are also included. Among the artists represented are Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Edward Steichen, and William Wegman.