The gift from photographer, philanthropist and collector Judy Glickman Lauder includes photographs by Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks.
“This collection puts us at another level,” said Mark Bessire, museum director. “We’ve always done (photography), but this just leverages the work we are doing and lets us take off. This (collection) could have gone anywhere, but it’s coming here.”
Glickman Lauder, who could not be reached for an interview, has homes in Cape Elizabeth and on Great Diamond Island and a longstanding affiliation with Rockport’s Maine Media Workshops. She serves on the museum’s board of trustees and is a well-known photographer in her own right, with work hanging in prominent museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
She is giving the PMA the collection, which includes some of her own work, as a “promised gift,” which means a pledged donation at some specified future date, although the museum already has the collection on site. The museum declined to say how much it is worth.