About The Center for Creative Photography

Welcome to the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) eStore at the University of Arizona.

CCP is an archive, museum, and research center dedicated to photography as an art form and cultural record. The store helps to support this mission through making available for purchase a wide variety of books, catalogs, and other publications on Photography and the artists who work in this medium. In addition, the store offers a variety of photography postcards, posters, and other related merchandise, as well as a limited selection of collectibles and CCP signature items.

Please visit the official Center for Creative Photography webpage for more information on our collections and programs.

CCP History

Established in 1975 with the acquisition of the archives of Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona is an archive, museum, and research institution dedicated to photography as an art form and cultural record. It was envisioned by Ansel Adams and then-University of Arizona President John P. Schaefer as a unique blend of archive, museum, and library, where art and research materials presented together offer the fullest understanding of photography as a creative medium.

CCP’s integrated mission of preservation, access, exhibition, interpretation, and education celebrates the history and study of photography and its contemporary practice, with an emphasis on American photography from 1900 to the present. The rich cultural experiences, public scholarship and research opportunities provided by CCP offer a window into higher education at the University of Arizona for people from the region, the nation, and the world.

CCP holds more archives and individual works by twentieth-century North American photographers than any other museum in the nation. These holdings include the archives of more than 60 photographers—Ansel Adams, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, and Garry Winogrand among them—along with more than a hundred significant smaller collections. Archives include photographs, negatives, albums, work prints, manuscripts, audiovisual material, contact sheets, correspondence, and memorabilia. In all, CCP’s photograph collection totals more than 80,000 works by 2,000 photographers. Researchers from all over the world visit CCP to study the vast collection, and the public is invited to view works in the art collection by making an appointment for a PrintViewing.

CCP shares its collection with museums, educators and publishers internationally through its Rights and Reproductions Department, with loans to exhibitions organized by other institutions, and by original traveling exhibitions. The CCP Library has more than 26,000 photography volumes, including rare artists’ books and more than eighty periodicals.

In 1989, CCP’s 55,000-square-foot building was dedicated, fully realizing the integration--under one roof--a changing exhibition program, Research Center, educational programs, Library, Museum Store, and public access to the vast collection through the renowned PrintViewing program. More than 95,000 people see exhibitions or take part in programs at CCP each year.

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