It is divided into various historical and contemporary categories, including, most notably, a collection of nineteenth-century photographs of Palestine; a unique collection of the negatives of the artist Ephraim Moses Lilien, who worked in Germany and Palestine in the early twentieth century; a representative and comprehensive selection of photographs by Robert Capa of Israel on the eve of the declaration of its independence; a representative selection of press photos by American photographers Weegee and W. Eugene Smith; street photographs by the influential French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; photographs by American Leon Levinstein; Soviet photography from the first half of the twentieth century; photojournalism by Israeli and American photographers from the 1930s through the 1970s; a selection of Andy Warhol’s Polaroid photos; as well as an impressive collection of works by contemporary Israeli photographers. In recent years, video works and photo installations have also been added to the collection (Dror Daum, Liat Elbling, Dana Levi, Ronit Porat, Orit Raff, Anna Yam, Maya Zack, and others).

The collection was built thanks to private donors – including the Schocken family, Cornell Capa, Michael S. Sachs, Howard Schickler, and David Lafaille, as well as the America–Israel Cultural Foundation. In recent years, it has also been enhanced by the efforts of the Museum’s Voting for Art acquisition group, and thanks to two sponsored awards conferred by the Museum upon photographers: the Leon & Michaela Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Photographer, awarded for over a decade (until 2013), and the Lauren & Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist.