Private Passions

George Stephanopoulos is well known as a political commentator and advisor, former White House communications director, and television host, but not many people know about his passion for photography. For several decades, he acquired photographic collections and archives, generously donating works from them to museums around the country. Stephanopoulos spent his high school years in Pepper Pike. His ties to the region led him to include two Northeast Ohio institutions among the beneficiaries of his philanthropy: the Akron Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Since 2011, he donated more than 1,500 photographs to this institution.

Stephanopoulos’s primary passion has been 20th-century documentary photography. Curator of photography Barbara Tannenbaum made selections from his offerings with the goal of deepening and broadening the museum’s photographic holdings. His gifts have been especially valuable in enhancing the CMA’s holdings of work by women photographers and deepening representation of individual artists. 

In-depth collections of a single artist’s work allow the museum to demonstrate the breadth of an artist’s production throughout their career. For instance, the museum received 215 prints by renowned American documentarian Danny Lyon (American, born 1942), including series on the Southern Civil Rights Movement, the culture of motorcycle gangs, life in Texas prisons, and the destruction of historical neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. The latter, which was on view as a solo exhibition at the museum in 2008, became the model for visual work addressing the aging infrastructure of American cities.

In 2025, the final year of Stephanopoulos’s donation program, the museum acquired 252 photographs by 38 photographers. The 2025 gift introduced 13 new artists to the collection, including Leo LaLonde (American, 1911–1977), photojournalist Micha Bar-Am (Israeli, born Germany, 1930), fashion photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917–2012), and social documentarian Erika Stone (American, born Germany, 1924).

Another 2025 highlight is a group of 48 images by John Gutmann (American, born Germany, 1905–1998), a German refugee who brought Bauhaus and modernist theories and a penchant for Surrealism to San Francisco in 1933. His outsider’s take on American popular culture emphasized, as he put it, “the almost bizarre, exotic qualities of the country,” from the earliest drive-in movie theater and “Eat in Car” restaurant to tattoos and graffiti. 

Over the past decade and a half, gifts from Stephanopoulos have generously enriched and expanded the CMA’s photographic holdings. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to him for creating a substantial legacy for the education and enjoyment of future generations.