Last night, I happened to stop by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where I learned a few things.

One, there is a notable collection of black-and-white photography displayed in a spacious hallway at the Hutch, labeled as the Ida Kay and Walser Greathouse Collection.

These names rung a bell because of the Frye Art Museum. Walser was director of the Frye from its founding in 1952 until his death in 1966. Ida Kay took over, governing the place from 1966 through 1993. For most of its existence, in other words, Seattle's most unusual museum was under the care of the Greathouses.

Who were photo collectors??

Now, the Frye is most closely associated with two things: old paintings and new contemporary art. The latter has come in the last few years. The former is from the Fryes themselves, who collected the old paintings, which of course were not old when they collected them, and some even newfangled. They were often buying from German artists, paintings that featured martyrs and Eves with snakes and shepherdesses and snowy landscapes.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the museum's current director and curator of the temporary exhibition Franz von Stuck, has done a remarkable job in the last few years of revamping the Fryes' public reputation as sticks in the mud into a more historically specific view that, rather, they were in thrall to a Germanic conception of late-19th-century pre-modernism rather than the French strains that would become the dominant begatting tales of art history. (Charles was a first-generation American of German descent.) Hence, the Frye's story of the turn of the 20th century is quite different from MoMA's, bereft of the Cezannes and Picassos you might expect of the period in European art.

The Fryes were no aesthetic revolutionaries, and neither were their chosen inheritors, the Greathouses, who became known for disavowing abstraction. Inside the Frye in the 1950s to 1970s, the abstract expressionism, pop, and conceptual art of the world's urban capitals did not exist. The Frye was a place for gilt-framed paintings.

So you wouldn't necessarily expect the Greathouses to be avid collectors of an art form—photography—that was barely accepted as such until the 20th century was well underway. Did the Greathouses collect photography similar to the way they collected painting for the Frye? From what the Fryes collected, what can we surmise about what the Fryes might have thought of the Greathouse photo collection? Are there any interesting aesthetical links and breaks to be made between the two? What is the exact size of the Greathouse collection, and what all is in it? What of the relatively abstract pictures it includes—how were abstract photographs and abstract paintings different for the Greathouses? When did they donate their holdings to the Hutch?

So many questions.

I can't ask the people involved. Ida Kay passed away at 104 years old in 2011; here is her obituary. I'm working on asking the Hutch. Beyond that, this might make an interesting study or even a dual exhibition.

There's nothing online at all about the collection (that I could find). It includes works by W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, André Kertész, and many more. Probably three or four dozen images line the walls of the walkway at the Hutch.

I didn't get to look too closely last night, but I did note Smith's 1946 photograph of his children, taken after he'd returned from war, badly hurt and not believing he could ever make a picture again, Walk to Paradise Garden. A nice little writeup of the story behind that picture—a sweet image taken by a man given to making war images that were anything but sweet—is here.

End note: While I was at the Hutch, I also got to see the Nobel Prizes on display. One interested me the most: 2004's for Linda Buck. Take a look into her nose-tastic work to read more than you've ever read before about the way your sense of smell works.