It is a public museum, opened in 1995, and is recognized as the first cultural facility to specialize in photography and visual artworks. It collects valuable works and material from the field of photography and visual works, both old and modern, and from both inside and outside Japan. It introduces these works through various project exhibitions.
In recent years, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has also actively covered the culture of visual art, such as animated cartoons, as seen in the movie show in the first floor hall. Yoshiharu Fukuhara (the present honorary chairman of Shiseido Co., Ltd.) is the director. Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has a strongly reformative posture and tries to represent photography and visual art in a non-stereotypical fashion.