Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art in downtown San Diego's Balboa Park has operated from the Casa de Balboa building on El Prado since 1983, when a 7,000-square-foot custom-designed gallery became one of the first museum spaces in the country built exclusively for photographic art. The permanent collection holds more than 7,000 images from over 850 photographers spanning the full history of the medium, with holdings by Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Stieglitz, Ruth Bernhard, and Yosuke Yamahata housed alongside the Balboa Park science and natural history institutions including the San Diego Natural History Museum. A July 2023 merger with the San Diego Museum of Art unified the two organizations under one nonprofit umbrella, expanding MOPA's reach through combined ticketing, cross-disciplinary programming, and shared conservation resources. The museum's 20,000-volume research library, print viewing room, and in-house theater for documentary and experimental film screenings distinguish it from standard photography galleries, with the film program sharing audience crossover with Digital Gym CINEMA in the East Village. The most resource-intensive programming is the museum's large-scale retrospective exhibition format, which assembles 100-plus works from international lenders to survey a single photographer's career across decades of output.