Amassed piecemeal by Vesterheim curators over the course of many decades, the collection currently has more than 2,000 images of notable Norwegian and Norwegian-American church leaders, politicians, military officials, explorers, scientists, doctors, athletes, artists, writers, publishers, editors, historians, and university presidents, among other movers and shakers, in a variety of photographic and photomechanical formats, from 19th-century tintypes and albumen cartes de visite and cabinet cards to 20th-century silver gelatin prints, halftones, and real photo postcards.

The earliest of the portraits date from just after the Civil War, the latest from the 1990s. The bulk, however, are from the 1870s through the 1920s, decades of peak emigration from Norway to the United States. Imprints from over seventy Norwegian and Norwegian-American photographers, mostly with businesses in the Upper Midwest but some with studios as far afield as Nome, Alaska, were identified during the cataloging of the collection from February 2017 through March 2018.