A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs

Saturday, 25 June 2005 11:27

CAMBRIDGE, MA.-An exhibition at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum will present images from a vast collection of photographs, negatives, and related material collected during four decades by curators at the University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The images reflect a range of uses of the medium, including social documentary, vernacular, and art photography. A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection, will feature 70 photographs and ephemera selected from the 28,000-object collection, which was placed on permanent deposit at the Fogg in 2002. The title of the exhibition comes from a 1967 Harvard Alumni Bulletin article reporting the establishment of the Carpenter Center collection and heralding photography as “a new kind of historic evidence.” The collection contains some of photography’s most famous images and is an extremely valuable resource for scholars and researchers. Among the photographs on display will be Edward Weston’s classic Nude (1936), from the Fine Art Photographers Collection; Frances Benjamin Johnston’s comparative photographs (c. 1899) of a poor person’s crumbling shack and the tidy two-story house of a graduate of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, once displayed in the Social Museum to show the benefits of education; Harry Annas’s 1949 studio portrait of a boy in a cowboy outfit, Untitled (Lockhart, Texas), from the American Professional Photographers Collection; and Paul Rowell’s E.R. Warren, Motorman – a 1907 portrait of a young, mustachioed man in a double-breasted full-length coat and conductor’s cap, from the Boston Transit Collection. The Carpenter Center Photograph Collection was established by Harvard University in the mid-1960s as a resource for teaching the history of photography and its aesthetic practice. The History of the Carpenter Center Collection - Although photographs had been collected at Harvard since the early days of the medium, their special importance wasn’t recognized until the mid-1960s, when photographic history became a discipline in its own right. The University created a repository at the Carpenter Center to consolidate its holdings of significant historical photographs, and the collection began with the transfer of 19th-century prints belonging to the Geology Department Library.

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