Exhibits

Exhibits from the RBMSCL Gallery Space in Perkins Library

Olive Pierce: Forty Years of Photographs (1963-2003) A Maine resident and lifelong political activist, Olive Pierce's photographs reflect the spirit of community. This retrospective of black and white gelatin silver prints includes images that document life in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as Maine fishing communities. Images of Iraqi citizens under US economic sanctions in 1999 and photographs of Maine citizens demonstrating for and against the war in 2003, make the connection between the local and global community.
Then & Now - Eight South African Photographers An exhibition of 160 photographs mounted in 5 venues at Duke University. South African photographer Paul Weinberg conceived and curated Then & Now which is comprised of black and white and color photographs from 8 South African documentary photographers. Twenty photographs were selected from each photographer, 10 made under apartheid and 10 photographs made after the historic democratic elections of 1994.
Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta An exhibition of photographs by Tom Rankin from his long-standing work on the sacred traditions and landscapes of the Mississippi Delta.
Danny Wilcox Frazier - Driftless: Photographs from Iowa Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer and Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.
Close To Home: Photographs by Margaret Sartor Margaret Sartor has been documenting her family and her hometown in northern Louisiana for close to a quarter century. This exhibit of evocative black and white prints includes selected portraits and landscapes made between 1986 and 2004.
Carl Mydans: Photographs, 1935-1958 A retrospective of Carl Mydans' early black and white photography for the Farm Security Administration and for Life magazine.
Maxwell Did It!: Photographing the Atlantic City Boardwalk, 1920s-1950s Black and white photographs in this exhibit were selected from thousands of images in the R.C. Maxwell Company Collection, part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History. The R. C. Maxwell Company produced electric "spectacular" signs and billboards and used the photographs to document construction and placement of those advertising signs on the boardwalk.
Steven Smith: Photographs of the Suburban West In these black-and-white, landscape photographs, Steven Smith depicts the continuous expansion of suburban development into the deserts and up the mountain sides of California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Smith won the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book in Photography award for this stellar body of work.
Night Vision: Photographs of William Gedney and Lynn Saville This singular show offers 48 photographs made between sunset and sunrise by nocturnal photographers Bill Gedney and Lynn Saville. These beautiful, edgy black and white prints reveal the evocative power of moonlight, reflected light, and deep shadow to alter familiar landscapes and inspire the imagination.
James Karales: Photographs 1956-1969 The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library acquired the James Karales Collection in 2004. The prints in this show were culled from five distinct bodies of work: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March; the Vietnam War; the Lower East Side of New York City; Rendville, Ohio; and logging in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the exhibition quality prints, the collection contains negatives, slides, contact sheets and 5x7 and 8x10 proof prints.
Early Comic Strips 1898-1916 This exhibit of early "funnies" is drawn from the volumes of the recently acquired American Newspaper Repository (ANR) which contains over 152 titles dating from 1852 through 2004. Long runs of The World and The Chicago Tribune provided material for the exhibit. At the turn of the nineteenth century, two newspaper titans, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, were engaged in a bitter rivalry for supremacy in the New York market. The introduction of the color printing press and the modern "comic strip" was instrumental in their competition to circulate the most newspapers.
Mel Rosenthal: Photographs from In the South Bronx of America Against backdrops of rubble, abandoned buildings, and destroyed city blocks, these portrait photographs depict the everyday lives of residents as they struggle to survive "planned shrinkage," an urban planning strategy utilized from the 1960s-1980s to raze residential buildings in older urban areas and replace them with industrial parks.
Alex Harris: Photographs, 1998-2000. Images from the Duke University Special Collections Library Alex Harris juxtaposes two groups of color images - a series of Havana views seen through the windshields of aging American automobiles and a series of American landscapes seen in the context of a boy's electronic game - to explore the potential of the photographer's eye and the camera's frame both to limit and to expand our view of the world.
Larry Schwarm: On Fire This exhibition presents work by Larry Schwarm, winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for his series of color images capturing the dramatic prairie fires that sweep across the Flint Hills of Kansas each spring. A professor of art at Emporia State University, Schwarm has spent the past twelve years photographing the burning of the tallgrass prairie in his native state.

Other Online Exhibits from RBMSCL Collections

A Renaissance at Duke: The Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection
Originally a private library belonging to a Florentine professor of literature and Senator of Italy, the Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection is a rich ensemble of more than 49,000 pamphlets, small volumes, librettos, newspapers, periodicals, and clippings spanning four centuries of Italian and European history. This on-line exhibit features selected items relating to literature, music, popular culture, the two World Wars, early Fascism, and more.

America Votes: Presidential Campaign Memorabilia from the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
Winners share the limelight with the defeated in this exhibit of U.S. presidential campaign memorabilia drawn primarily from the holdings of the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The exhibit illustrates the nation's presidential elections in letters, sheet music, leaflets, buttons, bumper stickers, and even t-shirts.

Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
This exhibit probes the life experiences of American slaves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, and examines the enterprise of recovering and preserving African American history of the period. The exhibit showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute.

Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the life and times of William Grant Still
A multimedia celebration of the centenary of the birth of William Grant Still, known as the dean of African-American composers. This exhibit contains a timeline of the cultural context in which Still lived and worked as well as a narrative of his life that includes photos, letters, music scores, and sound clips of his compositions.