While visiting the Harry Ransom Center in September 2011, Elliott Erwitt noted that “a good photograph is pretty obvious. It tells you a story very quickly. When it works, that is a good photograph.”

The more than 280 photos of 90 sequences in Erwitt’s new book Sequentially Yours (teNeues, 2011) certainly meet that qualification.

Visit the Ransom Center’s Facebook page to pick your favorite Elliott Erwitt photo for the chance to win a copy of Sequentially Yours.

Publisher teNeues describes Sequentially Yours as Erwitt presenting “a sense of vignettes, each showing a sequence of photographs shot just moments apart. Gifted storyteller that he is, Erwitt gives you a sense of what happens next, the end point being sometimes comic, sometimes poignant, and often with a wink.”

In his more…

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Who was Spalding Gray?

Fans have debated this question for years, as Gray was a pioneer in blurring the line between real life and theater in his autobiographical and often very personal monologues. He left audiences wondering how much of the stage persona was the real Gray and how much was Gray the performer.

Photographer Ann Rhoney captured the real Spalding Gray at home in his Wooster Street loft in New York City on an August day in 1990. He wasn’t wearing his usual plaid shirt. He wasn’t sitting behind a desk with a notebook and props. He was sitting comfortably at home in his grandmother’s chair and having a conversation with a new friend.

***

Rhoney splits her time between New York and the West Coast, and after a photo shoot in San Francisco the previous day, she took a red-eye flight to New York City to meet Gray and photograph him for a portrait assignment related to his forthcoming monologue Monster in a Box.

She described Gray as affable but somewhat meek and reserved when she arrived. He was wearing a shirt with a color somewhere between green and gold. “He may have pressed it himself,” Rhoney notes. “He appeared to be rather dressed up for that hour of the morning.”

As she started chatting with him and asking questions to try to get him to relax and open up for the session, he told her about the piece he was working on—a monologue that would become Gray’s Anatomy, which chronicled Gray’s medical problems with his eyes.

“Then all of the sudden, he started going into character, in a way,” Rhoney noticed. “That’s when a great moment happened.”

Gray dramatically described going to a medicine man in Niagara Falls to seek treatment for his eyes, as if he wanted to impress his new audience. Rhoney’s uncharacteristically blunt response?

“Oh, you fool!”

Rhoney describes Gray’s shock at her response: “His eyes opened in wide surprise and bewilderment. He jumped back, as if ‘What are you saying to me?’”

Then Rhoney explained that she was born and raised in Niagara Falls with a familial heritage of a funeral home in close proximity to an Indian reservation.

“He lit up,” she said.

The ice had been broken, and from then on, Rhoney had Gray’s full attention. Gray peppered her with questions as she did her light meter readings and prepared for the shoot, loading her Hasselblad camera.

Conversation flowed, and the result was 271 frames of Gray in what Rhoney says is, essentially, a still-life movie. “It’s a portrait of a soul with a range of every human emotion in this session of 15 rolls.”

“To get a successful portrait, you have to enter into an honest exchange with the person so that their spirit, their personal landscape emerges. You have to put them at ease and put yourself in their place.”

Rhoney spoke about how people are unable to see themselves, but once in a while—”every once in a blue moon”—a person can look at a photograph and recognize oneself.

“I always try to get that photograph where the person will say, ‘That’s me,’” she said.

The Ransom Center recently acquired two images from that session, one with an animated Gray using his hands for full effect and a second, quieter image of Gray midthought. Gray’s archive resides at the Ransom Center and recently opened for research.

“He completely offered me and my camera—even though at times he thought the camera got in the way of the conversation—an honest openness throughout the session,” she said. “He moved differently than he did on stage. It was as if I had a private performance. Yet it was not a performance at all. He was giving me his spirit.”

As Rhoney studied the images, she kept coming back to the hands in the first image. Though she’s looked at the photo hundreds of times, she made yet another discovery.

“Think about a palm reader, and if you look at the palm on his left, how poignant and beautiful that is. It’s as if he left us with his hand imprint,” she said. After a pause, she continued, “Especially the left palm. The detail on that? If everyone wants a road map to Spalding, there it is.”

As Rhoney studied the second image, she thought more about how he interacted with audiences.

“There’s a stillness. Yet you can see his thought process in motion,” she said.”We know him as talking to an audience, but I believe when he talked to the audience, he talked to everyone individually, even though he couldn’t see their faces. There’s something about this image where he’s talking to me behind the camera. That’s how he really, truly regarded his audiences—as a collective whole of individuals.”

The Gray archive contains no photos, so Rhoney’s portraits give scholars an additional lens through which to view Gray and his work.

“I’d like the photos to be a window into who he was,” Rhoney said. “Hopefully, this leads the scholars into seeing him with fresh eyes. As a photographer, I feel lucky to show him in a form of reality. This is who he was and is. A photograph is the truth and a scholarly document at its finest.”

Rhoney said this photo session led to a strong friendship, and Gray often told her how much he loved the photograph with the hand detail Rhoney loved. As she studied her photos and her contact sheets, she laughed often as she recalled details from the shoot and their conversation.

“The man can really still, in his own way, jump off the contact sheet and make one laugh,” she said. “He’s not here anymore, but they leave us with a whisper, an echo of who he is.”

Spalding Gray, 1991. © Ann Rhoney.

'Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979' by Susan Meiselas.

Erina Duganne, Assistant Professor of Art History at Texas State University, visited the Ransom Center on a Marlene Nathan Meyerson Photography Fellowship for a month during the summer of 2011 to review photographs by Susan Meiselas in the Magnum Photos collection. This research relates to her forthcoming book that examines the act of bearing witness in photography from the 1970s through the 1990s. She is also presenting her findings on Meiselas at the annual conference of the Association of American Studies. The Ransom Center is now accepting applications for 2012-2013 fellowships. Duganne discusses her research here.

For this fellowship, I closely examined press photographs in the Magnum Photos collection that Susan Meiselas took of the…

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The Ransom Center recently acquired ten tintype images from photographer Robb Kendrick. Tintype printing is a historical photo technique that was used primarily during the nineteenth century. The tintypes acquired are each handmade and one-of-a-kind.

The acquired tintypes vary in subject matter from portraits to landscapes to cacti. Several of Kendrick’s photographs were taken on location for National Geographic, and many were taken for personal projects.  Kendrick’s most recent wet-plate work documented the working cowboy for the December 2007 issue of National Geographic. The photographs were taken in 14 western states, Mexico, and Canada.  These photographs were then collected in the critically acclaimed book Revealing Character.

Kendrick’s documentary photography regularly appears in National Geographic, but he also frequently works with wet-plate photography. Kendrick currently splits time between Austin and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with his wife and two sons.

Robb Kendrick. "Untitled: Raramuri Series." March 2008.

Cover of exhibition catalog for 'Picasso at Work, Through the lens of David Douglas Duncan.'

In October 1996, world-renowned photographer and author David Douglas Duncan donated his archive to the Harry Ransom Center. The Center has preserved, organized, cataloged, exhibited and made available a variety of images and artifacts that complete the archive, including many that document his years of friendship with Pablo Picasso. Recently, Duncan donated a plate painted by Picasso of his beloved dachshund named Lump.

The new exhibition Picasso at Work. Through the lens of David Douglas Duncan, runs through September 25 at the Museo Picasso, Malaga, and will then move to the Picasso Kuntsmuseum Munster from October 15 to January 15, 2012 and finally at La Piscine Musee d’Art…

As part of the Harry Ransom Lectures, legendary Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt discusses his life and work tomorrow evening at 7 p.m. CST in Jessen Auditorium at The University of Texas at Austin. The program will be webcast live.

Steve Hoelscher, Chair of the Department of American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, shares his thoughts on the work and career of Erwitt:

CUBA. Havana. 1964. © Elliott Erwitt/MAGNUM PHOTOS.

Few photographers have had a greater impact on American visual culture than Elliott Erwitt. Even if you’ve never heard the name Elliott Erwitt, you’ve seen his pictures. Some are icons of photojournalism: Richard Nixon burying his finger in Nikita Khrushchev’s chest during their so-called Moscow “kitchen debate” in 1959; Jacqueline Kennedy,…

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Last month, the Ransom Center participated in and helped to sponsor an experimental documentary project from Magnum Photos called “Postcards From America.” The trip has now finished, topped off by a pop-up exhibition and reception at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. The show was terrific, and images from the trip, printed in a range of sizes, were taped up in groupings around the room. None of the images had credits, which forced everyone to really look at them. There were also two very long tables onto which were piled huge assortments of 4×6-inch prints from the trip, also presented anonymously. The prints had been made at a local drugstore, reminding us all that photographs are first and foremost acts of communication, meant for the widest possible audience. People spontaneously started grouping these images together into small sets, curating on the fly. Often, these images were combined with narrative texts from Ginger Strand, the writer traveling with the Magnum photographers.

This message was reinforced, just yesterday, when we received in the mail a set of signed postcards the photographers produced while on the road, one from each photographer. A thoughtful post on the “Postcards From America” blog by Strand sums it all up:

For the last several days, postcards have been rolling off Uncle Jackson’s two printers. There’s a lot of perfectionism around the postcards—choosing the right images, getting the colors correct—but in the end, it’s a naturally imperfect form. Whoever drops the postcards into the mail slot—whoever delivers them into the chutes and sorting machines and conveyor belts and plastic tubs and mail sacks and entirely human fingers of the United States Postal Service—that person is going to have to take a deep breath.

But that’s what a road trip is all about: the creative tension between the perfect, polished, product and the nature of the road: the fleeting glimpse, the passing landscape, the too-short message on a too-small card: look, this is what I saw.

The ‘Postcards From America’ project ended with a pop-up exhibition and reception at the Starline Social Club in Oakland, California, on May 26, 2011. Photo by David Coleman.

Image courtesy of Magnum Photos.

“5 photographers, a writer, 2 weeks, a bus.” Thus begins a unique documentary project comprised of Magnum photographers Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky, and writer Ginger Strand, who will be traveling from San Antonio to Oakland from May 12 to May 26 on the first of a series of trips across the country.

They’ve been blogging about it since the end of March, so there’s already plenty to see and read. You can follow them on various social media sites, and you can even post your own images at the “Postcards From America” Flickr site. At the end they will be mounting a special exhibition of images from the trip at the Starline in…

Unidentified itinerant photographer, 'Barber Shop in the Nueces Hotel,' 1934. Gelatin silver glass plate negative.

The Ransom Center has made available online the digital collection “The Itinerant Photographer: Photographs of Corpus Christi Businesses in the 1930s.”

The collection highlights photographs taken of businesses in Corpus Christi during the Great Depression. The project to make these materials accessible online was funded by a TexTreasures grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.

Until now, access to the collection was limited, due to the fragility of the collection material and its uncataloged status. The Center has now constructed a Web site as a portal to…

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The Ransom Center has received a $10,000 grant from the Friends of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics to rehouse and rearrange its holdings of the Herschel family papers and to create an online finding aid.

The Herschel family papers, acquired in 1960 with subsequent smaller accessions of additional materials, largely represent the life and work of Sir John F. W. Herschel (1792-1871), the English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor. John Herschel has been called Britain’s first modern physical scientist, and his correspondence has been noted as one of the most valuable archives for 19th-century science.

The Herschel family papers at the Ransom Center form a significant resource for the study of the history of science in general and also for studies in several individual fields, such as astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The lives of the Herschels, their pioneering achievements, their interactions with other leading scientists of their time and their influence on their colleagues’ work are topics scholars may pursue in the papers.

The Herschel family papers will be closed to scholars during the duration of the grant, which runs through Dec. 31, 2011.

A drawing of Halley's Comet by Sir John F. W. Herschel in 1835–1836.