Mariette Pathy Allen is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Collection contains six portfolios of photographer Mariette Pathy Allen's work dating from the 1960s to 2016, totaling 209 color and black-and-white prints. There is also a papers series dating from 1981-2022. The photographs document aspects of human sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression in the U.S.; spirituality, rituals, and gender identity in Burma and Thailand; the connections between people and art; and the social life of people in the suburbs and beaches of Philadelphia and New Jersey. Two CD-Rs of digital images are also included in the papers series, along with printed materials such as exhibit and gallery publicity, book proofs, and articles. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
Collection comprises a large photograph album likely created by an African American soldier serving in Vietnam. There are 268 uncaptioned black-and-white and several color photographs ranging in size from 2 3/4 x 3 1/2 to 3 1/2 x 5 inches, along with 15 souvenir postcards. Images primarily feature informal shots of African American and white servicemen in camp and off base, though few show the races mingling. There is also a series of well-executed portraits of individual soldiers, white and black. The photographer took many images of U.S. Army camps and air bases, army personnel and vehicles, street scenes from Saigon and smaller villages, and took numerous snapshots of local citizens, chiefly women and children. There are a handful of shots showing bombing raids and cleared or destroyed jungle areas. Overall, the images offer a wealth of details about the Vietnam War from a variety of viewpoints. Acquired as part of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.
Collection comprises 23 color photographs (4"x6") of Bamako, Mali, sent to Helene Baumann by a friend in 2002, accompanied by a letter containing descriptive information for each photograph. Baumann was librarian for African and Western European Studies at Duke University, 1988-2006. Includes images of housing conditions; markets, public spaces, monuments, and buildings; and soccer matches.
Assembled by the staff of the Duke University Medical Library, the History of Medicine Picture File holds thousands of small and large images organized into series for individuals, places, and subjects related to the history of medicine and medical practice. The great majority portray notable physicians, scientists, naturalists, philosophers, and other individuals with important links to medicine. Places featured include hospitals and other institutions of medicine, and scenes in specific locations related to events in medical history. The subject categories cover many topics, with the largest groups including advertising, anatomy, caricatures, cartoons, pediatrics, physicians, and surgery. Predominant formats are engravings, lithographs, print materials (such as posters, clippings, and postcards), and many modern photographic reproductions of older works; there are also albumen photographs, negatives, slide reproductions, and other image formats found throughout the files. Forms part of the History of Medicine Collections at Duke University.
Collection consists of forty 17x24 inch color inkjet prints from a body of work titled "Color Falls Down" by artist Priya Kambli, who emigrated from India to the U.S. at the age of eighteen. Sometimes resembling diptychs, the images juxtapose and recontextualize family photographs, personal objects such as clothing, spoons, and earrings, and contemporary self-portraits, exploring themes of migration, cross-cultural understanding, women and family, identity, and memory. This work received the 2018 ADA Collection Award for Women Documentarians. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
John Willis created these six composite color images to articulate and consider the connections between photographic portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge of young people in Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where an estimated 14,000-20,000 victims were executed from about 1975-1979, and images of deteriorating mural frescoes at the Emperor's Palace, also in Phnom Penh. The portraits are said to be of prison workers, and were exhibited in 2008 at the prison, now a genocide museum. Five of the historical photographs are portraits; the sixth shows a group of what appears to be Khmer Rouge soldiers in uniform. The photographer's images show that the original photographs on exhibit were defaced with graffiti and other marks by visitors to the museum. The neglected Emperor's Palace frescoes, whose images flank the victim's portraits in Willis' work, depict scenes from the Cambodian epic poem, the Reamker, which speaks to human issues of love, revenge, loyalty, and trust. The color inkjet prints were created from 2009 to 2011. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
Seven creative projects produced by students in Photographic Memory: Photo Albums, Photobooks, & Zines, taught by Lisa McCarty in Spring 2016 at Duke University. The one zine and six photobooks utilize photographs and ephemera from their personal archives, and document representations of women in art; a morning walk in Durham, N.C.; Duke students at a horse race in South Carolina; the Pan Mass bicycle charity event in Massachusetts; the rapid changes in downtown Durham, N.C.; a ferry service in Hong Kong; and U.S. war memorials. Through their work, the students explored aspects of the interplay of text and image, methods for sequential storytelling, basic layout and design techniques, as well as methods for production and distribution. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
The Kathy Acker papers are primarily comprised of drafts of her novels, short stories, and other miscellaneous writings, ranging from early works like The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1975) to her last novel Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996). Described as a cyberpunk author and performance artist, her novels question the strictures of female sexuality and the power of language.
The Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize is awarded by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies to visual artists and writers working on documentary projects. The collection houses the work of 16 documentarians, all winners of the Center for Documentary Studies Lange-Taylor Prize from 1996 to 2020: Chinen Aimi, Rob Amberg, Mary Berridge, Peter Brown, Steven Cozart, Jason Eskenazi, Michel Huneault, Misty Keasler, Katherine Yungyee Kim, Roger LeMoyne, Jim Lommasson, Deborah Luster, Dona Ann McAdams, Daniel Ramos, Amanda Russhell Wallace, and Donald Weber. Their portfolios total 139 color and black-and-white photographic prints, 2 illustrated publications, and 6 digital videos. The projects engage with a wide variety of topics: the culture of boxing gyms; the effects of highway construction in the Appalachian mountains of N.C.; the experiences of HIV-positive women; the changing culture and traditions of Jews in Azerbaijan; the lives of older schizophrenics institutionalized in the U.S.; the experiences of Mexican immigrants and their families in Chicago; "colorism," prejudice within one's own racial community based on relative skin hue; a French-Canadian community coping with environmental and social trauma caused by a train derailment; the people, cultures, and landscapes of the U.S. High Plains; the experiences of Korean families affected and separated by conflicts, borders, and cultural identities; grieving and family in an African American community; crime, prostitution, and addiction in Ukraine; the impact of colonizers on the island of Okinawa; a Guatemala city landfill and its inhabitants; portraits of incarcerated people in Louisiana; and the effects of war on the former Yugoslavia. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
The photographs and papers of documentarian Rob Amberg span the years 1975-2009. The gelatin silver prints and pigmented inkjet color prints in the collection represent three bodies of work: The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress; The Sodom Laurel Album; and The Vanishing Culture of Agriculture. Amberg focuses primarily on the social life and customs of the rural South, especially in the mountains of his home state of North Carolina. Images range from landscape shots taken before and during construction of an interstate highway in the N.C. mountains, to portraits of individuals and families affected by the changes in rural culture. Images also depict agricultural activies such as tobacco cultivation and dairy cattle farming, as well as work in the poultry industry. He has a special concern for documenting the way in which industrial and economic progress seems to be erasing many aspects of rural culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Amberg's papers account for the rest of the collection and are organized into five series: Correspondence, Printed Materials, Subject Files, and Writings and Research, and Audio. Acquired as part of the Archives of Documentary Arts at Duke University.