PHOTOGRAPHY

Old Photographs,
New Perspectives

Jan|Feb 2013 Contents
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PHOTOGRAPHY Penn collection highlighted at Arthur Ross Gallery

FILM In search of lost children in El Salvador. Memoria de los Niños

BOOKS Writers v. robber barons. The Great American Railroad War

MUSIC A new Penn songbook from the late Bruce Montgomery

BRIEFLY NOTED

ARTS CALENDAR

Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party, April 1980 (Larry Fink).

The 90 photographs that make up the Arthur Ross Gallery’s 9 Perspectives on a Photography Collection encompass multiple universes: the erotically charged, high-fashion images of Helmut Newton; Edward Steichen’s searing wartime documentations from the US Naval Aviation Photographic Unit; Larry Fink’s earthy portraits of small-town Pennsylvania, each one paired with one of his decadent urban images; group portraits that range from Mary Ellen Mark FA’62 ASC’64’s Bull Riders Craig Scarmardo and Cheyloh Mather, Boerne Rodeo, Texas, to a 1902 image of the University Orchestra.

Those 90 photographs, and more than 700 others, are part of the University’s art collection, which encompasses some 6,000 works collected over the past 250 years. In the fall of 2011, Lynn Marsden-Atlass, director of the Ross Gallery and curator of the University’s collection, asked Gabriel Martinez, senior lecturer in photography, to curate an exhibition. First he and collections manager Heather Gibson went through the 800-plus photographs, inventoried them, and digitized them in high-resolution images. Realizing that he had “discovered buried treasure,” in Marsden-Atlass’s words, Martinez then asked eight colleagues from the Department of Fine Arts to join him in curating separate portions of the exhibition. A few of their choices are on this page. The exhibition runs through January 27. —S.H.

International Twins Association, Muncie, IN (Neal Slavin).