Bryn Mawr College

Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1860s-present

 

“Double Take” exhibition extended; gallery talk scheduled for 5 pm on Wednesday, February 15, 2012

 

Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1860s-present

Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, noon to 4:30 pm

Through February 17, 2012

Rare Book Room, Canaday Library

 

Bryn Mawr College’s fall exhibition Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1867-2009 is the first major exhibition of the College’s rich photography holdings. The exhibition, which will span almost the entire history of the photographic medium, will showcase more than 65 photographs by hanging them in pairs that prompt viewers to compare and contrast the images.  

Double Take will be on view in Bryn Mawr’s Canaday Library from September 27 through December 22, Tuesday through Saturday from 12:00 to 4:30 p.m., and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue and related programming.

Double Take is the first major exhibition at Bryn Mawr College to show works exclusively from its photography collection. Most of these works, like the rest of the College’s photography collection, have never before been exhibited. Double Take then is meant to offer a suggestive sampling of the collection’s breadth. Exhibited artists include media pioneers, such as, Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Eakins, Adolphe Braun, Eugène Atget; Modernists, such as Ansel Adams, André Kertész, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Lotte Jacobi; survey and documentary photographers, such as Lewis Hine, William Henry Jackson, Walker Evans, Edward Curtis; and Philadelphia photographers, such as Laurence Salzmann, Zoe Strauss, William Earle Williams. 

For the collection’s debut, selected photographs will be hung provocatively in unexpected pairs or groups, based sometimes on the works’ formal qualities or subject matter.  These pairings of images are not meant to equate them as “doubles,” but are intended to show two artists’ different takes. Seen together, the similarities and differences produce a “double take” that prompts the viewer to look again and more closely.

The exhibition is curated by Carrie Robbins, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art, whose work on the project has been funded through an NEH Curatorial Fellowship awarded by the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art. Funding for this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue has been generously provided by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library.

Double Take opens September 27 with a lecture ( “The Body in the Library: Collecting Photographs on a College Campus”) at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter Library B21 by Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Alfred Stieglitz Center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Thr exhibition is free and open to the public.  For further information about the exhibition and related programs, please contact the Special Collections Department at 610-526-6576, SpecColl@brynmawr.edu. For directions to the College and information about parking, please visit brynmawr.edu/campus/visiting.shtml.

Read about this and other exhibitions at Bryn Mawr College.

Photographs from the exhibition: