Photographs from DeGolyer Library

February 2 - March 31, 2009

This exhibition, which was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of The Society for Photographic Education in Dallas March 26-29, featured highlights from the exceptional collection of more than 500,000 photographs at SMU’s DeGolyer Library. While the focused of the photography collection at the DeGolyer is the U.S. West and Mexico, there were surprises, too. Included among the 80 images in the exhibit were Civil War pictures by Timothy O’Sullivan, Western landscapes by Carleton Watkins, Andrew J. Russell, Charles Roscoe Savage, William Henry Jackson and John K. Hillers, Indian portraits by Edward Curtis, photographs of Mexico by Abel Briquet and Hugo Brehme, as well as 19th century views of India, Jamaica, Russia, Italy and Trinidad, and works by contemporary photographers: Yousuf Karsh, Gordon Parks, Craig Varjabedian, and June Van Cleef. In addition, there was an entire case devoted to the newly acquired Lawrence T. Jones III Texas Photography Collection of 5,000 rare Texas images including portraits of Santa Anna, Sam Houston, Mexican American War and Civil War soldiers, frontier towns and views from throughout the state from the 1840s on and the only known portrait of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured as a girl by the Comanches and went on the become the mother of Comanche leader Quanah Parker.