UNC libraries welcome photography collections
“Leaf Burning,” Bahama, N.C., 1980, by Bill Bamberger
Two photography collections have found new homes in
Carolina’s libraries.
The first collection was donated to the Robert B. House
Undergraduate Library by Ann Stewart, a Chapel Hill art
consultant, and features the work of three internationally
known North Carolina photographers: Bill Bamberger,
Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris. The photos all depict
scenes of the American South from the early 1980s through
2002.
Bamberger’s work includes the photos in the 1998 book
Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, which
chronicled the final months of the White Furniture Co. in
his hometown of Mebane.
Harris’ most recent photography book, The Idea of
Cuba, will be published in spring 2007. Sartor wrote the
just-published Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets,
and Growing Up in the 1970s. Both live in Durham.
“I’m thrilled that this wonderful art will have
a permanent home in the House library,” said Stewart,
who is the granddaughter of House, chancellor of the
University from 1945 to 1957, for whom the library is
named.
The photos are on permanent display in the Christopher B.
Smith Instructional Lab on the library’s main
floor.
“New York City, August 1964.” By Robert Bolton, from the Robert Bolton Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The second collection features the work of the late
Robert Bolton, who was art director of Hogan, Rose &
Co. Inc., an advertising agency in Knoxville, Tenn., and a
passionate photographer. His collection includes everything
from famous musicians, such as John Coltrane, Dizzy
Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, to common street scenes
found in and around many Southern cities during the 1960s,
to major cultural gatherings, such as the 1965 Downbeat
Jazz Festival in Chicago.
The collection was donated to Wilson Library’s
Southern Folklife Collection by Kirston Johnson, a UNC
graduate student in the School of Information and Library
Science, and Bolton’s son, Shane, of Rockwell, N.C.
Johnson, whose mother’s best friend was
Bolton’s wife, Sharon Adams, said the images will
provide valuable documentary evidence to those studying
life in the American South during the middle of the last
century, as well as the artistic influence of better known
photographers.
“The Untamed World: Photographs of Robert Bolton,
1964-1969,” is on display in Wilson Library through
Dec. 31.