We are pleased to share our interview with Ransom Center member Susan Scafati, an Austin-based, American contemporary artist. She is a member of Lakes Were Rivers, an artist collective showcased in the Ransom Center’s 2013 exhibition Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive. [Read more…] about Member Profile: Susan Scafati
Roy Flukinger
Ransom Center staff to contribute to new Texas-themed UT Press book series
The University of Texas Press recently announced the undertaking of the publishing project The Texas Bookshelf, a series of 16 books, with an accompanying website, focusing on all things Texan. All books are to be written by faculty and staff at The University of Texas at Austin. The inaugural book, to be released in 2017, will be a history of Texas written by Stephen Harrigan, faculty member at the Michener Center for Writers. The subsequent books will focus on Texas history, business, culture, art, music, film, politics, and more.
Of the contributors, two are affiliated with the Harry Ransom Center.
Greg Curtis, Humanities Coordinator at the Ransom Center and Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, plans to write a book on the history of Texas literature, with profiles of the lives of Texas writers and critical responses to their work.
Roy Flukinger, Senior Research Curator at the Ransom Center, will be writing and compiling a volume about the evolution and expansion of twentieth-century photography in Texas, which will feature hundreds of significant images created by important photographers and artists who worked throughout the state during that century.
Image: Photo of contributors to UT Press series The Texas Bookshelf by Michael O’Brien.
University of Texas at Austin partners with online learning initiative
When University of Texas at Austin Professor of Philosophy Daniel Bonevac and Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger taught the course “Ideas of the Twentieth Century” last fall, they had 100 students.
[Read more…] about University of Texas at Austin partners with online learning initiative
“Arnold Newman: At Work” explores photographer through his archive
In conjunction with the exhibition Arnold Newman: Masterclass, University of Texas Press and the Ransom Center have published Arnold Newman: At Work by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger. Featuring an introductory essay by photo historian Marianne Fulton, the illustrated volume includes Newman’s iconic images alongside his contact sheets, Polaroids, and work prints complete with handwritten notes and marginalia. Providing a contextual overview of the Ransom Center’s Newman archive, the book reveals insights into Newman’s process. The book also includes Newman’s lesser known collages, commercial work, and cityscapes.
Drawing extensively from the Ransom Center’s Newman archive, the book is a rich collection of materials ranging from personal documents—such as Augusta and Arnold Newman’s holiday cards, travel ledgers, and copies of passports and pocketbooks—to some of Newman’s most iconic images. Readers can track the creative process from contact sheets with the photographer’s notes and cropping instructions to the eventual final selection and enlargement.
For Newman, a single session with the sitter was only the beginning of the creative process. Newman’s attentive markups and anecdotes litter the edges of countless contact sheets, and work prints from a portrait sitting allow readers to see how Newman approached his subject and found ways to reveal his or her character. Newman would take 10, 20, 30 and in some cases more than 50 individual photographs of a sitter, making minor adjustments each time. Though highly significant, the differences between the frames are often miniscule, but the variation in their impact can be dramatic.
The Center’s Newman archive contains all of Newman’s negatives, slides and color transparencies, all of his original contact sheets, and more than two thousand prints, including examples of color and collage work. The collection also includes Newman’s original sittings books, correspondence and business files, early sketchbooks and photographic albums.
Senior Research Curator of Photography Discusses Photography in the Digital Age
In “Technology: No Place For Wimps,” Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger joins Carol Henry, fine-art photographer, and James M. Reilly, founder and director of the Image Performance Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in a discussion about photography in the digital age. The discussion, which appears in The Getty Conservation Institute newsletter Conservation Perspectives, features a question and answer session with the three experts and highlights the ways in which photographers, conservators, and curators respond to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing medium. Flukinger, Henry, and Reilly spoke with Dusan Stulik, a Getty Conservation Institute senior scientist, and Jeffrey Levin, editor of the Institute’s newsletter.
Special offer celebrates recognition of "The Gernsheim Collection"
Just last week, The Gernsheim Collection, co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Texas Press, received an Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, which honors a distinguished catalog in the history of art published during the past year.
To celebrate this recognition, the Ransom Center is offering editor-signed copies of The Gernsheim Collection at a reduced price of $60 through March 15. Orders placed by this date will also include a set of five notecards featuring images from the Gernsheim collection.
Edited by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection coincided with the Ransom Center’s 2010 exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection, which explored the history of photography through the Center’s foundational photography collection. The Gernsheim collection is widely considered one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world’s earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.
The book includes more than 125 full-page plates of images from the collection accompanied by descriptions of each image’s place in the evolution of photography and within the collection.
The offer is available online and in person at the visitor’s desk in the Ransom Center’s lobby through Thursday, March 15.
The publication of The Gernsheim Collection was made possible by the generous support of Janet and Jack Roberts, Jeanne and Van Hoisington, Margaret Hight, William Russell Young III, and the Hite Foundation in memory of Sybil E. Hite.
