Current exhibit at the Wittliff Gallery

Masterworks from the Wittliff’s Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection
On view August 15 – November 2, 2008 HELD OVER!

SAN MARCOS, TX—With a few weeks still to go before construction begins on the new exhibition galleries, the Wittliff Collections present one more show on the seventh floor of the Alkek Library at Texas State University-San Marcos. 45 Photographs from the Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection will be on view August 15 through November 2, 2008.

Visitors are asked to check the Wittliff Collections website before their visit, as hours fluctuate: http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu .

The images in this exhibit are representative of the range of the permanent collection as it crosses the border between the U.S. and Mexico, and include one of the Wittliff’s oldest photographs, François Aubert’s albumen print Corpse of Emperor Maximilian, made in 1867.

Some of the more famous pictures include the 1945 Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, Raúl Ortega’s 1995 signature image of famous revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos taken in the jungle of Chiapas, the 1956 Portrait of Georgia O’Keefe by Yousuf Karsh, and a vintage 1941 silver gelatin print of Ansel Adams’s Moonrise Over Hernandez.

On display for the first time at the Wittliff is the collection’s print of Jack Ruby Shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, captured on film in 1963 by Bob Jackson.

Also on the show’s long list of celebrated artists—more than 40 in all—are Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Kate Breakey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Curtis, Héctor García, Laura Gilpin, Graciela Iturbide, Danny Lyon, Lee Marmon, Richard Misrach, Garry Winogrand, and Joel-Peter Witkin.

Located on the seventh floor of Texas State’s Alkek Library, the Wittliff Collections will be undergoing construction this fall to expand their public and exhibition spaces. For updates, and more about the Wittliff’s literary archives, photographs, exhibits, and events, call (512) 245-2313, or visit http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu.

INSTRUCTING | ILLUMINATING | INSPIRING

THE WITTLIFF COLLECTIONS offer a dynamic archival, exhibition, programming, and research environment designed to further the cultural legacy of the region’s literary and photographic arts, and foster “the spirit of place” in the wider world. The Southwestern Writers Collection preserves and exhibits the literary papers and artifacts of principal writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including the major archives of Cormac McCarthy, Sam Shepard, and John Graves, as well as the production archives of Texas Monthly magazine, Fox’s animated series King of the Hill, and the CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove. The Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection includes the major holdings of work by such renowned artists as Kate Breakey, Keith Carter, and Graciela Iturbide, and houses the largest archive of modern and contemporary Mexican photography in the United States. Connie Todd, Curator.