Archives Of Nine Photographers Go To Center For Creative Photography

The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson has expanded its holdings with the archives of nine photographers, a move that deepens one of the most important photography collections in the United States. The acquisition includes prints as well as documentary materials such as correspondence, notebooks, teaching materials, and working proofs - the kinds of records that reveal how a body of work takes shape over time.

The newly acquired archives are those of Laura Aguilar, Jack Dykinga, Jody Forster, Frank Gohlke, Mark Klett, Nathan Lyons, Stephen Marc, Patrick Nagatani, and Susan Wood. They now join the CCP's existing archives connected to Ansel Adams, Robert Heinecken, David Hume Kennerly, and Lola Álvarez Bravo, further strengthening an institution already known for the breadth of its photography holdings.

In a statement, CCP director Todd J. Tubutis said the archives“expand the creative and intellectual constellation” that makes the center“one of the foremost photography institutions in the world.” He added that each archive contains not only iconic images but also the paper trail of artistic development: correspondence, notebooks, teaching materials, and working proofs that illuminate a photographer's evolution.

The center's history helps explain the scale of that ambition. The CCP emerged from an agreement between Ansel Adams and the University of Arizona in 1974, and it has long combined preservation with scholarship. Its cold-storage facility is designed to conserve photographic materials, while its exhibition space supports study across disciplines ranging from world history and journalism to nursing, literature, veterinary science, gender studies, and environmental studies.

Chief curator Rebecca Senf described the institution as one“created by an artist for other artists,” a founding ethic that still shapes its work. That perspective is especially visible in an archive-based collection like this one, where the value lies not only in finished prints but also in the notes, drafts, and proofs that make artistic process legible.

Among the works highlighted from the acquisition are Aguilar's“In Sandy's Room” (1989), Wood's“John Lennon & Yoko Ono” (1968), Marc's“Untitled” (2017), Nagatani's“Alamogordo Blues” (1986), Lyons's“Untitled b” from“Riding 1st Class on the Titanic” (1974–98), Klett and Byron Wolfe's details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon (2007), Forster's“Super Cluster 1” (1992), Gohlke's“Grain Elevator Being Repaired – Minneapolis, MN” (1974), and Dykinga's“Cape Royal Rays, North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona” (1990). Together, they point to a collection that is as much about photographic history as it is about the images themselves.

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