Photographer Cedric Nunn, Then & Now Collection, South Africa Documentary Photographs Collection

Photographs in one format or another have been an unrecognized component of manuscript collections since the birth of photography.  The Rubenstein Library manuscript collections contain an extensive array of photographic formats documenting the history of the photographic process, including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, salt prints, albumen prints, cyanotypes, carbon prints, pastel prints, and autochromes.

Notable collections include Francis Frith photographs of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe; early American landscape photographs made during the Western exploratory expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s by Timothy O'Sullivan, John K. Hillers, William Bell, and William Henry Jackson; photographs of the Civil War by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner; Sidney Gamble photographs of China, 1908-1932; Edward S. Curtis photogravures of Native Americans; and Doris Ulmann photographs of Kentucky, 1930.

The Archive of Documentary Arts collects photography from around the world related to human rights, social change, occupational culture, migration, race and ethnicity, gender, the American South, Africa, and African American history and culture. Since the early 1980s, ADA has been actively collecting documentary photography in support of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (formerly known as the Center for Documentary Photography). The collecting initiative focuses on acquiring and preserving the entire body of a photographer's work - prints, negatives, contact sheets, motion picture footage, sound recordings, correspondence, journals and related materials.

This unique and generous collecting policy combined with excellent photographic storage facilities has proved very successful, bringing in the work of William Gedney, Paul Kwilecki, Frank Espada, Petra Barth, Vince Cianni, Mariette Pathy Allen, Alex Harris, Tom Rankin and Mel Rosenthal, among others. ADA also archives the materials created through documentary projects sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies, such as Behind the Veil, the African-American Self Portrait Project; Indivisible: Local Heroes Changing America; and selected student work.

In order to strengthen its collections of South African photography, the Archive of Documentary Arts forged a new model of digital collecting with the University of Cape Town Library to preserve and make accessible the work of South African photographers-essentially creating parallel archives. The South African Documentary Photographs Collection currently contains the work of over 40 photographers, including David Goldblatt, Anne Fischer, Santu Mofokeng, Daniel Morolong, Cedric Nunn, Jeeva Rajgopaul, Guy Tillim, Paul Weinberg, Giselle Wolfson, and Graeme Williams.

Please see our Photographers in the Collections page for more information about photographers represented in the Rubenstein Library.