Collections: pho

Organized by UMass anthropology professor Joel Halpern, the images in this collection were put on display during the Cambodian New Year celebration in 1986. As part of the celebration, members of the large community of Cambodian refugees who have resettled in Amherst were recognized.

The collection consists of photographs as well as programs, correspondence, and financial records pertaining to the Cambodian-Americans in Amherst New Year’s Day Celebration and Exhibit of 1986.

The entomologist Charles F. Clagg was born in Barnstable, Mass., in 1904 and received his bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1927. Although never able to complete his graduate degree, Clagg enjoyed a long and productive career in entomology. Listed as a graduate student at MAC in 1929-1930, Clagg took part in an extensive collecting trip to the Philippines in 1930 and 1931. Beginning in June 1930 near Calian in Davao del Sur (Mindanao), Clagg spent several months collecting flies in and around the active Mount Apo volcano, in the Lawa and Calian river valleys, and in the Lalun mountains, traveling to the eastern peninsula of Davao early in 1931. He remained in the Pacific region later in his career, working as an entomologist for the U.S. Navy.

The twenty photographs taken by Charles F. Clagg in 1930 document his entomological collecting trip to Davao, Mindanao, in the Philippines. Primarily personal in nature, rather than professional, they were taken on Clagg’s visit to a coconut plantation run by American expatriates Henry and George Pahl and illustrate the local sights in Davao, including work in harvesting coconuts and the production of copra, the production of Manilla hemp, a horse fight at Calian, and Manobos who came to the plantation trade. Also included are three photographs of Clagg’s quarters while collecting high in the Lalun Mountains. The captions provided by Clagg on the back of each photograph have been transcribed verbatim.

In May 1985, a group of activists in Western Massachusetts opposed to the interventionist U.S. foreign policy of the Reagan era formed a construction brigade to assist with basic human needs and express solidarity with the people of Central America. Modeled on the Venceremos Brigade, Construyamos Juntos, Building Peace of Nicaragua, raised over $20,000 for construction supplies in addition to funds for individual travel. Between January and March 1986, the 17 activists joined a smaller brigade from West Virginia in constructing the Carlos Armin Gonzales elementary school in San Pedro de Lovago. During their first month in Nicaragua, they witnessed a Contra assault on the town that left one assailant dead and two residents of the town wounded.

This exhibit includes 55 mounted images and 99 35mm slides taken during the brigade’s time in Nicaragua, documenting the brigade’s construction work and providing a valuable visual record of life in Nicaragua during the Contra war. Used in public talks about Contruyamos Juntos, the collection includes exhibit labels that explain the purpose and activity of the brigade, the history of Nicaragua, and the Contra attack in January 1986.

Michael Cornish first became interested in gravemarkers while writing a senior thesis at the Massachusetts College of Art, and since that time, he has prepared numerous exhibitions of his photographic work and conducted important research on colonial markers. Widely known for his work on the carver Joseph Barbur of West Medway, Mass., and a group of “tendril carvers” in southeastern Massachusetts, Cornish speaks frequently to historical societies around Massachusetts, delivering slide shows tailored to the particular area. An inventory photographer for the City of Boston’s Historic Burying Ground Initiative, he has also consulted for several towns regarding the preservation and rehabilitation of their burying grounds. As a member of the AGS Board of Directors, Cornish has worked in various capacities and played an active role in organizing and participating in the annual conventions, programs, exhibits, and tours.

The Cornish Collection includes many thousands of photographs and direct rubbings of early New England gravestones, primarily in Massachusetts and Connecticut, focusing on their beauty and artistic merit. Originally inspired by the work of Harriette Merrifield Forbes, and encouraged by Dan and Jessie Farber, Cornish photographed in a variety of formats, including Kodachrome transparencies, black-and-white negatives, and black-and-white prints. The collection also includes research notes relating to his work on Barbur and other stonecarvers.

A founder of the Western Massachusetts branch of the American Friends Service Committee and the Traprock Peace Center, Frances Crowe was a legendary peace activist. Born in Missouri in March 1919, Crowe became a committed pacifist in 1945 after learning of the devastation of the bombings in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Moving to Northampton in 1951 with her husband Thomas, a physician, she began organizing for peace and against nuclear weapons, increasing her peacework during the Vietnam War, she she worked as a draft counselor in Northampton. A member of the Society of Friends, she joined the War Resisters League, SANE, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, among many other organizations, and was arrested dozens of times for civil disobedience during protests opposing war and militarism, nuclear energy, American imperialism in Central America, and apartheid, and she became a war tax resister after the first Iraq War. An activist to the very end, she died on Aug. 27, 2019, at the age of 100.

This small collection of photographs was kept by Frances Crowe in her role as contributor to Peace Work, the newsletter of the American Friends Service Committee, or for inclusion in the AFSC files. Concentrated in the early 1980s, they depict a range of peace and antinuclear protests in western Massachusetts. The majority of the images were taken by Crowe’s associate, Miriam Leader.

A native of Providence, R.I., Bobby Davis arrived in Amherst in 1977 and soon afterward entered the University Without Walls program at UMass to earn his college degree. A talented jazz musician, Davis became immersed in the vibrant local arts scene, learning photography while writing for the student publications Nummo News and the Collegian, and covering performances by a steady stream of jazz and R&B acts touring through the area. Working later as a photographer for Smith College and traveling for the yearbook company, Delmar Studios, Davis eventually settled in Northampton, where he remains active as a photographer.

The Davis collection contains ten exhibition prints of jazz musicians performing in Amherst, including Art Blakey, Angela Bofill, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, Oscar Peterson, Max Roach, Gil Scott-Heron, and Archie Shepp.

Born and raised in France, the photojournalist Lionel Delevingne studied education at l’Ecole Normale in Paris, but settled permanently in the United States in 1975. Based at first in Northampton, Mass., he became a prolific photographer of American social movements while working for the Valley Advocate and other publications, covering the early years of the Clamshell Alliance and the antinuclear movement in considerable depth. His work has been exhibited frequently and published widely in the mainstream and alternative press, including the New York Times, Le Figaro Magazine, Die Zeit, Newsweek, Washington Post Magazine, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair.

The Delevingne collection includes remarkable visual documentation of the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and beyond, including some of the its most iconic images. Beginning with coverage of the Seabrook occupation, Delevingne covered the movement as it spread throughout the northeastern U.S. and internationally. The collection includes exhibition prints, prints for publication, and digitized images ranging in date from the mid-1970s through 1990s. Copyright in the images has been retained by Delevingne.

UMass Amherst faculty members Walter Denny (Art History) and Joel M. Halpern (Anthropology) collaborated in 1997 on an exhibition in the University Gallery exploring Bosnian multiculturalism prior the Yugoslav civil war. Denny, a specialist in Islamic art, and Halpern, an ethnographer whose research in the Balkans began in the early 1950s, assembled dozens of images from eight photographers depicting Bosnia from the nineteenth century to the start of the civil war, illustrating both the past history of the region and then-current attempts to erase that history in the name of cultural purity. The final part of the exhibition included a set of prints first exhibited in Sarajevo in 1992 comprising creative reactions to the war by Bosnian artists.

This small collection consists of 38 matted prints, 20×24″, that were part of the Thin Veneer exhibition in April through June 1997. All were taken by Halpern during field work in Bosnia betwee 1953 and 1996.

Wildwood Cemetery, Amherst, Non. 2004

An historical archaeologist with an MA in Anthropology from UMass Amherst, Bob Drinkwater has recorded, photographed, and reported on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gravestones and stonecutters of western Massachusetts for over four decades, and he has identified a number of Connecticut River Valley carvers. A charter member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, he has been active in nearly every aspect of the organization, contributing scholarly articles to its journals, organizing and presenting at its conferences, and serving terms as President and Trustee. He offers a workshop, “Gravestone Studies 101: A Survey of Gravestone Art in the Pioneer Valley”, at Greenfield Community College.

Focused on Bob Drinkwater’s research on western Massachusetts, the collection contains several hundred images recording early gravestones in the cemeteries of Amherst and Hadley, photo documentation of the stonecutters of Berkshire County and the Quabbin region, and two longer works written by Drinkwater: “From quarry to graveyard: a schematic reconstruction of early New England gravestone-carving technology” (his honor’s thesis, ca.1975) and “Notes on Methods of Collection, Classification, Recording, and Analysis of Data for Stylistic and Demographic Studies of Early New England Gravestones.”

While working as caretaker for veterans’ graves in 1966, Edward H. Duane became concerned about the deterioration he saw affecting the older tombstones. A resident of Leicester and (after 1968) Paxton, Mass., Duane was employed for many years as a shipper for companies in nearby Worcester, but preserving the information on tombstones became his calling. Over the following years, he made hundreds of rubbings of New England tombstones, teaching the technique at workshops and classes throughout the region. Among other works, he was author of The Old Burial Ground, Rutland, Mass., 1717-1888 (1983).

The Duane Collection contains an array of materials used by Edward Duane in his stone rubbing workshops in the 1970s and 1980s, along with newsclippings and short publications on New England gravestones and gravestone preservation. Among other items is an early essay of his, “Old New England Headstone, 1668-1815” (1967), accompanied by related correspondence from Allan Ludwig.