News Release — August 14, 2008

45 Photographs

Masterworks from the Wittliff’s Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection
On view August 15 – September 28, 2008

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 September 28, 2008. 

The images in this 45-day 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 to expand their public and exhibition spaces this fall. For updates, and more about the Wittliff’s literary archives, photographs, exhibits, and events, call (512) 245-2313, or visit our website.