Photograph Collection

Petersburg Federal Reformatory Album

Photograph Collection

C1: 087
1 album, 16 x 11 inches, 111 pages, 310 photographs, typed narrative
1948 

C1:087 Petersburg Federal Reformatory Album

More than a picture album, this carefully composed narrative history of the Petersburg Federal Reformatory (now the low-security Federal Corrections Institute outside Hopewell, Virginia) describes and photographically documents the institution’s first eighteen years. Founded in 1930 as a makeshift camp on former farm properties along the Appomattox, the reformatory quickly achieved “an atmosphere of permanency” through the efforts of a relatively small inmate population the narrative characterizes as enthusiastic, industrious, and dignified. 

C1:087 Petersburg Federal Reformatory Album

Indeed, with its stately administrative building and quadrangle of formal hedges, the reformatory, in these photos, looks more like an English country estate than a Depression-era prison. According to the narrative, the inmates took great pride in beautifying the reformatory, which they essentially built from the ground up with local materials and resources, including dogwood, mimosa, redbud, and rambler roses. An ornamental fish pond was even created by flooding the cellar of a vanished farmhouse. A beautiful Arts and Crafts house, built by inmates for the warden, featured a fireplace of petrified wood.  The reformatory was from its earliest days almost completely self-sustaining, with vast fields of alfalfa, squash, and potatoes; horse and mule barns; a dairy herd and modern milking machines; a piggery and slaughterhouse; a cinderblock-making facility; a power plant; and even its own fire station … Read the rest

Petersburg Federal Reformatory Album Read More »

Willoughby A. Reade Photograph Collection

Photograph Collection

C1: 114
1901–1910
1 album, 11 x 14 inches, containing 78 prints; 32 glass-plate negatives with corresponding contact prints 

C1:114 Willoughby A. Reade Photograph Collection

Willoughby Reade (1865–1952), author of several books, including When Hearts Were True (1907), a set of short stories set in Virginia, was born in London, England, educated at Howard College in Alabama, and served for most of his life as a professor of English at Episcopal High School in Alexandria. His first wife was Mary Wheeler Robertson, of Abingdon, Virginia, whose childhood home, the Meadows, became the Reades’ annual summer place, the site of the first national camp for girls (Camp Glenrochie, officially founded by the Reades in 1910), and one of the main subject locales for this collection. 

Reade’s original platinum prints are mounted in the album with handwritten captions. The dramatic natural landmarks of White Top, Red Rock Cove, Pinnacle Rock, Backbone Rock, Watauga River, and South Holston River—environs that would have been familiar to the sporting girls of Camp Glenrochie in its heyday—appear in shots with a dreamy, almost Proustian quality. Sunlight seems to drip onto the ferny forest floors. Toward the end of the album, nature studies give way to photos of white-frocked campers at the Meadows, the great white house smothered in trees.

Arrangement and access:
The album prints are numbered sequentially, 1 through 78. Those glass plate negatives and contact prints corresponding to the … Read the rest

Willoughby A. Reade Photograph Collection Read More »

J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Drawing Collection, Ephemera Collection, Photograph Collection, Print Collection

D1: 001
1989–2010
Mixed materials—including vintage prints, color snapshots, oil studies, finished drawings, process drawings, ink-jet printouts, flyers, and posters—ranging in size from 2 x 3 to 26 x 36 inches

D1:001 J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Richmond-based painter J. Bohannan was born in New York City in 1950 and moved with his family at age two to Hilton Village, Newport News, and later, as a teenager, to Hopewell. After studying art at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bohannan worked as a salesman in his father’s art supply store, selling his own original artwork on the side. By his own admission, his paintings of the time were derivative of the European high art and contemporary abstraction he had studied at RPI. Then one day he picked up a copy of Matthew Baigell’s The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (1974) from a discount book bin. Until then, Bohannan says, he had never really seen, much less studied, modern American painting, despite four years of formal art education.

D1:001 J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Working alongside street artists in Verona and Munich, copying famous Caravaggios and Bouchers in pastel on public sidewalks, Bohannan developed a passion for “plastic realism,” embedding human forms in visual space in a way that is, as Bohannan puts it, “more there than right”—that is, more materially … Read the rest

J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection Read More »

Carney Christie Scrapbook and Ephemera Collection

Ephemera Collection, Photograph Collection

C1: 123
ca.1900–1930
Four scrapbook albums, two photograph albums with 200+ photos, mixed ephemera 

C1:123 Carney Christie Scrapbook and Ephemera Collection

C1:123 Carney Christie Scrapbook and Ephemera Collection

Unlike many of our Prints and Photographs Collections holdings, which derive from individual artists, photographers, and agencies, the Carney Christie Collection derives from many sources—family photos, postcards, handwritten correspondence (on hotel stationary), theater programs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera—which dovetail into a mixed media portrait of an individual man. 

A graduate of Staunton Military Academy, the actor Carney Pitcher Christie (1887–1932) gained early and enduring professional success on Broadway, perfecting the role of Pietro in Edward Locke’s comedy The Climax. Christie was the son of a prominent West Virginia druggist and brother to Mary Christie, a music teacher and sought-after pianist (and presumed assembler of the materials in our collection) with whom he often collaborated on popular “interpretive recitals” of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Thomas Nelson Page. The family maintained residences in Richmond and Brooklyn, and a summer home in the resort town of Palmer Lake, Colorado, and Christie corresponded with them, especially Mary, during his theatrical tours all over the United States. According to one theater reviewer, he was “the very incarnation of buoyant youth.” About 1928, however, a “nervous collapse” forced Christie to quit touring and instead teach acting at the Leland Powers School in Boston. He later moved to Richmond to live with his … Read the rest

Carney Christie Scrapbook and Ephemera Collection Read More »

Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters

Photograph Collection

C1: 126
1953–1975
252 posters, 8.5 x 11 inches

C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)

“Safety is better than compensation.” This sentiment echoes—both explicitly and implicitly—through the world of these safety posters. Here cartoon workers are eaten by machines and lose limbs and eyes, all to the “music” of morbid puns and innocuous slogans (“You can’t be silly safely!”) reminiscent in style and sentiment to Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1844 children’s book, Struwwelpeter, in which violent punishments are merrily delivered to disobedient or imprudent children.  The posters give a sense of a workplace ethos before the advent of political correctness.  A notable softening of the posters’ visual style corresponds to a transition from artist Dick Poythress to Boyd Leffler of Salem, Virginia. As they progress through time they begin to suggest a subtle “holistic” interest in the lives of state employees. They conflate the professional and the personal, caution against overwork at home, emphasize the need for weekend rest and recreation, and even veer into sentimental and emotional territory quite out of character with the posters’ early comic approach.

Arrangement and access:
The posters are arranged chronologically.

  • C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
    C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
  • C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
    C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
  • C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
    C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
  • C1:126 Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters (LVA 10_1265_001)
    C1:126 Collection of
… Read the rest

Collection of Virginia Department of Labor and Industry Safety Posters Read More »