{"id":646,"date":"2011-01-06T18:25:52","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T00:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.atomicnewstools.com\/pages\/?p=646"},"modified":"2012-01-28T18:26:06","modified_gmt":"2012-01-29T00:26:06","slug":"revisiting-a-favorite-campus-haunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/revisiting-a-favorite-campus-haunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting a Favorite Campus Haunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>

I should have mentioned this earlier so that those interested could have made it to the photography exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center at UT. But I forgot about getting there myself until it nearly was too late, and now it is.<\/p>\n

The HRC is one of my favorite haunts in Austin. I spent hours as a graduate student in photojournalism at UT three decades ago, doing grunt work in the bowels of this vast repository. As a teaching assistant, I helped catalogue photographs from the morgue of the New York Journal-American, a dead newspaper whose 3 million photographs are part of the HRC\u2019s holdings. There were black-and-white photos of murder scenes, tens of thousand of mug shots, grip-and-grin check-passing photos \u2014 a visual history of that city from the 1930s through the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n

The exhibit, \u201cDiscovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection,\u201d highlighted one of the HRC\u2019s most famous acquisitions and provided a rare glimpse of photographs from the media\u2019s early history \u2014 including the first photograph taken by Joseph Ni\u00e8pce in 1826. It is a courtyard scene in a small French village. The exposure took eight hours. The photograph is barely visible from its pewter surface when one views it from an angle. Its value, of course, is that it is the first photograph.<\/p>\n

I wandered the exhibit, hung throughout several spaces. Several photographs are so rare and sensitive to light that they hung draped with a velvet cloth that one lifted in order to view the image. Some of the stars of the show included Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson \u2014 better known as Lewis Carroll, author of \u201cAlice in Wonderland.\u201d Dodgson was an avid photographer. Down the wall is a study by Eadweard Muybridge of a nude man swinging a baseball bat in 1887. Muybridge used photography to study motion and eventually proved through multiple photographs shot in time sequence that at some point when a horse gallops all four hooves are in the air. Leland Stanford, the namesake of the famed California university, paid him to prove it. Stanford, a former governor, owned horses. I figure he was trying to win a bar bet.<\/p>\n

Since I was already there, I took a quick look at the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed on a press. The University\u2019s copy is one of just five complete copies in this country. UT bought it in 1978. I never tire of looking at this magnificent piece of art and history, printed more than 550 years ago. Johann Gutenberg launched the information revolution with his press. I still love to hear a press starting up, ink flying on to paper using essentially the same principle.<\/p>\n

Other exhibits in recent years that have drawn me to the HRC include one drawn from the papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein \u2014 the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story and brought down a president. Their efforts and subsequent fame \u2014 especially from the movie, \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d \u2014 spurred an entire generation of now-middle aged folks to enter journalism, including me. Of course, with a bachelor\u2019s in philosophy, English and history I was unqualified for anything else.<\/p>\n

The manuscript to \u201cOn the Road\u201d by Jack Kerouac, typed on a continuous scroll of paper and stretching 120 feet, was the centerpiece of \u201cOn the Road With the Beats,\u201d a 2008 exhibit. As the HRC\u2019s website notes, the end of the scroll \u2014 and thus Kerouac\u2019s original ending for the book \u2014 is missing. Kerouac blamed a cocker spaniel owned by a friend for the missing pages. The dog indeed ate his homework.<\/p>\n

The next exhibit, \u201cCulture Unbound \u2014 Collecting in the Twenty-First Century,\u201d starts on Feb. 1 and runs through the end of July, showcasing material from some of the country\u2019s finest contemporary writers. A companion exhibit celebrates the life of playwright Tennessee Williams.<\/p>\n

Visiting the HRC, which is just north of Dobie Mall on Guadalupe, only costs the gasoline required to get there. Donations are appreciated but no admission is charged. There are darned few things that are still free these days. (Getting one\u2019s eyeglasses adjusted at an optometrist\u2019s office comes to mind.) Keep the HRC on your list if looking for a pleasant few hours soaking up some culture. Park either in the Blanton Museum\u2019s parking garage for a few bucks, or in the Bob Bullock State History Museum\u2019s lot for free and get a bit of exercise hiking up the hill. It\u2019s worth the trip.<\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryI should have mentioned this earlier so that those interested could have made it to the photography exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center at UT. But I forgot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[40,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-40","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}