International Photography Curators Visit LCP

Photo by Harris Fogel

About twenty-five members of Oracle, an international group of photographic curators, visited the Library Company on November 8. Oracle’s annual meeting had been held in Blue Bell, a Philadelphia suburb, the week before, and attendees from as far away as China, Spain, and the Netherlands stayed on to visit area museums and galleries including the Princeton University Art Museum, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Curator of Prints and Photographs Sarah Weatherwax, a new Oracle member, organized and led a tour of the Library Company that included a brief talk outlining the history of the library and our mission today, as well as an opportunity to view the current exhibition John A. McAllister’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front. Visitors also had the chance to see a selection of daguerreotypes displayed in the Logan Room and to tour the Print Department’s second floor reading room where more highlights of the photographic collection were on display. Prior to their visit, very few Oracle members had been aware of the Library Company and the richness of our photographic holdings. From an outdoor daguerreotype by the Langenheim brothers, to early experiments with the paper negative/positive process by Robert Montgomery Bird, to a motion study by Thomas Eakins, our guests were treated to a morning of visual treasures.