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A series shot in Pittsburg, Kansas, during that town's annual rodeo. Bull-riders, cowboys, an all-female string band, and spectators young and old, several of whom are in uniform - a view of Americans at play during wartime.
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Scotland 1953-1957
Portraits of Scottish tinker and balladeer Jimmy MacBeath, probably shot in 1957 during a recording session in London, and a candid photo of folklorist and poet Hamish Henderson.
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While making recordings of English and Welsh folk song between 1951 and 1958, Alan Lomax took a
small selection of photos of Harry Cox, the singers of the Blaxhall Ship Inn, and an unidentified tinker, perhaps
Eddie Sanger.
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In 1952 Alan Lomax acquired a used Leica and shot over seven hundred black and white photos to accompany
his audio recordings in Spain. This Spanish collection represents Lomax's first serious attempt to put
photography at the center of the documentation process. The collection portrays styles of traditional
Spanish folk music and dance from Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Castile, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia,
Mallorca, Ibiza, Formentera, Murcia, Navarro, the Pais Vasco, and Santander, with images of performers,
instruments, dance styles, and traditional dress, and many in-depth portraits as well. Scenes of
agriculture, domestic work, village marketplaces and streets, child-rearing and family life, townscapes
and architecture, and regional customs reveal much about the "lost decades" in Spanish history, obliterated
in the fear and silence of the Franco regime during the 1940s and '50s.
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Over 1,300 black and white photographs illustrate Alan Lomax's six months' of field recording in Italy with
Diego Carpitella in 1954 and 1955. His growing skill with the camera produced a collection of images evoking the musical culture of peasants, shepherds, fishermen, and artisans in over a hundred localities from Sicily to the Alps. They bear testimony to an era in Italian life and history that was both tragic and enormously fecund.
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800 black and white photos and color slides represent Alan Lomax's 1959 and 1960 collecting trips in
the Southern U.S., with images of Delta blues guitarists, fife-and-drum ensembles, Ozark and Appalachian
ballad singers, Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and prison work gangs. Many of the iconic singers and
musicians of the period - Fred McDowell, Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Vera Hall, Bessie Jones and the
Georgia Sea Island Singers, Texas Gladden, Ed and Lonnie Young, James Carter, and others - are represented
in the collection, shown on their farms, porches, in their churches, and at hard labor.
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During his Caribbean fieldwork in 1962, Alan Lomax took photos and color
slides to accompany his audio recordings. They focus on then living music and dance traditions of the Eastern Caribbean and Lesser Antilles: Trinidad, Grenada, Dominica, Carriacou, Guadaloupe, Nevis, St. Barts, St. Kitts, St. Lucia and Anguilla. It includes images of schoolchildren singing and dancing at their games, stick fighting sequences and tug-o-war matches accompanied by drummers, chante-fable, or story-song performances, the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, boat-pulling and sawing songs, Shango ceremonies, and powerful portraits of performers.
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Shots of Ed Young, Howlin' Wolf, and Son House taken in tandem with Lomax's filming of the proceedings at an ad hoc juke joint assembled for the '66 Newport Festival.
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Dominican Republic 1967
Portraits of several unidentified performers Lomax met during his brief recording trip to the Dominican Republic.
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Louisiana 1983 and 1985
Photos from Cajun Louisiana - Abbeville, Lafayette, and Mamou, among other locales - shot as Lomax and film crew produced footage of Cajuns at work and play for what would become the "Cajun Country" episode of the American Patchwork television series on PBS.
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A few prints without provenance.
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