“Documenting Ethnic Wedding Traditions in America: The Photographs of Katrina Thomas,” an exhibition of work by Katrina Thomas (BMC Class of 1949), will open on Tuesday, September 23 in the Canaday Library Class of 1912 Rare Book Room. The exhibition was curated by Tracie Wilson, 2007-2008 Post-Doctoral Fellow in Scholarly Information Resources, and Jenny Castle (BMC 2009). The images were selected from a collection of more than 800 photographs that Thomas donated to Bryn Mawr College in 2007, along with extensive notes about each wedding. Extracts from these notes are incorporated in the descriptions of the individual photographs.

Thomas began photographing ethnic festivals and parades in the late 1960s as a way of documenting the increasingly diverse nature of American society. Within a few years she focused on weddings, in which she could see the importance of cultural traditions to a community more clearly than in the often-scripted and commercialized festivals. By capturing the weddings on film, she was able to highlight a community’s religious and cultural traditions while revealing how those traditions were changing in a new world.

Over the last thirty years, Thomas has photographed weddings in more than 70 ethnic and religious communities. Most of the weddings were celebrated on the East Coast, but she also recorded ceremonies across the United States. While the greatest number took place in recent immigrant families, there are also many in older immigrant communities. Thomas sought out weddings where the family had decided to maintain or revive their group’s ceremonial traditions, although often enacting them within a contemporary context.

The entire collection of photographs can be found online as part of the Tri-College Digital Collections: http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm4/wedding.php.

Katrina Thomas has had a long career as a free-lance photographer. She worked extensively in Africa and the Middle East, and her photographs have appeared in Aramco World, Time, Newsweek, and publications of the US Information Agency. Her ethnic wedding photographs were featured in Something Old, Something New: Ethnic Weddings in America, a traveling exhibit co-sponsored by Modern Bride Magazine and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia in the 19080s. She is also the author of three photographic books for children, My Skyscraper City: a Child’s View of New York (1963), Chito (1968), and Oh, Boy! Babies! (1980).

For additional information, contact the Special Collections Department at 610-526-6576.

Rhys Carpenter Library

Educating the Eye: Nineteenth-Century Optical Toys and Devices

October - December, 2008

Open regular Library hours.

“Educating the Eye: Nineteenth-Century Optical Toys and Devices” presents for the first time a selection of nineteenth-century optical devices and visual media from the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.  The exhibition examines the ways in these objects contributed to, and were themselves produced by, new types of viewing experiences throughout the nineteenth century.  A selection of rare books, photographs, works on paper, lantern slides and other related objects document the various technologies that began to reshape how viewers perceived and inhabited their world. Many of the objects on view are part of the Anthony R. Michaelis Collection.  Dr. Anthony R. Michaelis (1916-2007) was one of the preeminent science writers of the 20th century.  After World War II he became involved in research on high speed film and went on to edit Discovery.  He was the Daily Telegraph’s scientific correspondent for four years, leaving in 1973 to found and edit The Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.  An avid collector of scientific instruments, optical toys, rare books and works in other media, his interests ranged across a variety of fields.  Through the generous gift of one of his friends, Bryn Mawr was honored to receive a portion of  Dr. Michaelis’ collection. The exhibition was curated by Matthew Feliz, a graduate student in the History of Art, as part of his Curatorial Internship, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant to the Graduate Group.