Frank and Frances Carpenter: Capturing the World | Exhibition of Photography

The Carpenter collection is a rich photographic archive consisting of approximately 5400 prints arranged in 29 albums, 10,400 loose photographs, and 7,000 glass and film negatives. These extraordinary images were created between 1880 and 1934, with the bulk dating from 1910 to 1925.

Frank and Frances Carpenter took many of the photographs themselves, but they also collected images from commercial sources.  As a result, the collection is an invaluable record of their worldwide travels. Their travels spanned Europe, with a particular emphasis on the Basque Country, and extended to the Middle East, Far East, Africa, and the Americas.

The Carpenter photographs are more than just beautiful images; they are a remarkable documentation of the daily lives of people from around the world. The authors focused on aspects such as industry, clothing, agriculture, architecture, transportation, education, art, customs,  religious practices and spiritual leaders.

Photographs taken in the United States emphasise natural resources, food and agriculture, industries, health, and welfare. Among them are also portraits of Native Americans.

Frank Carpenter

Born in Mansfield, Ohio, Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) became a journalist, photographer, world traveler, and the author of books on geography. His wanderlust resulted in articles and books that informed American readers about life in other countries and enabled him to accumulate an impressive rangeof visual documentation. Carpenter began his writing career as a journalist and his assignments fueled his compilation of images from around the world.

After graduating from the University of Wooster (Ohio) in 1877, Carpenter began newspaper work as the Columbus, Ohio, correspondent for the Cleveland Leader newspaper. He got a taste of life abroad as a foreign correspondent for that paper in 1881. In 1882 his work for the Cleveland Leader took him to Washington, D.C., where he was the paper’s Washington correspondent until 1888, writing a regular column on life in “Carp’s Washington.” He also did work for the American Press Association starting in 1885 and the New York World in 1887. Carpenter collected enough assignments with newspaper syndicates and Cosmopolitan Magazine to pay for a trip around the world in 1888-1889. He was charged with sending a “letter” each week to twelve periodicals, describing life in the countries to which he traveled. He continued to travel extensively, logging 25,000 miles in South America in 1898, and later doing letter-writing tours of Central America, South America, and Europe

. A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, the National Press Club, and numerous scientific societies, Carpenter published widely on travel and authored the Carpenter’s Geographic Readers, standard texts used in American schools for forty years. His writings helped popularize culturalanthropology and geography. Carpenter’s globetrotting did not preclude his having a family and sinking roots in the Washington, D.C., area. He married Joanna Condict in 1883, and they had two children. His real estate holdings inWashington, D.C., made him a millionaire. Frank Carpenter died in Nanking, China, in 1924 at age 69, on his third trip around the world.

Frances Carpenter

Frances Carpenter (1890-1972) began accompanying her father Frank on his travels as both secretary and photographer upon her graduation from Smith College in 1912. She co-authored a number of books with him including The Clothes We Wear (1926) and The Foods We Eat (1926). She later edited the articles her father had written in the 1880s about life in Washington, D.C., resulting in the publication, Carp’sWashington (1960).

Inheriting her father’s interest in cultures outside the U.S., Frances Carpenter became an author and geographer in her own right. She wrote of foreign legends and peoples for a youthful audience in books such as Our Neighbors Near and Far (1933) and Tales of A Russian Grandmother (1933). Not only do the books reflect the knowledge Frances gained through her travels, but a few also include illustrations she chose from the Carpenter collection.

Frances Carpenter was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and Vice President of the International Societyof Women Geographers. She married W. Chapin Huntington, the commercial attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. As Mrs. W. Chapin Huntington she presented the Carpenter collection to the Library of Congress in 1951 and continued to donatematerial until her death in 1972.

Photographs on display are sourced from the collections of the Library of Congress.

The exhibition was curated by Katarzyna Godula, Ewelina Królik, Magdalena Kulka, and Wiktoria Mirosław, students from the Lublin Clothing and Textile School Complex during their 2023 internship at the Culture Workshops in Lublin.

Details

When: 2-30 September 2024
Where: The Hartwig Alley
Outdoor exhibition, available at all times.

Accessibility

English translation

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