Curators: Martha Briggs and Catherine Grandgeorge
Project Director: Diane Dillon
Exhibition Conservators and Installers: Lesa Dowd and Kasie Janssen
Digital Photographer: Catherine Gass
Designer for Exhibition Graphics: M.N. Kennedy
Designer for Booklet and Promotional Graphics: Andrea Villaseñor
Editor: Alex Teller
 
Special thanks to Sarah Hoskins and longtime Zion Hill resident Myrtle B. (Livers) Hughes,
who identified many of the individuals in the photographs. Myrtle is pictured here holding
Helen Morrison’s photograph of her as a child.

Photographing Freetowns is sponsored by the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, Joan and Robert Feitler, and the Rosaline G. Cohn Endowment for Exhibitions.

About the Exhibition

This exhibition, Photographing Freetowns: African American Kentucky through the Lens of Helen Balfour Morrison, 1935–1946, was organized by the Newberry Library and is on view from January 20 through April 15, 2017.

The Helen Balfour Morrison Photographs of Kentucky African American Communities are a 2016 gift of the Morrison-Shearer Foundation of Northbrook, Illinois. Consisting of more than 110 vintage prints and nearly 500 negatives dating from 1935 to 1946, the photographs are largely unknown to modern audiences. Morrison exhibited a small selection of Kentucky prints during the 1930s, and then they disappeared from public view.

We are very pleased to introduce a selection of Morrison’s Kentucky photographs in this publication, and to present over 80 of her vintage prints in Photographing Freetowns. Both this publication and the exhibition offer a window into the daily lives of the black residents of rural freetowns or hamlets, especially Zion Hill and Sugar Hill, that sprang up after emancipation in the Kentucky Bluegrass region surrounding Lexington.

We assembled preliminary information about the photographs from a number of sources. The Morrison-Shearer Foundation shared research by Sarah Hoskins, which included identifications of people and places by Myrtle B. Livers Hughes, a lifelong Zion Hill resident. Using these names, we discovered more information about individuals and communities in genealogical tools and published and unpublished local history sources.

We have barely scratched the surface in our study of this remarkable collection. When Morrison’s larger “Great Americans” photographic series joins her Kentucky work and her personal papers at the Newberry in 2017, these materials will offer students of 20th century American culture the opportunity to understand the African American photographs in their historical context and to assess Morrison’s contribution to documentary and artistic photography.

Photographing Freetowns: African American Kentucky through the Lens of Helen Balfour Morrison, 1935–1946 is sponsored by the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, Joan and Robert Feitler, and the Rosaline G. Cohn Endowment for Exhibitions.

The collection inventory, with links to digital images of all of Morrison’s vintage prints and negatives, is available online at https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/MorrisonKY.xml