Chrysler Museum Showing Period, Modern Pinhole Photos

By Deborah Fitts

NORFOLK, Va. — The Chrysler Museum is hosting a dual photography exhibition featuring both period photos and contemporary Civil War-themed pinhole photographs by Willie Anne Wright through Oct. 29.

“Civil War Photography from the David L. Hack Collection” features 50 photographs from the major collection of more than 300 images that the museum acquired in 1998. In appreciation, the Chrysler renamed a permanent photography gallery in honor of Hack, and made a commitment to keep Civil War photography continually on view in that gallery.

Although the collection contains such famous images as Alexander Gardner’s photograph of Abraham Lincoln and Tad, most of the other works have rarely if ever been published or exhibited. The collection contains an assortment of print sizes and shapes, as well as a wide range of subjects, including Andersonville and Gardner’s series of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators in 1865.

The exhibit includes Peter S. Weaver’s photo of the embalming tent at Gettysburg’s Camp Letterman; five members of Mosby’s Rangers relaxing, three with their pipes; and the Mathew Brady photo of Robert E. Lee flanked by his son Gen. Custis Lee and Col. Walter H. Taylor outside Lee’s Richmond home after the surrender.

The museum has had 33 of the photographs conserved. During this process it was discovered that some of them were not albumen prints, but much rarer salted paper prints. The photographs are shown on their original mounts as they were presented during the 19th century.

The Hack photographs are complemented by “Civil War Redux: Civil War Pinhole Photographs by Willie Anne Wright.” Pinhole photographs are created when light, reflecting off of a subject and entering a darkened enclosed box through a tiny hole – the “pinhole” – creates an inverted visible image of that subject which registers on a surface parallel to the plane of the pinhole.

This method requires longer exposure times, eight seconds in bright sun, and when light-sensitive photographic materials are placed on that parallel plane, the image is then recorded.

Wright used this process to photograph at reenactments. She said she felt an affinity with the period wet plate photographers whose work was equally time-consuming. “My subjects, as those of Mathew Brady and others of the period, did not include battle action. I concentrated on capturing camp scenes, picturing impressions of personages both famous and little known, medical and death- related images and portrayals of widows.”

Information about the exhibit and special related programs is available at (757) 664-6200, museum@chrysler.org or www.chrysler.org.