Windows Newsletter 10-05.qxd - University of North Carolina at ...

“His images are going to be seen and enjoyed not just by
Tar Heels but by people all around the world.”
war on poverty. He is gratified that his
images of the Chattooga River helped lead
to its designation by Congress as a Wild
and Scenic River. Sturkey was inducted
into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame in
1991.
“My working philosophy was to
capture the emotion first and make
composition and technique secondary,”
Sturkey wrote in A Slice of Time, a
Carolinas Album 1950-1990. He was
fascinated by people with charisma, and
he photographed politicians, entertainers,
athletes and evangelists exuding heat and
light in front of audiences — or switched
off and withdrawn in solitary moments.
For all the historic value his photos hold
today, it’s still emotion and character that
make us want to look at the people in
those images. Says Stephen Fletcher,
the N.C. Collection’s photo archivist,
“There’s a personal connection between
photographer and subject; the magic is
that connection’s translation over to the
subject and the viewer.”
Early in his career, Don Sturkey
realized his work had value, and he began
holding on to his best negatives to prevent
the kind of casual loss that regularly befell
the work of some of his peers. Eventually
Silent Sam draped with symbols of peace
and love for the anti-war Moratorium Day
on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.
Photograph © Don Sturkey, 1969
Dorothy Counts, as she climbs the steps to integrate Charlotte’s Harding High School.
he went to the trouble of getting copyright
transferred from the Charlotte Observer
to himself, and after retiring in 1989 he
spent three to four years cataloging his
thousands of images.
He also began to think seriously about
how the collection could be kept together,
safely housed, and seen by the public
during and after his lifetime. Photographer
Hugh Morton of Grandfather Mountain
urged him to consider the North Carolina
Collection. Sturkey already had close ties
to Chapel Hill through two of his children
who attended Carolina and through photo
assignments there.
After detailed discussions with Bob
Anthony, Don Sturkey made the gift. And
in August, Stephen Fletcher drove a van to
Belmont to pick up 30 boxes of negatives.
To the archivist, the collection was a
marvel: “In twenty-some years, this was
the most highly organized collection I had
ever received,” Fletcher says. Sturkey’s
chronological arrangement and documentation
of the complete contents will save
Fletcher several years of work. The
archivist’s next steps will be moving the
negatives from glassine sleeves to
envelopes safe for long-term use, and
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selecting the first images to be made
public through the Library’s new digital
content management software.
University Librarian Sarah Michalak
foresees a time, not very far off, when the
Sturkey photo archive will be in broad use
by Internet visitors and will receive similar
appreciation and gratitude as that
showered on Documenting the American
South, the Library’s pioneering digital collection.
And new software is the key, making
it easy for librarians to scan photo
negatives, display the images and add
descriptive text. The digital content management
program also works with other
media, including digital photography and
printed documents.
As a result, “we have a fabulous
opportunity to collect old and new at the
same time,” Michalak says. “Users will
have great access to both . . . and this
way we can do both with equal quality and
clarity.”
The first photos from the Sturkey collection
should be viewable within a year.
Don Sturkey’s books include The Catawba
River (1983) with Frye Gaillard and Dot
Jackson, and A Slice of Time (1990).
Photograph © Don Sturkey