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Performance Style and Culture
In early 1950s, Alan Lomax began to keep photographic journals of his field trips, beginning with a few rolls taken while recording in England and Scotland, to many hundreds to a thousand on each of his subsequent major recording expeditions through the 1960s. Photography became for Lomax a serious vocation and the camera far more than an adjunct to the recording machine. While he was fascinated with the landscape, architecture, and humanity of the places he visited, his main intent was to document performers in and engaged with their environments and activities. Just as did his microphone, his camera focused on singers, musicians, and dancers at peak moments of their performances. His images show that he tried to capture the quintessential body attitudes, gestures, facial expressions, and social groupings of the culture, bringing to this task his remarkable eye for composition, and illuminating the stories told by the audio recordings. There are a total of about 5,000 photographs in these collections.
In future, this catalog will also include photographs collected by Lomax, digital images of his field notebooks, and selected letters and ephemera of general interest.
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Alan Lomax (with microphone) and Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh, Scotland 1958.
Scotland 1951-1957
While collecting Scottish folk songs in Scotland and London (1951-1953;1957), Alan Lomax took a small selection
of photos of Jimmy MacBeath and other, as of yet unidentified, performers.
England & Wales 1951-1958
While making recordings of English and Welsh folk song between 1951 and 1958, Alan Lomax took a
small selection of photos of Harry Cox, the singers of the Blaxhall Ship Inn, and an unidentified tinker, perhaps
Eddie Sanger.
Harry Cox, England 1953.
A page from Alan Lomax's photo journal that he kept in conjunction with his 1950s Spanish field recordings.
Spain 1952-1953
In 1952 Alan Lomax acquired a used Leica and shot over seven hundred black and white photos to accompany
his audio recordings in Spain. This Spanish collection represents Lomax?s first serious attempt to put
photography at the center of the documentation process. The collection portrays styles of traditional
Spanish folk music and dance from Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Castile, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia,
Mallorca, Ibiza, Formentera, Murcia, Navarro, the Pais Vasco, and Santander, with images of performers,
instruments, dance styles, and traditional dress, and many in-depth portraits as well. Scenes of
agriculture, domestic work, village marketplaces and streets, child-rearing and family life, townscapes
and architecture, and regional customs reveal much about the "lost decades" in Spanish history, obliterated
in the fear and silence of the Franco regime during the 1940s and '50s.
Italy 1954-1955
Over 1,300 black and white photographs illustrate Alan Lomax?s six months' of field recording in Italy with
Diego Carpitella in 1954 and 1955. His significant talent and growing skill with the camera produced a magical
collection of images evoking the musical culture of peasants, shepherds, fishermen, and artisans in over a
hundred localities from Sicily to the Alps. They bear eloquent testimony to an era in Italian life and history
that was both tragic and enormously fecund.
Fishermen rowing, Vibo, Calabria, Italy 1954.
Bessie Jones of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Williamsburg VA, 1960.
Southern U.S. 1959 and 1960
800 black and white photos and color slides represent Alan Lomax's 1959 and 1960 collecting trips in
the Southern U.S., with images of Delta blues guitarists, fife-and-drum ensembles, Ozark and Appalachian
ballad singers, Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and prison work gangs. Many of the iconic singers and
musicians of the period ? Fred McDowell, Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Vera Hall, Bessie Jones and the
Georgia Sea Island Singers, Texas Gladden, Ed and Lonnie Young, James Carter, and others ? are represented
in the collection, shown on their farms, porches, in their churches, and at hard labor.
Caribbean 1962
During his Caribbean fieldwork in 1962, Alan Lomax took over 1,100 black and white photos and color
slides to accompany his audio recordings. This exquisite collection of photographs focuses on then
living music and dance traditions of the Eastern Caribbean and Lesser Antilles: Trinidad, Grenada,
Dominica, Carriacou, Guadaloupe, Nevis, St. Barts, St. Kitts, St. Lucia and Anguilla. It includes
images of schoolchildren singing and dancing at their games, stick fighting sequences and tug-o-war
matches accompanied by drummers, chante-fable, or story-song performances, the Big Drum Dance of
Carriacou, boat-pulling and sawing songs, Shango ceremonies, and powerful portraits of performers.
Kalinda drummers, Mayaro, Trinidad 1962.