Sara S. Hodson and Jeanne Campbell Reesman will present a lecture entitled, “Jack London, Photographer,” Thursday, April 20th at 1:30pm at the Branigan Cultural Center.
World-famous author Jack London was also an accomplished photographer. London’s subjects included people like the ragged homeless of the City of London’s East End and the freezing refugees of the Russo-Japanese War. London took some of the first photographs in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. During his voyage aboard the Snark, he produced humane images of the South Sea islanders that contrasted dramatically with the period’s stereotypical portraits of indigenous peoples. The lecture will include highlights from London’s extraordinary body of photographs, with descriptions of his experiences drawn from his writings. The speakers, Sara S. “Sue” Hodson and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, together with Philip Adam, published a volume of selections from London’s photographs, with the University of Georgia Press. The current exhibition is based on this book.
Sara S. “Sue” Hodson is curator of literary collections at The Huntington, where she oversees all the British and American literary manuscripts and rare books from the renaissance to the present, including the Jack London Papers. A nationally-recognized expert on privacy and confidentiality in modern manuscript collections, she lectures and publishses often on that subject. She lectures and writes about Jack London and was named Woman of the Year by the Jack London Foundation. Her essay, “The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty,” appears in the Oxford Handbook of Jack London.
Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Ph.D., is Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published numerous books on Jack London, including “Jack London’s Racial Lives” (U of Georgia P, 2009) and, with Sue S. Hudson, “Jack London, Photographer” (U of Georgia P, 2010). She is presently at work on two new books, “Jack London: Writers in Their Own Time” (U of Iowa P) and “Mark Twain Vs. God: The Story of a Relationship” (U of Georgia P). She is the founder of the Jack London Society, for which she served as Executive Director for 25 years.
Admission to the Branigan Cultural Center is free. The museum is located at 501 North Main Street and is open Tuesday – Friday from 10am to 4:30pm, Saturday from 9am to 4:30pm. For additional information, visit the website at: museums.las-cruces.org or call 575.541.2154.
If you need an accommodation for a disability to enable you to fully participate in this event, please contact the museum 48 hours prior to the event.