The Beinecke Library Acquires Toba Pato Tucker's Archive

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the archive of American photographer Toba Pato Tucker as part of the Yale Collection of Western Americana. Ms. Tucker's archive contains more than 1,100 vintage exhibition prints, primarily 16 x 20 inches, more than 2,800 related work prints, primarily 11 x 14 inches and 8 x 10 inches, as well as extensive personal records including audio tapes and transcriptions of interviews from many of her projects.

Merging documentary intentions with the artistic insights of portraiture, Ms. Tucker has spent three decades pursuing her interest "in recording continuity and change in American culture for history and artistic purposes." She has compiled a broad, rich, deep record of Americans from such diverse places as the streets of Manhattan, the Native American and African-American communities of eastern Long Island, the Onondaga Indian Nation of upstate New York, the rural town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, and the Pueblo and Navajo communities of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as the landscapes in which her subjects reside.

Ms. Tucker came to photography in the 1970s when she was nearing forty years old. Basically self-taught, Tucker was inspired to become a full time photographer by a workshop with the legendary teacher and photographer, Harold Feinstein, who helped generate in her an enduring passion for photography. A friend, photographer Toby Old, mentored her technical abilities, including the use of a second hand Hasselblad she innocently purchased and continues to use today. Tucker became proficient in developing negatives and printing black & white silver prints to produce the exact dynamic range of tone and contrast she wished to achieve. Later, she learned the techniques of color printing, primarily to depict landscapes. Seeking to record history through individual, family, and generational portraits, Ms. Tucker often recorded oral history interviews with her subjects to allow their voices to enrich her serene and formal visual style. Her ability to recognize the individual characteristics and dignity of each sitter is clearly evident in all her work, from her initial photographs to her most recent projects.

Ms. Tucker's earliest projects, begun in 1977, include portraits of people on the street in New York City and St. Paul, Minnesota, and from 1979 to 1980 of residents at Daytop Village, a drug rehabilitation facility in New York City and upstate New York, whose director asked her to make the portraits not for publicity purposes, but to encourage the residents to see "the potential to be what they see in their portraits." In 1980 a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed Ms. Tucker to work under the auspices of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Commission with the Navajo living in the Joint Use Area of Arizona. From 1984 to 1987 she photographed the Shinnecock Indians, a multi-cultural community, and the Montauket Indians, both of eastern Long Island; and concurrently, the Riverhead Black Folk Life and Oral History Project documenting the history and culture of one of Long Island's oldest African-American communities.

From 1989 to 1991, Tucker lived in Heber Springs, Arkansas to explore continuity and change in rural Arkansas. She sought to compare and contrast her photographs and oral history interviews with the portraits made by local photographer Mike Disfarmer in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1996 the University of New Mexico Press published her first book, Heber Springs Portraits: Continuity & Change in the World Disfarmer Photographed.

In 1991 and 1992 Tucker photographed the Onondaga Nation, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, a collaboration that led to her next book, Haudenosaunee: Portraits of the Fire Keepers, The Onondaga Nation, published by the Syracuse University Press in 1999. From 1995 to 1997 she photographed the artists and artisans of the Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona, exploring the relationship between traditional, centuries-old techniques and the emerging vision of contemporary artists. The collaboration led to the publication of Pueblo Artists: Portraits by the Museum of New Mexico Press in 1998.

Aware of the complicated historical relationship between photographers and Native Americans, Ms. Tucker is known for the mutually respectful relationships she develops with the people she photographs. In addition to securing permission before she takes any photographs, Tucker has promised not to use her photographs commercially, has given her subjects copies of their individual portraits, and has provided each community with a portfolio for their archives. Oren R. Lyons, Faithkeeper, Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs, and Distinguished Service Professor of American Studies at SUNY Buffalo, observed about Ms. Tucker's work, "Some time tomorrow, generations from now, our progeny will be able to look back at this moment in time and see children who have become great-grandparents and they will see the light of love and determination in the eyes of our people . . . and they can be grateful for the perseverance, patience, integrity, and genius of Toba Tucker to record for the future this moment."

Ms. Tucker's photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the Heard Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, and the National Museum of the American Indian among other institutions. The work has been awarded prestigious grants through national and private foundations, exhibited in museums, libraries and universities, and her photographs have been published in LIFE, Camera Arts, Native Peoples, and the New York Times, and other publications.

At the Beinecke Library, Ms. Tucker's archive joins a rich collection of manuscripts, books, and photographs concerning the history and culture of Native Americans including more than 2,000 photographs of the Blackfoot Indians made by Yale alumnus Walter McClintock in the first decade of the 20^th century, the papers of Richard Henry Pratt the founder of Carlisle Indian School, the papers of Felix Cohen, the author of the first Handbook of Federal Indian Law, and the literary papers of Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Joseph Bruchac. Ms. Tucker's archive also enhances the Library's collection of contemporary American photographers that includes the archives of David Plowden, Eve Arnold, Robert Giard, Carl Mydans, and Miguel Gandert.