Curated by Jason Francisco, a visual artist tenured in the Film and Media Department at Emory University, Laurence Salzmann: A Life with Others is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Laurence Salzmann (American, born 1944), whose collection was donated to the Penn Libraries in 2018. 

August 28 - December 4, 2023

Goldstein Family Gallery, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, sixth floor

Open to the Public

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Born in 1944, Salzmann grew up during a transitional era of documentary’s evolution. Following the First World War, documentary had become a staple element of mass media in the United States, filling weekly picture magazines and proliferating in a modified form as journalism in the daily press. The rhetoric of showing social “fact” was embraced across the spectrum of political perspective and institutional authority, not least by many agencies of the US government during the Depression—most famously the Farm Security Administration, which launched the careers of several of the most important photographers of the era. In the aftermath of the Second World War, documentary in the US became roughly synonymous with visual humanism, or more precisely, visual humanism girded by official confidence in a bettering world. Documentary addressed the cultures of loss, survival and rebuilding after the war, and showed the redevelopment of an enlightened capitalist culture whose dominant truths were predicated upon scientific advancement, mass communication, and a developed conception of public service.

With Salzmann, there is an open question about how he came to find his way into documentary thinking, and how he came to register his own sense of himself within it. There is a further question about what came to characterize his way, his method, his style. Some part of the answer might reside in Salzmann’s direct teachers, in particular Reuben Goldberg (1906-1960), chief photographer of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology from 1937 to 1960.

- Jason Francisco