Contact: Maridith Geuder
More than 100 F.S. McKnight photographs from turn-of-the-century Mississippi are being featured through August at Mississippi State.
The collection, along with a concurrent exhibit highlighting agricultural history that concludes July 31, are on display at the university's Mitchell Memorial Library.
"Fine Work Guaranteed: The Studio Photography of F.S. McKnight" is a traveling exhibition of Evans Memorial Library in Aberdeen. Featuring photographs made in Monroe County from 1894 to 1930, it may be viewed in Mitchell's second- and third-floor atrium areas.
Meanwhile, manuscripts, books, government documents, and other materials highlighting the state's agricultural history may be visually seen in exhibit cases on the second and third floors. This collection also reflects the history of America's land-grant college system, including MSU and its extension service and agricultural and forestry experiment station.
McKnight came to Aberdeen in 1894, promising potential customers in a newspaper advertisement "to give you as fine a work as any sample I show you." For nearly four decades, he produced more than 14,000 black-and-white prints of children, families, socialites, farmers, industrial workers, and homemakers.
More than 30 percent of the photographs portray African Americans, with photographs also capturing images of immigrants from China, Ireland, Germany, the Mediterranean, and Central Europe.
The exhibit results from the McKnight Photographic Collection Project, which was begun in 1995 by Evans Memorial Library to clean, print and preserve the photos as educational and cultural resources. (Five scrapbooks of McKnight photographs also may be seen in the MSU library's special collections department.)
"Fine Work Guaranteed" is funded by grants from the Mississippi Humanities Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, Evans Memorial Trust, Friends of Evans Memorial Library, and the City of Aberdeen.
For more information about the exhibits, telephone Mattie Sink at (662) 325-3848.