Caroline Hickman Vaughan Fine Art Photography / Poetry

Margaret Nicoll introduced me to her friend, Whitney Hyder, of Fort Worth, Texas who allowed me to stay at her guest house as I courted the Amon Carter Museum. Both Margaret and Whitney had seen my photographs and felt they should have wider exposure.  Mitchell Wilder was the director of the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. He reviewed my work and asked what my exhibit would include.  I wanted to photograph in western states to combine both my eastern photographs into an exhibit representing locations I found in my future travels out west. He asked me what developer I used for my film. I said pyrogallol. He asked if anyone knew what that meant. No one did. When he first came to the museum and explored the basement, he found a chemical bottle labeled pyrogallol, the developer that Ansel Adams, Brett Weston and members of the F 64 group used. He then turned and as he was leaving the room, said give her a show. 

 

My travels were funded by Ruth and Steve Wainwright of Durham, NC. Over the next three years in 75,000 miles I ventured as far north as Newfoundland and Vancouver, whereI  pitched my tent or rented a hotel for the night to develop film. My father had built a plywood top to the Jeep Waggoner so I could stand with my tripod and 4x5 view camera. My mother had sewn black cloth which snapped all around the windows in the back so I could use the Jeep as a large changing bag. I could sleep in it if necessary.

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The Catalogue Of  The Amon Carter Museum Photography Collection containing 6,000 exhibition quality prints and 1,400 black and white reproductions was published in 1993. Many of the images were subsequently published in the Duke monograph Borrowed Time: Photographs of Caroline Vaughan, Durham and London, Duke Press, 1996. When I first approached the museum they were famous for their collection of Remmingtons but later dropped Western Art from their name to reflect a broader collection. Their catalogue is now online. You can search by photographer and see my entire collection.