DUST

12 - 6 pm, every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday - November 3 - 19

200 E. 4th Ave. Corsicana (located between 100 West and Storefront)

DUST is an exhibition of a recently discovered cache of photographs and negatives from 1948 - 1966 in Corsicana.

How so? Film dropped-off for development at the local Copy Center (four blocks south of 100 West) didn't always get picked up. Thousands of awaiting photographs were stashed in boxes, eventually forgotten beneath decades of files until the Copy Center underwent renovation in 2019. This accidental time capsule chronicling daily life surfaced for our resident alumnus Michael Thomas (founder and editor of 1814 Magazine), who has prepared this collection for responsible archiving and exhibition with Allison V. Smith (author and photographer). 

DUST

by David Searcy

In the spring of 2019 there were discovered among the miscellaneous materials placed in storage on the second floor of the Copy Center in Corsicana, Texas, a number of file drawers filled with forgotten unclaimed photographs processed years before by Kodak, Fox and others. An inventory undertaken by 1814 Magazine - a bi-annual publication largely devoted to photography - would discover 403 envelopes containing, along with negatives, 2626 prints depicting life in all its fragile self-regard from around the town and county during the period 1948 to 1966 when the business was known as City Office Supply. Twice moving and twice changing its name in following years, it somehow brought all this along. This dusty hoard of incomplete transactions. These forgettings.

What do you do with this? Or make of this? One thinks of Mary Leakey’s famous discovery of the Laetoli footprints - tracks of human ancestors fossilized in the Tanzanian mud. An accidental photograph. Inspiring even now, after millions of years, a kind of sentiment. A glimmer of recognition. We were here. Or almost here.

In the writers’ room of the 100W Residency, and with permission of David Willie, Copy Center’s owner, a curator works as carefully, as delicately as Leakey with her trowel. To produce a catalog. To categorize, cross-index, gain a sense of who these people are. These moments: Here you’re overexposed and standing in the sunlight next to your car. Here in your front yard by your house, next to your new evaporative cooler. With your dog. Whatever happened to that dog? Here at the Prom. Or Christmas morning. On a pony on a sidewalk. On a sidewalk? All that stuff. You know that stuff. It’s all the same. Both sides of the tracks, it’s all the same. These black-and-whites are deeply black and white in that regard. Profoundly. Michael’s tally: African American 38.44%. White 61.28%. Hispanic, strangely, only a very tiny portion.

When I visit, I can sense the curatorial enchantment with the accidental photographic fact of all this life presented here. As if we hadn’t really known. How all this life is all around us all the time and all the same like dust in the air you never see until you catch it all of a sudden back-lit, brilliant in the sunlight shining into a darkened room.