Carolina Faces: The Photography of Don Sturkey on Exhibit Now

Talk by Don Sturkey
Thursday, March 22
Reception at 5 p.m.; Program at 5:45 p.m.
Wilson Library
Information: Linda Jacobson, (919) 962-1172

A young, unrecognized Elvis Presley being turned away from the Charlotte Coliseum. The ladies auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in hoods and robes. Children living in poverty, the public moments of government officials, the grief of ordinary citizens who have lost their jobs, their homes, their loved ones.

As a photojournalist in North Carolina from 1952 to 1989, Don Sturkey was witness to history writ large and small. Thirty-nine of Sturkey's photos are now on exhibit at the University of North Carolina in the North Carolina Collection Gallery of Wilson Library. Fourteen additional photos are being shown in the entrance area of Davis Library.

"Carolina Faces: The Photography of Don Sturkey" will run through May 31. The exhibits are free and open to the public. Sturkey will give a free public lecture about his career and photographs on Thursday, March 22 at 5:45 p.m. in Wilson Library. A reception will precede the program at 5 p.m.

In 2005, Sturkey donated his archive of 104,000 photographic negatives to the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library, where they are preserved and available for consultation and use.

Sturkey himself selected the images to be exhibited. "I chose photos that I really liked," he said. "I never liked photos that were over-posed or over-manipulated. I always tried as much as possible to be a fly on the wall and to document things as they really are." Sturkey said he also sought out a good cross section of photos that captured the reality of life in the Carolinas.

"Sturkey prided himself on capturing the emotion of the moment," said Bob Anthony, curator of the North Carolina Collection. "Looking at these photos is like being allowed a glimpse of the subject's most inner self."

Sturkey, a Georgia native and long-time North Carolinian, lives in Belmont, N.C. He attended Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, N.C., and discovered his calling while serving in the Navy during the Korean War.

His photojournalism career in North Carolina began with the Shelby Daily Star and the High Point Enterprise. In 1955, he joined the staff of the Charlotte Observer and was promoted to chief photographer in 1963, a position he held until his retirement in 1989. Sturkey won the National Press Photographers Association's Newspaper Photographer of the Year award in 1961 and was Southern Photographer of the Year in 1962 and 1963. He was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 1991.

Sturkey is the author of "A Slice of Time: A Carolina's Album 1950-90" (1990) and he provided photographs for "The Catawba River" (1983) and "Becoming truly free: 300 years of black history in the Carolinas" (1985).

Related links

• News Release from UNC News Services
• Preliminary Inventory of the Don Sturkey Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives

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