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Danger Pay: Exhibit of Photographs by Carol Spencer Mitchell |
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Gaza refugee camp, 1986 Carol Spencer Mitchell Photographic Archive, 1975–2007, CAH |
The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History On display until May 30, 2009. View hours and directions or call 512-495-4518. Danger Pay is an exhibit of 38 photographs by photojournalist Carol Spencer Mitchell. Spencer Mitchell’s memoir, Danger Pay: Memoir of a Photojournalist in the Middle East, 1984–1994, was recently published by the University of Texas Press as part of the Briscoe Center’s Focus on American History Series. The Briscoe Center serves as the permanent home for the Carol Spencer Collection. Consisting of approximately 60,000 photographs dating from 1977 until the early 1990s, this collection includes images that Spencer Mitchell took as a photojournalist on special assignment for Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other news publications in the United States and Europe. While still managing to cover various state visits and politicians, Spencer Mitchell was most drawn to the suffering she found in the refugee and PLO camps of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon before, during, and after the intifada of the 1980s. Some of her images are among the most powerful ever taken of the bleak border area between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Carol Spencer married Brian Mitchell, a United Nations official, in 1994. Ten years later she died of breast cancer at the age of 50. Since Spencer Mitchell’s death, her sister, Ellen Spencer Susman, has presented her writings and photographs to audiences across the country as testimony to the fact that the violence Carol Spencer Mitchell witnessed in the Middle East continues to have repercussions today. For more information, contact: Erin Purdy, assistant director of communications, the Center for American History, 512-495-4692. |