Duke graduate Charles Googe (A.B. ‘84) and his wife Linda Googe have made a transformative gift of photographs to the Nasher Museum. Comprised of more than 500 photographs, the gift will be presented to the museum in a series of installments over the next five years. The first installment of 94 photographs arrived in December 2017.
These include modernist photographers of the 1920s and ‘30s such as Edward Weston, Ilse Bing and Harold Haliday Costain; documentarians Arthur Rothstein, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Danny Lyon, and regionalist-inspired artists Mike Disfarmer, Henry Horenstein and Bill Owens, among many more. Last year, the museum presented a selection of works from this gift in Wilson Pavilion, La Vita Italiana: Italian Postwar Photography, 1950 – 1970.
We are delighted with this gift, which will significantly enlarge the Nasher Museum’s modest photography collection into one with outstanding examples of works by key figures of the 20th century. The Googe photography gift integrates well into the museum’s exist- ing holdings and provides a greater range of historical material from which to better tell the history of photography.
Marshall N. Price, Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art