WRPR 159: Memory, Monuments, and Urban Space (HC) Spring 2015: Background Sources

Provides online access to over 50,000 photographs from the collections of the Philadelphia Department of Records. Also provides digital access to the Philadelphia historical streets index and the Philadelphia historical photograph index.

FREE REGISTRATION REQUIRED FOR SEARCHING. Brings together the collections, data, images and professional expertise of The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives, the Philadelphia Historical Commission, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and several local cultural institutions, enabling free access to information on the built environment of the five-county Philadelphia area.

Photographing in small towns and large cities, Lyons has keenly observed the extreme and often confusing variety of responses to September 11 - from deep reverence to blatant commercialization - manifested by ordinary Americans. This provocative sequence of images, loaded with multiple messages, is powerfully coherent and strangely disturbing. Nathan Lyons's photographs will both engage audiences to question their responses to this horrific event in the context of our complicated society and memorialize the tragic loss of so many innocent lives.

Over the course of two years, Jonathan Tilove and freelance photographer Michael Falco traveled along some of the 650 Martin Luther King Jr. streets, avenues, and boulevards across the country. As this journey reveals, life along King is at once tightly conjoined and kaleidoscopically diverse. And that is precisely what Tilove has lyrically portrayed in the writing of this book, and what Falco has so superbly illumined with his rich photographs of the people along Martin Luther King. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six. There is no other street like it.

In the emotional aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, people from all walks of life created and encountered memorials to those who were murdered. Vernacular art appeared almost everywhere; on walls, trees, playgrounds, vehicles, houses, tombstones, and even on bodies. This outpouring of grief and other acts of remembrance impelled photographer Jonathan Hyman to document and so preserve these largely impermanent, spontaneous expressions. His collection of 20,000 photographs, along with field notes and personal interviews, constitutes a unique archive of 9/11 public memory.

This volume, published on the fifth anniversary of the dedication of the national shrine, includes photographs by photographer Lopes and 16 other photojournalists, and excerpts of letters placed at the wailing wall by families, friends and war buddies of the dead and missing whose names are engraved there "the mystery of death writ in stone 58,132 times."

The creation of memorials dedicated to the civil rights movement is a watershed event in the commemoration of southern and American history, an important reversal in the traditional invisibility of African Americans within the preservation movement. As the authors illustrate, there are reasons why memorials are not often located at the traditional core of civic space--City Hall, the Courthouse, or along Main Street--and location seriously affects their public impact. As the authors reveal, social and geographic marginalization has accompanied the creation and promotion of civil rights memorials, calling into question the relative progress that society has made in the time since the civil rights movement in America began.

Spontaneous shrines have emerged, both in the United States and internationally, as a way to mourn those who have died a sudden or shocking death, and to acknowledge the circumstances of the deaths. The contributors address events such as the Texas A&M bonfire collapse, the Pentagon and New York City after 9-11, roadside crosses, a memorial wall in Philadelphia, and the use of Day of the Dead altars to bring attention to deceased undocumented immigrants.

A collaborative creation unlike any other, the Names Project Foundation's AIDS Memorial Quilt has played an invaluable role in shattering the silence and stigma that surrounded the epidemic in the first years of its existence. Designed by Cleve Jones, the AIDS Quilt is the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. Since its conception in 1987, the Quilt has transformed the cultural and political responses to AIDS in the U.S. Representative of both marginalized and mainstream peoples, the Quilt contains crucial material and symbolic implications for mourning the dead, and the treatment and prevention of AIDS. However, the project has raised numerous questions concerning memory, activism, identity, ownership, and nationalism, as well as issues of sexuality, race, class, and gender.