When Claire Robbins came to the Women's Center last fall, her predecessor left behind an unidentified black and white photo of five women walking through a Duke archway.
It wasn't until VOICES Magazine decided to use the 1976 photograph for a piece about women in the 1970s, that Robbins learned of the existence of an almost identical photograph taken 30 years earlier, in 1946.
"Everyone was just tickled," Robbins, co-chair of the Five Women at Duke Planning Committee and program coordinator at the Women's Center, said of the discovery of the two photos.
She partnered with Jamaica Woodyard-Gilmer, program assistant at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, to bring a new picture to life by initiating a contest.
The contest aimed to find the next picture, although as Robbins pointed out, in the time it has taken them to get everything together it's been 31 years, not 30, since the last five women photo was taken.
The Five Women at Duke exhibit will feature all 18 submissions as well as artist statements from the contest initiated by Robbins and Woodyard-Gilmer.
The subjects of the 1976 photo have been invited to the opening and Robbins confirmed that Goldie Evans, the black woman in the photograph, will be attending.
Entrants chose between two categories-archway photographs and non-archway photos. Judges are in the process of choosing a winner and runner-up in each category.
Beyond specifying the categories, Robbins and Woodyard-Gilmer left the competition open-ended. Both have been pleasantly surprised by the applicants' work as well as by the artist statements.
"The archway submissions are all so different," Robbins said. "They give life to Duke today for women."
Melissa Kenney, an environmental science and policy graduate student and contest participant, chose the same archway featured in the original photographs for her entry.
"Me and [my friends] thought it was just really fabulous, particularly comparing the two photos," she said. "There are so many differences between those years, but there's also this sort of similar sense of empowerment the women have."
Kenney said she and five other longtime friends got together to take photographs not only for the contest, but also to capture that essence of strength. It's about capturing memories of who they are and what they are doing right now, she said. The diversity of interpretation taken by the non-archway entrants was also impressive, Robbins said.
"Architecture and place were still very important in those pictures," she said. "They had to get Duke in their picture."
As a photographer, Woodyard-Gilmer said she enjoyed the more artistic aspects of the competition.
"I really enjoyed presenting the campus with an opportunity to engage in photography in a thoughtful way, "Woodyard-Gilmer said.
Though the new pictures are undoubtedly important representatives of Duke today, the 1946 and 1976 pictures are equally important means for understanding Duke of old.
"The pictures provide a glimpse, a perspective, of women at Duke," Woodyard-Gilmer said. "At times it's personal, at times larger. It's a kind of description of what beauty is."
Unlike their predecessors, these pictures will not be relegated to an unknown pile. Robbins said she is unsure of their final destination, but said one possibility is to put them up around the University in a variety of places like the Allen Building, Women's Center and Mary Lou Williams Center.
"There's interest in keeping it alive in a decentralized way," she said. "We don't want them to end up in a closet somewhere."?
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