COLLECTIVE INSIGHT

The images on the wall are from the Millennial Collection, a joint documentary project between Texas Tech University’s School of Art and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of work from students enrolled in the School of Art’s documentary photography class, taught by Rick Dingus.  This project is ongoing and its sponsors hope to include artifacts from varied disciplines that will work together to create a perpetual record of responses to Lubbock and the High Plains region.

The documentary class, and the resulting images that make up the Millennial Collection, is in part a response to the history collected at the Southwest Collection. In studying this collection students begin to understand how photographs function as historical documents.  It is from this collection that students are prompted to begin to question and experiment with the variables of time, place, representation, contextual information (included or excluded), personal experience, changing frames of reference, and the challenges inherent in assigning meaning to photographic images.                                            Andrew John Liccardo