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Allen Cooper and William Orzen
Allen Cooper and William Orzen
Allen Cooper and William Orzen

Allen Cooper and William Orzen

Date1970
Mediumgelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 6 3/8 × 9 1/2 in. (16.2 × 24.1 cm)
Support: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm)
Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of Paige Pinnell, 2011
Object number2011.14.6
DescriptionTwo male speakers at prodium at a mass meeting of students planning political actions.
Text Entries
No Title (Organizing a Protest) depicts speakers at a mass meeting of students planning actions after the killings at Kent State University. Part of a series of gelatin silver photographs by unidentified photography students documenting the May, 1970, strike at the University of New Mexico. The strike occurred after four antiwar students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guardsmen while protesting the invasion of Cambodia by the United States military during the Viet Nam War.  The photographs culminate with the bayonetting of thirteen individuals, however, none were killed.      

During the summer of 1970 the students who had photographically documented the strike, marches through Albuquerque, NM, tensions during the strike, and the National Guard actions intended to produce both a book and a traveling exhibition. The strike occurred after four antiwar students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guardsmen while protesting the invasion of Cambodia by the United States military during the Viet Nam War. The UNM strike was part of political actions opposing the Viet Nam War after the killings at Kent State and Jackson State University The photographs culminate with the bayonetting of thirteen individuals as the campus was cleared by the Guard, however, none was killed.                                                  

 

The committee of art students made lists, printed images, but never to standard sizes in anticipation of the two projects. By the fall of 1970 during the election campaign, it appeared that the political thrust of the e vents and cooled and neither the book nor exhibition would come to fruition. Paige Pinnell, a photography graduate student studying with Van Deren Coke, and professor of record for an introductory photography class, kept the archive and printed materials and stored them outdoors in an unheated shed outside his mountainous Santa Fe home between the early 1970s and 1995. These materials in the museum’s archive includes black and white negatives, proofs, contact sheets, published news stories, a box of 8 x 10 proofs, and a stack of hand written recipe cards outlining the chronology of events from the student perspective.

 

In 1995 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the events, Joseph Traugott (then curator of the Jonson Gallery at UNM) organized an exhibition of 26 prints that compared images from the strike with Raymond Jonson’s abstract paintings from 1970. While Jonson’s materials are alleged not to be political, his works from that year often incorporate target like images. The comparison was published in a short gallery guide/exhibition announcement comparing the imagery and outlining the chronology of events during May 1970. The prints were returned to Pinnell who then stored them in his house.

 

Pinnell agreed to donate the archive to the museum as health problems loomed and he needed to consolidate his belongings. The donation included 24 matted works from the 1995 exhibition, however, two works reproduced in the Jonson guide are now missing, but other proofs may be found in the box of archival materials. There is no complete list of student artists who participated in the project, and a quick on line search of names found on envelopes of material did not produce names of working photographers 42 years after the original events. Careful work with the archive may connect images with photographers.

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