Sounds Stilled: Musical Photographs by Don Sturkey, 1956-1988

Join us for our Carolina Faces exhibit closing lecture with UNC Chapel Hill Archivist Stephen Fletcher!

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As a photographer at The Charlotte Observer from 1955 through 1989, Don Sturkey froze on film thousands of moments in the lives of performers and audiences captured during nearly sixty musical performances and news interviews. Sturkey’s photographic archive is available to researchers at the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the more than 107,000 items in the collection are photographs that document the first and second “Rock ‘n Roll” shows at the Charlotte Coliseum, concerts by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, Elvis Presley, The Monkees, the 1968 Charlotte Bicentennial Jazz Festival, Union Grove fiddlers’ conventions from the 1970s, Ray Charles, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Judy Garland, local musicians, and more.  The program will be in the form of a slideshow with background commentary, hopefully with recollections or observations made by attendees, and will feature a wide section of musical photographs spanning more than three decades.

Stephen J. Fletcher is the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archivist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to his appointment at UNC in 2003, he worked in curatorial positions at the California Historical Society from 1983 to 1988, and the Indiana Historical Society from 1988 to 2002. In 1988 he also worked as a consultant to the Sierra Club, organizing and providing access to its library’s photographic collection. Fletcher received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photographic Illustration with a focus on fine art photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1982. He began his archival/curatorial career at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1981, through three independent study classes, and as a summer cataloging assistant to sort and organize approximately 10,000 lantern slides.  He then attended the John F. Kennedy University’s Center for Museum Studies in San Francisco, obtaining his Master of Arts degree in 1992.

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