Center Acquires the Ferorelli Photographic Archive
The Briscoe Center has acquired the archive of photojournalist Enrico Ferorelli, who was a major contributor to many publications including Life, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. His career, spanning the 1960s through the 2000s, is captured through over 750,000 images that document American political and cultural life, as well as world travel and natural wonders.
“I’m grateful to Dr. Martha Saxton for choosing the Briscoe Center as the home of her late husband’s photographic archive,” said Don Carleton, executive director at the Briscoe Center. “Enrico Ferorelli was a talented photographer whose career covered an incredible amount of ground. His vast collection of images represents an exciting new resource for use by students and scholars, as well as for the center for its own projects and exhibits.”
Ferorelli was born in Rome in 1941. In 1966 he began working for the European bureaus of Time Inc. He moved to New York City in 1971, where he was based until his death in 2014. While many of his assignments saw him travel globally in order to capture local cultures and natural beauty, he also covered American politics, including the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, U.S. military involvement in Central America, and the inauguration of Bill Clinton as president in 1993. (In 1979, he also photographed the inauguration of Clinton as governor of Arkansas.)
Ferorelli’s archive includes thousands of color slides and photographs, project files related to his assignments, magazine tear sheets, negatives, books, journals and correspondence. The archive is currently being processed and will be open for research next year.
Since 1992, the Briscoe Center has conducted an ambitious program to collect and preserve the archives of photojournalists. Today, the center preserves one of the largest photojournalism collections in the world. In addition to millions of images, the collections comprise personal papers, correspondence, diaries, news clippings and three-dimensional artifacts. The combination of these materials provides researchers with remarkable primary source evidence for interpreting history.
