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My name is Bill Carner and I’ve been here with the Photographic Archives for 34 years;
I started the day after Labor Day, 1978.
My original title was Darkroom Manager,
but the Darkroom’s more or less been replaced by digital photography.
I became the imaging manager, but I styled myself the Photo Wrangler because basically
I got to know the collections pretty well in 34 for years and so when people came in looking for stuff,
I could usually find it for them.
I could go back into the herd of photographs,
cut out the photographs they were looking for just like a cowboy,
and trot them up to them and there they were.
These are some of my favorite photos; probably 40 photos in the exhibit, so it’s really packed pretty tight.
Probably about three quarters, 30 or so, are from our fine-print collection of photographs
that we’ve bought that were made to be seen as art rather than just of a photographic
document and then some others that are some documentary photography from the 30s and 40s.
We’ve got one of the biggest and best photographic archives of any university collection in the country.
As people have told me, and I already knew, I have the best job in the world, certainly for me.
I mean this was just a perfect job for me;
I always had an interest in history and the bills environment and photography.
I’ve had a great 34 years here and I’m looking to have a lot of fun doing what I want to do,
working on my photographs for the next 34 years, and I’ll have time to do that now.
As much as I love the photographs, my fondest memories are the people I worked with here;
the people who came in to do research, the people who were my coworkers here.