News Release — March 18, 2002

Noted Photojournalist To Inaugurate His Endowed Lecture Series

This spring, world-famous photojournalist David Douglas Duncan will inaugurate the lecture series named in his honor by speaking about his experiences and exploits in the world of photography. Scheduled for the evening of Tuesday, April 9, 2002, the David Douglas Duncan Endowed Lecture Series in Photojournalism features the photographer, whose archives are included in the Photography Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

Duncan's career includes more than a decade as a pioneer staff photographer for LIFE Magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, and his involvement in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam has established him as the preeminent photographic chronicler of those conflicts. Duncan began donating portions of his archive to the Center in 1996, with the capstone of the archive arriving at the Ransom Center last September. This most recent gift contains original negatives, prints, and color transparencies from many of his most significant bodies of work, including Duncan's entire record of his eighteen-year friendship with Pablo Picasso, and his exclusive documentation from the 1950s of the treasures of the Kremlin. The Duncan archive is one of the most complete and thorough of any modern American photojournalist and joins a number of others in the Photography and Film Collection of the Center.