Photos by the late Caroline Littell on display at Scholes Library
Examples of the travel photojournalism of the late Caroline Littell of Alfred will be on view May 2 through June 26 in the main-floor gallery of Alfred University’s Scholes Library. For a time in the late 1970s, Littell was employed at Alfred University as director of the school’s language laboratory and overseas study program. She died in Pasadena, CA, in 2015.
Hours for the exhibit—open to the public without charge—are weekdays 8 to 4.
Littell’s photographs had illustrated articles on travel and tourism in dozens of American and European publications, among them Travel & Leisure Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Athens (Greece) News. In Western New York her work appeared regularly in The Buffalo News as well as in newspapers in Rochester, Olean, Hornell, and Alfred.
In 2016 the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, obtained for its permanent collection a portfolio of the photographer’s gelatin-silver prints. A museum spokesman said of the acquisition that Littell had left behind “a piece of her legacy”: an extensive pictorial record of “beautiful images from her adventures all over the world.”
Her sensibilities as an artist—expressed to full effect in the Alfred show’s striking imagery of indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia and South America—animate the bulk of the Scholes Library display.
Caroline Littell was born Caroline Jane Penelope Byass in Cairo, Egypt, in 1939, to a family of British colonials. Largely self-taught as a photographer, she immigrated in 1962 to the United States. Working over the years with her husband, Alan Littell—a freelance journalist based in Alfred who served as director of Alfred University’s news bureau from 1968 to 1984—Caroline traveled widely in this country and abroad on newspaper and magazine assignments.