Call Number:

M59

Repository:

Bryn Mawr College

Extent:

15 boxes

Language:

English

Date:

1963-2001 (bulk)

Abstract:

Katrina Thomas is an alumna of Bryn Mawr College (1949). In the 1950s and 1960s she held a variety of jobs in New York City, spent a year in Rome, and returned to work for an architectural firm. On the side, she took photographs of children and families, and published a children.s book, My Skyscraper City: A Child.s View of New York (1963). In 1965 Thomas became a full-time, freelance photographer. She photographed Mayor Lindsay.s city programs designed to quell race riots in volatile neighborhoods, and published two additional children.s books, Chito (1968), and Oh, Boy! Babies! (1980). For 22 years Aramco World hired Thomas to photograph in both the Middle East and the U.S. Her pictures have appeared in Time, Newsweek, and publications of the US Information Agency.

The Katrina Thomas Ethnic Wedding Photograph Collection consists of over 800 photographs of cultural weddings in the United States. From 1965-2001, freelance photographer Katrina Thomas undertook the unique project of documenting the ways in which immigrant groups maintain and adapt wedding practices in the United States. In 1987 her photographs were featured in Something Old, Something New: Ethnic Weddings in America, a traveling exhibit co-sponsored by Modern Bride Magazine and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia.

The collection contains wedding photographs of more than 70 ethnic and religious groups that have immigrated from Africa, Asia, Europe, Central America, and the Caribbean. The majority of the weddings took place on the East Coast. However, Thomas also documented weddings in the Midwest (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee), on the West Coast (California and Oregon), and in the Southwest (Arizona). Many of the photographs are of more recent immigrant families, although the collection also includes wedding photographs of individuals from older immigrant communities who have maintained or revived cultural wedding traditions. Examples of ethnic and religious groups featured in the photograph collection include Afghan, Asante, Chaldean, Chinese, Greek, Hasidic, Hmong, Korean, Lithuanian, Mexican, Mien, Polish Gorale, Puerto Rican, Russian Old Believer, Tibetan, Yoruba, and Zoroastrian.

Thomas gave the early documentation of ethnic neighborhoods and festivals as a collection to City Lore, Inc. and in 2007 she donated her ethnic wedding photographs to Bryn Mawr College. The collection also includes negatives, correspondence, research materials, field notes, and Thomas's published works. Collection resources include a database with 800 thumbnail images from the collection and captions for each photograph. The database is searchable by ethnic group, location, year, subject categories, as well as various phases of wedding ceremonies and preparations.