McClellan Street
An American Neighborhood
by David and Peter Turnley

November 15, 2008 – January 11, 2009

Sponsored by Lincoln Financial Foundation

The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is proud to present McClellan Street, an exhibition of photography by David and Peter Turnley. These hauntingly beautiful, raw, and real photographs document life on McClellan Street in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the early 1970s. The photographs were originally complied for a book printed by Indiana University Press in cooperation with the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

Fort Wayne natives David and Peter Turnley did not grow up on McClellan Street. Rather they stumbled upon it while getting a photo release from an elderly man who appeared in their high school Scholastic Art Awards winning project. Struck with what they saw that day in 1973, the brothers decided to photograph the life they found on McClellan Street over the course of most of the following year. (Now part of the Harrison Square project, McClellan Street is only a memory.)

Once the home to many working-class and poor, several of the inhabitants had migrated from Appalachia and some were of Hispanic origin. It was these people, their lives, their struggles, their sense of community that drew Peter and David back to McClellan Street many times each week as well as on weekends using their one, shared camera to document their lives. The brothers formed a deep bond with each other during the project and with the residents of the street as well. The photographs they took revealed the beauty, diversity, and economic challenges of people many might have ignored. It is these photographs that now allow us to reflect on a time in history, on a street that no longer exists.

David Turnley won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of revolutions around the world in 1989. He has twice won the World Press Photo of the Year and the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for Courage. He is widely recognized for his work covering the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and has spent extensive time photographing Nelson Mandela since Mandela’s release from prison. In 1997-98, Turnley studied documentary filmmaking at Harvard while on a Neiman Fellowship. His first film work, The Dalai Lama: At Home in Exile, won the 2001 Cine Golden Eagle and was nominated for an Emmy.

Former assistant to the great French photographer Robert Doisneau, Peter Turnley is currently a contributing editor/photographer for Harper’s Magazine. Over the past 25 years, Turnley has documented major world events, including the Gulf War, 9/11, and the war in Iraq. He has also produced portraits and covered many of the world’s most influential people, including Gorbachev, Lady Diana, and Pope John Paul II. As a contract photographer for Newsweek from 1984 to 2001, his photographs appeared on the magazine’s cover 43 times. Turnley is the author of Parisians, as well as several other books.

The book, McClellan Street, is available for purchase in the Museum Shop.