Image Collection

Landkidzink Image Collection contains over 5,000 images drawn from more than 50 individual contributions and donations from Gate Hill Cooperative members, family and friends. These include original photographs, slides and negatives, that document the people, places, architecture and events at both Black Mountain College and the Gate Hill Cooperative over an eighty-year period (1942-2024).

Working with original photographs and negative transparencies (where unearthed), the collection has involved considerable restoration work and the loving task of producing very high-resolution digital scans. Some of the negatives were never made into positive photographic prints and therefore, are seen for the first time in newly-created digital images. Many will be featured in Davenport’s forthcoming illustrated history of Gate Hill. Others have already appeared in a growing number of publications and documentaries including Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, edited by Helen Molesworth (2017); A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes, edited by Mark Shapiro (2010); Don’t Know, We’ll See: The Work of Karen Karnes, a film by Lucy Massie Phenix (2008); “Variations on a Ground: Patsy Lynch at Black Mountain College” in Appalachian Journal (2017/2018), by Mark Davenport; “Paul Williams: ‘The Cage Mix’” in The Journal of the Society for American Music (2020), by Mark Davenport; and “Hope in the Midst of Apathy: Liberation Magazine and the Cover Art of Vera Williams,” in Signal: 08, A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture (2023), by Alec Dunn..

Permission to reproduce any of the images is limited to the scope of the Black Mountain College/Gate Hill history project and otherwise restricted without the written consent of the photographer or copyright holder.