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is a student-curated exhibition that centers on a series of souvenir photographs issued in commemoration of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and asks visitors to consider their status as portraits or types.

“While these might not be fair photographs for the subjects on display, our exhibition asks if we can restore some justice to them,” write the curators in the introduction that appears as visitors enter the exhibition, which is staged in the Kaiser Reading Room of Carpenter Library until March 20.

The exhibition was developed in a History of Art seminar taught by Carrie Robbins in the fall of 2015. The seminar provided students with the opportunity to research the histories of objects related to World’s Fairs held in the Special Collections of �鶹AV, and use postcolonial theory to investigate and critique their representational claims.

The seminar and curation of the exhibition also gave students practical production experience such as: conceiving a curatorial approach, articulating themes, writing didactics, researching a checklist, designing gallery layout, and marketing the exhibit.

A main feature of the exhibition is a wall of photographs taken from “Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance.” Produced by a Harvard trained ethnologist, the photos featured pseudo-scientific captions with “sweeping generalizations and racial epithets,” say the curators.

On the wall, the curators have obscured the captions under matting.

“We really wanted this to be the strongest part of the exhibition,” explains McBride Scholar Kate Beschen ‘17. “We took the text out because we wanted viewers to be able to see the individual without the labels that had been attached. Then, for the final two frames, we took away the image and left only the text. We wanted viewers to feel themselves trying to imagine who fits the description and then recognize how seductive the logic of racial typing is.”

The student curators of this exhibition are: Kate Beschen ‘17, Emma Cohen ’17, Emily Crispino ’17, Brenna Levitin ’16, Chau Nguyen ’17, Maria Shellman ’17, Sofia Vivado ’16, and Alexandria Wang ’16.