Past exhibitions | Pitt Rivers Museum

Māori house (whare) with carved and painted wooden decoration. Photograph by Alfred Burton for the Burton Brothers studio (Dunedin). North Island, New Zealand. Circa 1887.

30 November 2015 – 6 March 2016

Burton Bros. of Dunedin: Photographs of New Zealand and Fiji by a Late Nineteenth-Century Commercial Studio

This display presented twenty-six mounted albumen prints by the Burton Brothers studio of Dunedin, New Zealand.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Wabamum Lake.

20 October 2014 – 3 May 2015

Scarred/Sacred Water: Tanya Harnett

This exhibition presented six large photographic works by Canadian First Nations artist Tanya Harnett.

Group portrait of the first three students to receive the University of Oxford’s Diploma in Anthropology, including James Arthur Harley (right). Photographer unknown. 1908.

18 October 2014 – 8 February 2015

A Well-Documented Life: James Arthur Harley (1873–1943)

This display considered how a man born in Antigua – and studied at Howard, Yale, Harvard and Oxford – spent his last twenty years campaigning on local issues in rural Leicestershire.

Archive case (First Floor)

Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum, looking towards the east end of the Court, showing the Haida totem pole (‘Star House Pole’). Photograph by Alfred Robinson. Oxford, England. 1901.

9 June – 28 September 2014

Star House Pole: Early Images of the Haida Totem Pole in the Pitt Rivers Museum

This display presented a selection of historic images – including photographs, drawings and published material – relating to the Haida totem pole on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Archive Case (First Floor)

(Copyright Mamadou Gomis)

12 May – 7 September 2014

Points of Departure: Photographs from Senegal by Mamadou Gomis and Judith Quax

Looking at the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary migration, photographers Mamadou Gomis and Judith Quax examined migration in West Africa in this photographic exhibition.

Prints salvaged from Rikuzentakata City Museum after the tsunami.

8 October 2013 – 27 April 2014

Surviving Tsunami: Photographs in the Aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This exhibition presented visual material from a volunteer-led project in Japan to salvage and conserve historic photograph collections after two museums and a library in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, were destroyed in the 2011 tsunami.

Hand-coloured studio portrait of a Saami woman, identified as a wife (or married woman), standing, wearing a distinctive hat. Photograph by the Marcus Selmer studio. Bergen, Norway. Circa 1873.

29 April – 1 September 2013

Travels in Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Collection of Sir Arthur Evans

This display presented a selection of twenty-three drawings, sketches and photographs by the archaeologist Sir Arthur J. Evans (1851–1941).

Archive Case (First Floor)

Andrea Stultiens, Arthur C. Kisitu and Kaddu Wasswa (eds.), The Kaddu Wasswa Archive: A Visual Biography (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010).

23 February – 8 September 2013

Andrea Stultiens: The Kaddu Wasswa Archive

A photographic memoir of the life of Kaddu Wasswa, born in 1933 in Ngangwa Village, near Mukono Town, Uganda. His story gives an insight into twentieth-century Ugandan history.

A mounted muleteer, one of a series of Brazilian types from Rio de Janeiro.

21 January – 21 April 2013

Brazil, Chile, Peru, 1829–32: A Naval Surgeon’s Costumbrismo Collection

This collection of watercolours was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1933 by a Miss Wakefield. It contains fine examples of costumbrismo, a genre of painting with Spanish origins that became popular in South America in the early 19th century.

Archive Case (First Floor)

‘Desert Melon’. Photograph by Christian Thompson. 2012. (Copyright Christian Thompson)

26 June 2012 – 6 January 2013

Christian Thompson: We Bury Our Own

Leading contemporary Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson presented a ground-breaking new body of work, consisting of eight large photographic self-portraits and a video installation.

Zoomorph B (also known as Monument 2), south face, dated AD 780. Photograph by Alfred Maudslay. Quirigua, Guatemala. 1883.

16 April – 2 September 2012

Reading the Ruins: Alfred Maudslay and the Maya Site of Quirigua, Guatemala

This display presented ten mounted prints by Alfred Percival Maudslay (1850–1931), known as the father of Mesoamerican archaeology, alongside related material concerning his pioneering work during the early 1880s at the Maya site of Quirigua.

Archive Case (First Floor)

This image shows the depth of Garrod’s excavations in the final 1934 season at Tabun.

26 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

A Pioneer of Prehistory: Dorothy Garrod and the Caves of Mount Carmel

This display presented seventeen photographs from the collection of the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968), which was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum by her friend and executor Suzanne Cassou de Saint Mathurin in 1986.

Archive Case (First Floor)

12th Avenue. Windermere, Cape Town, South Africa. Photograph by Bryan Heseltine. Circa 1949–1952. (Copyright Bryan Heseltine)

19 July 2011 – 8 January 2012

People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952 – Photographs by Bryan Heseltine

An exhibition of photographs of Cape Town in the early 1950s, a city in the midst of profound transformation, with unique political tensions and conflicts.

Rentarō Tanaka. Photograph by Jacques-Philippe Potteau. Paris, France. 1864.

11 April – 18 September 2011

The Last Samurai: Jacques-Philippe Potteau’s Photographs of the Japanese Missions to Europe, 1862 and 1864

This display presented fourteen mounted albumen prints and two related engravings from the important Takenouchi mission to Europe (1862) and the Ikeda mission to France (1864).

Archive Case (First Floor)

Nyima Dorje performing as the deaf mother of the ‘crazy saint’ Drukpa Kunley. Buchen plays are a local and peripheral form of the Tibetan Opera. Photograph by Patrick Sutherland. Mane, Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, India. 2007.

9 December 2010 – 3 July 2011

Disciples of a Crazy Saint: The Buchen of Spiti – Photographs by Patrick Sutherland

This exhibition presented photographs of the Buchen of Spiti: ritual experts, actors and disciples of the fifteenth-century ‘crazy saint’ Thang Tong Gyalpo.

Multi-storeyed houses in Taos Pueblo, a settlement which has been inhabited for over six centuries and is the northernmost of the Rio Grande pueblos. Photograph by John Hillers. Taos, New Mexico, United States of America. 1880.

22 November 2010 – 27 March 2011

Among the Pueblos: John K. Hillers (1843–1925), Photographer of the American Southwest

This display presented eighteen original albumen prints by John Karl Hillers (1843–1925), pioneer photographer of the American Southwest.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Embroidered cotton gown, kusaibi. Made in Liberia or a neighbouring area of Sierra Leone or Guinea before 1846.

19 September 2010 – 6 November 2011

Costume of a King

A display of a gown that was found in the Museum's textile store without any documentation in 1974. It turned out to be much more important than just ‘probably West African, possibly Nigerian’, as it was identified then.

Didcot Case (Lower Gallery)

View of an escarpment near Magdala, with a boy standing on rocks in the foreground. Tanta, Ethiopia. Photograph by Wilfred Thesiger. 1960.

4 June 2010 – 5 June 2011

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition

This exhibition celebrated arguably the greatest traveller of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest explorers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003), who is most famous for his journeys in Arabia and his sojourns among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq.

Special Exhibition Gallery

Veteran soldiers take Emperor Haile Selassie’s coffin from the processional vehicle and onto their shoulders. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photograph by Peter Marlow. 2000. (Copyright Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos)

22 April – 21 November 2010

The Burial of Emperor Haile Selassie: Photographs by Peter Marlow

An exhibition of images by renowned Magnum photographer Peter Marlow from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's burial ceremony in 2000, twenty-five years after his death.

Gifts of money are passed between men and women dancing at a Pamiri wedding. Roshorv, Tajikistan. Photograph by Carolyn Drake. July 2008.

14 May 2009 – 28 February 2010

Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia

The first UK exhibition by documentary photographer Carolyn Drake, this exhibition displayed images of the everyday effects of environmental, social and economic change in post-Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Frontispiece of John F. Baddeley’s Russia, Mongolia, China: Being Some Record of the Relations Between Them from the Beginning of the XVIIth Century to the Death of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, A.D. 1602–1676, etc., 2 vols. (London, 1919).

1 May – 29 September 2009

Across the Caucasus: Photographs and Manuscripts from the John F. Baddeley Collection

This display presented a selection of photographs, manuscripts and exquisite published material by the writer and traveller John F. Baddeley (1854–1940).

Archive Case (First Floor)

Man dressed in contemporary fashion standing in front of Touselle’s third painted backdrop of pillars draped with curtains. Photograph by Jacques Touselle. Mbouda, Cameroon. About 1975.

9 November 2007 – 29 June 2008

Studio Cameroon: The Everyday Photography of Jacques Touselle

An exhibition of Jacques Touselle’s photographs detailing the shifting identities and aspirations of the rapidly urbanising Cameroonian town of Mbouda in the 1970s and 1980s.