C&RL News - UTA Photo Selected

College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) is the newsmagazine of record of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), which provides articles on the trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries. C&RL News is a monthly magazine and seeks artwork from libraries as cover art. 

One of the photographs from the UTA Special Collections was selected for the November issue of the C&RL News cover. This issue is available at: https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/issue/view/1588

The photograph selected is a 1976 photograph of Plennie L. Wingo, age 81, who is seen walking backwards throughout the streets in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, watching his progress with a periscopic rear-view mirror. Wingo (1895–1993), a native of Abilene, Texas, was given the Guinness World Record title of “greatest extent of reverse pedestrianism” after walking backwards from Santa Monica, California to Istanbul, Turkey from April 1931 to October 1932.

This photograph comes from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper photograph morgue of negatives housed in the University of Texas-Arlington Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The collection comprises more than 4 million negatives spanning from the early 20th century through 1991. Learn more at:https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery-beta/collections/fort-worth-star-telegram-collection.

This photograph is also available in the Digital Gallery: https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10017789

I want to express my appreciation to University and Labor Archivist, Michael Barera, and Photographs Specialist, Sara Pezzoni,  who collaborated with me in the selection process. I brought this project to their attention and they took the initiative to collect and select this amazing photograph.