Menasco Collection exhibit to open at LSUS April 6
03/13/06

“The Eye of the Beholder,” an exhibit of the (Robert) Menasco Studio Collection, will open in the LSUS Noel Memorial Library Archives and Special Collections Thursday, April 6, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Thurman C. Smith, noted photographer and a longtime friend of the Menascos, will speak briefly about his recollection of them at 6 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. The exhibit will run through May 26.

The Menasco Collection was acquired by the LSUS Archives and Special Collections in April 2005 with assistance from Scot Smith of Smith Photographic Services and the LSUS Alumni Association. The collection, comprising 32,000 photo shoots and nearly 200,000 negatives, represents the distinguished career of the late Robert Menasco, one of Shreveport’s best known and most respected photographers, and is a veritable “Who’s Who” of Shreveport and north Louisiana.

The Menasco Studio exhibit at LSUS will present a number of photos reflecting the diversity of clientele, from brides to businessmen, entertainers to cultural events such Holiday-in-Dixie and Little Theatre. Additional displays will highlight cameras, equipment, and the studio itself; the art and craft of portraiture as practiced by the Menascos, and the process of archivally preserving the collection. The exhibit will be open to the public during regular Library hours.

Menasco, who hailed from Glenwood, Ark., headed west as a young man to seek his fortune in California, but wound up in Shreveport instead. He started his first photography studio in the old Continental American Bank building at the corner of Market and Milam in 1943. He had a darkroom on the second floor and free-lanced for The Shreveport Times as a news photographer. As his clientele grew, he took over two floors in the bank building.

He had no formal training in art or photography, but “he just had this knack,” according to Aloyese Thorn Menasco Seyburn, his second wife and artistic partner. She had the New York art school education and experience, “the other side of what he hadn’t done.” According to her, Menasco decided on his career in a rather unorthodox way.

“He was the nervous type,” she explained, always hopping from here to there. “One day while Bob waited agitatedly for an appointment at Doctor’s Sanitarium, Dr. Paul Abramson went into his room, threw a professional photographer’s magazine at him and said, ‘Here, settle down on this for a while.’” The rest, as they say – and, in fact – is history.