Toni Pepe

Can I Hold You? is an ongoing project that explores press photographs and newspaper clippings from the Women and Gender Issues Collection (WGI), housed in the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections. The archive, discovered within a larger acquisition, contains a complex and often contradictory visual record of women in the public eye. From crime victims and survivors to beauty pageant winners and “exceptional” women who were pioneers in their fields, these images reflect two sides of the same coin: both the violent and celebratory aspects of women’s stories are constructed in parallel, often in ways that reinforce one another.

My approach centers not only on the events depicted but also on the physical traces left on the photographs, including handwritten notes, crop marks, paint overlays, and date stamps. These marks reveal how editors shaped stories and assigned value to particular images, highlighting the lives and narratives deemed worthy of public attention. By retracing these gestures with paint, ink, and folds, I aim to draw out the layered interactions between image, handler, and viewer.