Museum to Showcase 1950s and ’60s Travel Photos in New Exhibit

ST. CLOUD -- Photos taken all over the world in the 1950s and 1960s are coming home to Stearns County.

The Stearns History Museum is opening an exhibit featuring photographs taken by St. Cloud native Lois Whitney Forbes. She was the daughter of St. Cloud businessman A.G. Whitney and his wife Alice Wheelock.

After her second husband died, she traveled the globe taking pictures with her Rolleiflex twin lens camera. Collections Curator Eric Cheever says the photographs capture many places we can no longer see or visit.

It's kinda neat because a lot of the pictures that she took are in places where you can't really travel anymore like Iran and parts of the Middle East where she spent quite a bit of time. So it's a nice snapshot of those areas in the late '50s, early '60s.

Forbes’ granddaughter-in-law Therese Kunzi-Clark teamed up with the history museum to permanently store the images digitally, and put together the exhibit which includes artifacts such as the camera she used.

Cheever says Forbes was self-taught, and that while there are some landscapes, many of her photographs center around capturing people and humanity.

One of the things that struck me is Lois didn't just casually walk by and take pictures of people, she interacted with them. There's a number of snapshots of her posing with the people that she had photographed. So she spent some time, actually got to know these people, and you can tell by the photographs, you can tell that there is an interaction there. It's not a tourist type picture.

The temporary exhibit opens Saturday and will run through Labor Day weekend. Cost of admission to the museum is $7 for adults, $3 for kids, and free for members.