The Polly Knoll Papers

By Library Staff

A rich, fascinating, and extensive new archival and photographic collection focused on Arabian horses is now available for researchers in the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library at Cal Poly Pomona. The Polly Knoll Papers complement the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library holdings, one of the major collecting areas of the Special Collections & Archives unit of the University Library.

Polly Knoll was an Arabian horse photographer who was active from the 1960s through the mid-2010s. After Knoll passed away in 2019, her daughter Jan Burgan donated Knoll’s photographic prints, writing drafts, correspondence, and other materials to the Cal Poly Pomona University Library. Knoll’s collection comprises 251 boxes and measures 106.5 linear feet. This new collection represents one of our largest collections in the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library collecting area.

During her extensive and groundbreaking career, Knoll traveled from farm to farm across the country photographing Arabian horses and their riders, handlers, and owners. She would take dozens of photographs during each session and kept a detailed system of numbering envelopes with the roll number. Oftentimes, she would also number each individual photograph on the negative sleeve, and she kept notebooks, organized by month and year, with identifying information for many of those photographs.

In addition to photographing farms, Knoll used her camera to document many Arabian horse shows over the years, starting with regional shows and eventually focusing on three big events: The Egyptian Event, an annual show organized by the Pyramid Society; The Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show in Arizona; and the United States Nationals.

Along with photographs, Knoll’s collection includes drafts of writings and research materials for articles, correspondence, and notes from trips to Egypt and other countries. One of the writing drafts is titled “The Adventure Behind the Patrick Swayze Poster” and tells the story of Knoll’s day photographing actor Patrick Swayze. It provides an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of photographing horses and capturing the right shot. That photography session resulted in a well-known poster in the Arabian horse community: Swayze is photographed in a field with his bare back to the camera and his hands resting on his horse, Tammen. (We note Swayze is not the only celebrity to appear in the collection). The textual materials also include the outline of a speech in which Knoll gives tips on how to photograph Arabian horses.

While Knoll’s collection is part of the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library collecting area and will be a great resource for Arabian horse researchers, her collection could also be of interest to people studying photography. The materials provide insight into the practices of a professional photographer, with Knoll writing instructions on how she wanted photographs processed, occasionally making notes about the camera she used, and taking what appear to be experimental photographs with different cameras. Moreover, the collection acts as a record of the technological changes that have happened in the photography industry over the past several decades. For most of her career, Knoll relied on analog methods to capture and process her photographs, eventually turning to memory cards and CDs in her later years.

Because of the vast number of photographs and other materials that Knoll created over the years, a large part of the processing time focused on creating a detailed arrangement and finding aid over 21 months. While Rob Strauss oversaw the processing of the collection, a number of student assistants worked on the collection including Iman Mirza, Marissa Matthews, Elsie Voong, Leila Al-Shibibi, Radhika Epps, and Luis Frausto. These student assistants provided help with identifying photographs, helping to arrange materials, entering information into the finding aid, and labeling folders, among many more tasks.

Processing archival collections is a specialized area of librarianship. Processing such a collection involves sorting and organizing the materials into different series, developing a schema for the collection, rehousing the materials into acid-free folders and boxes to protect and preserve the items, and producing a detailed finding aid that serves as an inventory for researchers using the collection. The finding aid for the Polly Knoll Papers is now available in the Online Archive of California.

One of the challenges of processing the collection was identifying people, farms, horses, and events in the photographs. "This requires staff like Rob Strauss to research, investigate, and, to some extent, play detective," said Dr. Jéanne Brooks, Senior Director of Library Operations & Development. Dr. Brooks’ experience in and knowledge of in the Arabian Horse community was useful in identifying and suggesting leads on items that lacked identification. We often relied on Knoll’s own notebooks, clues in photographs, and resources like AHA DataSource, a database from the Arabian Horse Association. We also cross-referenced the names of horses with the names of the owners or farms and their locations. Finally, we sought help from the members of Arabian horse groups on Facebook.

“We are delighted to make this valuable and impressive collection available to our students, faculty, staff, and researchers from the Arabian horse community,” said Pat Hawthorne, University Library Dean, “and we are very grateful to Polly Knoll’s daughter for her gift of this collection to Cal Poly Pomona and are honored to steward this collection as part of Polly Knoll’s legacy.”

“The work completed by Rob Strauss and our student assistants under the guidance of Katie Richardson, Head of Special Collections & Archives, represents a significant accomplishment and is a testament to their talent and dedication. In the area of special collections and archives, we strive to make these one-of-a-kind collections accessible and discoverable to researchers around the globe.”

This will be an important research collection that will draw the Arabian Horse community and researchers to Cal Poly Pomona, said Brooks, who works with library donors extensively. The University Library will seek donor funding to digitize this collection in the future, noted Hawthorne. If you are interested in donating to the University Library, contact Brooks at brooks@cpp.edu.

If you are interested in seeing the collection, please see our Using the Collections page for information about our reading room hours and how to request materials. You can also email Special Collections and Archives at speccollections@cpp.edu. Appointments are recommended so that we can have the materials prepared for you at the start of your research appointment.