Picture-Work

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture.

The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In this book, Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public.

Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.Acknowledgments ix
Prologue: Picture-workers xiii
Introduction: Picture-problems 1
1 Circulating Collection Style: Pictures as Documents at the New York Public Library 25
2 The Museum Without Walls: The Museum of Modern Art and Photography's Double Duty 79
3 "Your Story in Pictures Leaves Nothing Untold": H. Armstrong Roberts and the Rise of American Stock Photography 131
4 The New Universal Collection: From Pictures to Digital Assets 187
Coda: Angels of History 231
Notes 239
Bibliography 279
Index 301"Kamin offers readers a compelling, trustworthy, and detailed story about how photographic imprints and images in general are made and remade. . . This is a book well worth reading, even to someone who never bothers to take pictures of anything."
—CHOICE

“The close but strongly contextualized reading of the picture-workers’ philosophy as well as achievements is an important contribution to our thinking on photography…. Finally, this outstandingly well written book –a real page-turner!– challenges the idea that digital culture is an absolute novelty: many problems, procedures, obstacles, achievements of the digital circulation of pictures were already known and addressed by picture-workers during the analog era…”
—Leonardo Reviews

“In this remarkable book, Kamin shows how twentieth-century social networks of paper and touch shaped today’s digital image economy. An invaluable perspective and a major contribution to media and information studies.”
—Craig Robertson, author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information
 
“This extremely precise study fills a glaring gap in the field of photographic history. Diana Kamin reveals how picture-workers enable the circulation of images and thus provide access to the visible.”
—Clément Chéroux, Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, FranceDiana Kamin is Advanced Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York. Her research has been published in Information & Culture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Artforum, among other publications.