Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (History and Foundations of Information Science)

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. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Prologue: Picture-Workers 14 Introduction: Picture-Problems 18 Pictures across Fields and History 23 Circulating, Image, Collection, and Other Useful Terms: A Short Glossary 28 Chapter Outline 36 “An Exhilarating Continuity” 40 1. Circulating Collection Style: Pictures as Documents at the New York Public Library 42 Living Collection 47 “Pictures as Documents” 66 Conclusion: Circulating Collection Style 85 2. The Museum Without Walls: The Museum of Modern Art and Photography’s Double Duty 96 Alfred Barr, the Reproduction in the 1920s, and Les Demoiselles D’Avignon 102 Circulating Modernism 109 The Library, Rights and Reproductions, and the Values of Photography 124 The Art Lending Service and Photography: The Atget Portfolio 135 Conclusion: The Museum without Walls 144 3. “Your Story in Pictures Leaves Nothing Untold”: H. Armstrong Roberts and the Rise of American Stock Photography 148 Infrastructure: The Ledger and the Studio 154 Infrastructure: Cards, Cabinets, Catalogues 167 Signal: The Genre of Stock as Photographic Allegory 179 Conclusion: System Aesthetics of the Deconstructed Image 198 4. The New Universal Collection: From Pictures to Digital Assets 204 Digital Image 208 Digital Asset 210 Computerization 212 Compact Discs and Digitization 215 Digital Asset Management Systems 223 Copyright Management 226 Structured Data: Metadata and Keywording 229 Union Collection 238 Conclusion: An Uncertain Future 244 Coda: Angels of History 248 Notes 256 Prologue 256 Introduction 256 Chapter 1 261 Chapter 2 271 Chapter 3 281 Chapter 4 288 Coda 294 Bibliography 296 Interviews 296 Archives 297 Bibliography 297 Index 318 "Argues that our contemporary treatment of the image as a circulating object was forged by three 20th century institutions: the museum, the library, and the stock photography agency"-- Provided by publisher