Greetings all,
While the City Experience model of the Boston was an intriguing and
exciting model to explore, the turnout on Monday was less than I had
hoped for. Many colleagues had already departed to return to the fray,
many took Monday as their travel day, etc. and so on. I will probably
beat my paper from the "/Seeing Past and Present Anew: Animating the
Archive/" session into some sort of condition for an academic journal,
but would also like to make it available to any who might be interested.
The PowerPoint is 25 Mb, but includes the visual portion of the paper
and is an absolutely necessary component, so please take that into
consideration if your mail system balks at large file attachments. The
paper proposal follows. Please read first and if it sound interesting,
give me a shout. May take a few days to respond.
Cheers,
Peter Blank
Animating the Archive: Playing in the Fields of Cultural Production.
Case Study: 1959 – More Than Frank’s /The Americans/.
As librarians we are commonly charged with creating, maintaining, and
providing access to our collections. But in recent years I have
completely recast my relationship to and appreciation of the
“collection.” In fact, “collection” is a term I seldom use. Instead, I
consider myself a sort of Bibliographer/Archaeologist on a dig, sifting
through what I now refer to as the “Archive” which I define as much more
than mere physical or digital collections. The Archive is an
intellectual construct that defines us.
A “fact” for a researcher working in our collections is often a fact
only within a certain cultural and time-sensitive context. In the
composting of understanding we identify as the writing of history
researchers level the push and pull of cultural forces with knowledge
assumptions in order to produce a serviceable end product, a history.
But over time and as vantage points shift these histories lose their
status as comprehensive structures and the process begins anew. Facts
and assumptions are recycled with new understanding to create new
products. The materials in our collections are not bound by walls, but
by ideas which are both aggressive and fleeting. The books in our
collections are not stillborn, but are writhing, uncontrollable
entities. The Archive is anything but a collection. It is a rich,
expanding, and shifting mass. It is constantly building, dismantling,
and reconstituting itself, often unbeknownst to its supposed caretakers.
Do we appreciate this notion of Archive? Have we lost the realization
that not only are we the guardians of the Archive as it is constituted
at that moment, but that the actions by which we create, maintain, and
provide access to the Archive we profoundly influence how the Archive is
perceived, or more importantly, /if it is perceived at all/? Are we
blind to the Archive?
First, I will kindle our awareness of the Archive with a brief yet
stimulating excursion into Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of lost “original
possibles,” field structures, and “agents” who are engaged in struggles
within those fields (/The Field of Cultural Production/, 1993), T.S.
Eliot’s commentaries on tradition and “the historical sense” (“Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” 1917), and Thomas Kuhn’s distinction of
“normal” and “revolutionary” science (/The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions/, 3rd ed., 1996). These ideas reveal the essentially
historicist underpinnings to my broader endeavor as an Archivist, which
is to provide a constantly fertile ground for researchers to recapture
essentially lost original possibles, that series of remarked and
unremarked beliefs that constitute an evolving cultural system, by
providing those researchers the means to excavate within the body of
published literature and related materials produced within that system.
Second, upon this philosophical basis for examining cultural production
and using the literature of photography, I will further present the case
for appreciating publication as culture and culture as publication. The
very nature of research in an object-based discipline such as art
history is inextricably linked to an object-based learning environment
where the form of the published vehicle as physical object (book or
magazine) is often as imbued with cultural codings as its contents.
Published artifacts have and project their own media values. I will
argue that the photobook functions as both an instrumental and a
reflective object for the culture that developed around photography,
specifically American art photography. By positioning the photobook
against the culture which produced it, the book casts back
representations that are otherwise irretrievable, providing traces of
the senses of self that constituted the identities, assumptions, and
values that collectively constitute culture, as well as evidence of the
systems that defined photographic practices and supported certain
cultural formations – and yes, made photographs.
Third, zeroing in on 1959 and Robert Frank’s /The Americans/ and other
photobooks of that era, I will close with a specific example of how, as
a bibliographer cum Archivist, I approach the Archive as it is
manifested in the Stanford Art & Architecture Library. We will look at
other well known examples of photobooks from 1959, including Richard
Avedon and Truman Capote’s /Observations/, Horizon Press’s /Aaron
Siskind Photographs/, and William Klein’s /Rome/, as well as those less
well known today, such as Carl Mydans’s /More Than Meets the Eye/ (1959)
and Lloyd and Alice Reeve’s /Gift of the Grape/ (with photos by Ansel
Adams and Pirkle Jones). I will demonstrate how it is possible to
suggest to students through the use of materials from the Archive as
well as an historical analysis of how these materials have appeared and
disappeared within the Archive that these books clearly identify a shift
from a culture where photography was seen as a sharing of facts to a
practice for personalizing experience. It is through my new
understanding of what constitutes Archive that I now base much of my
collection development and instructional practice.
The paper will be tight, fast paced, infused with interesting ideas, and
liberally dosed with extensive illustrations from the photobook
literature. Through a history of ideas and photographic practices, as
illustrated by multiple dust jackets and page spreads, this paper is
more a model for how one might conceptualize such an approach than a
nuts and bolts presentation of “this is how I do it at Stanford.”
-----------------------------
Peter P. Blank
Head Librarian
Art & Architecture Library
102 Cummings Art Bldg.
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2018
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