Vivian Maier

Recently there has been a buzz in the photography world regarding the discovery of an amateur street photographer named Vivian Maier. Her work was discovered in 2007 by a Chicago historian named John Maloof, who purchased a box of prints and negatives at an antique auction. When he finally identified the photographer’s name, he found her obituary from the previous day. While Maier was unknown during her own time, through Maloof’s work to systematically scan her photographs and share them over the internet, her images are garnering worldwide acclaim. A solo exhibition of her work now hangs in the Chicago Cultural Center, and both a book and documentary about Vivian Maier are forthcoming.

What this story about Vivian Maier highlights is that photography and the history of photography is continuing to evolve, not just because of advancements in technology, but also because of the explorative work of photo archivists, historians and curators.

The Photo Archivist. Explained.

I like this explanation of what we photograph archivists do, written by Marguerite I. Roby on the Smithsonian Photography Initiative blog titled The Bigger Picture.

"The only difference between you and me is that I have to adhere to a stricter set of guidelines and standards in regards to the physical care, preservation, and description of the items in my charge.

Right, so how is what we do similar? Do you have prints of pictures? We call these born analog objects. Where are they? Are they in an album? A scrapbook? A shoebox? Your wallet? On your refrigerator? This is called physical control. Are they organized in any specific way that’s meaningful to you? Chronologically? By event? This is called arrangement. Do you have digital images? We call these born digital objects. Do you add captions to them or “tag” them with information? Do you write on the back of your prints? This is called description. Have you ever received pictures from family or friends, whether from your grandmother’s attic or as an email attachment? This is called an accession. Do you integrate them into the rest of your pictures? Do you keep them separate? Have you ever gotten rid of a picture or deleted an image from your hard drive? That’s deaccessioning. Are you digitizing your born analog prints? How do you decide what to scan? At what resolution do you scan them? What file-naming convention do you use? Are your digital images backed up? If you were to give away all of your pictures right now, is there enough context to discern the who, what, where, when, and why of your life in images? That’s my job: to ask these questions, to establish control over a body of images, and to document their context so that they are accessible."

Poetry of a Photo Collector

Here is a poem from a newspaper clipping titled "The Daguerreotype Girl" that accompanied a cased tintype portrait of a young girl in the Chicago History Museum collection:

Little girl, who are you?
Tell me, for time will fade
Your pretty face, your gingham dress,
your hair done in a braid.
Long have I had you near me,
Smiling from out your frame,
So lonely and so wistful.
Please, child, what is your name?
Are you Elizabeth or Phoebe,
Abigail or Jane
Of our Quaker ancestry
Whence came my father's name?
By chance you may be Josephine,
Catherine, Marie Louise
Of mother's proud French family.
Oh, can't you tell me, please?
It matters not now who you are
Nor how you chanced to be,
And I have ceased to wonder;
You're just a mystery.
My eyes grow dim, you fade away,
I only hold the frame.
Still I have always loved you,
Though never knew your name.
- C. B. S.

Eggleston at the Art Institute

The retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 is now up at the Art Institute of Chicago in their new modern wing. This exhibition highlights William Eggleston's ubiquitous images as well as his lesser known black-and-white work from the 1960s and other series that are rarely exhibited. A pioneer whose work helped break color photography into museums and galleries in the 1970s, Eggleston focuses on the everyday familiar in undeniably vivid color.


As a student of photographic preservation, I understand color photography to be extremely unstable, particularly color work that was created in the 1960s and 1970s when film and paper manufacturers, as well as photographers both professional and amateur, were still unaware of the inherent and dramatic fading and color shifting of their products. So I was pleasantly surprised to see Eggleston's vintage prints displayed with brilliant color. Either by extreme foresight, good luck, or a keen insight into collectors of art, Eggleston chose to work in the dye imbibition (or dye transfer) process which offers greater control in color saturation, brightness and hue. The pure dyes of this process are tremendously stable and preserve the artists' original printing choices. For effective comparison, some of Eggleston's images that were printed as 5 x 7s with the standard chromogenic process were displayed near large dye transfer prints from the same negatives. The color comparison is dramatic and the stability of dye transfer unmistakable.


On the same note, there are a few digital prints in this show. Much is made of the stability of the various digital printing processes and I only hope that twenty years from now the process chosen for those prints proves just as stable as Eggleston's dye transfers.


Printing processes aside, I love Eggleston's work and this exhibition. His explorations of the most common scenes around him transform the mundane into strange, unexpected and vividly American photographs.

Photographic Proof

You can’t deny the power of photography to convince. Of course today most people are fully aware of the ease and prevalence of photo manipulation, but seeing is still the best path to believing. That’s why when I advocate for my favorite breed of dog, the American Pit Bull Terrier, I often turn to photographs. Simply saying that pit bulls were once the most popular family pet in America, or that “nanny dog” was a nickname for these animals that were so good with children, is not usually enough to battle the vicious reputation this breed now has. But it’s true and old photographs like these help confirm it.

Victorian Photocollage

There is an amazing online component to an exhibition that just finished up at the Art Institute of Chicago called Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. An overview of the exhibition introduces the art of photocollage that began in the 1860s, and a breakdown of the exhibit themes outlines the purpose, practice, meanings and influence of Victorian photocollage. Selected works can be viewed, as well as pages from the incredible Madame B’s Marvelous Album. This site offers a wonderful introduction to these beautiful and whimsical designs and is a very good substitute for anyone who is unable to see this exhibit that is now traveling to New York and then Toronto.

Welcome!

Welcome to Past is Present, a place where I will discuss, ponder and present an assortment of issues regarding the history of photography and collecting, organizing and preserving various types of photographs.

Photography has been a passion of mine since the day my father gave me a Pentax K1000 35mm camera. Raised in a New Jersey suburb of Manhattan, I frequented New York City museums and galleries on a regular basis and found my biggest inspiration when I first viewed Robert Frank’s photographs from The Americans. I received my Bachelor's degree in Art with an emphasis in Photography from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. In 2007 I completed a two-year graduate program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management and received my Master's degree from Ryerson University. Since early 2008, I have been working as a Collection Manager of Prints and Photographs at the Chicago History Museum where I have a wide range of tasks and responsibilities involving registrarial and collections management, processing, arranging and cataloging pictorial collection items.

I continue to take my own photos, only now with a digital camera, and organize the images into sets on my Flickr page and the prints into a large volume of albums. I occasionally do graphic design work and am very experienced at digital photo restoration and re-touching. I collect photographs, primarily nineteenth century cartes de visite, cabinet cards, tintypes, ambrotypes, and (hopefully) daguerreotypes, as well as vintage snapshots and any old photos featuring American Staffordshire Terrier, Pit Bull, and other Bully dogs. Some of my other interests are mid-century modern design, lowbrow art, typography, Victorian lithography, natural curiosities, music, and film. I love perusing thrift stores, antique malls and flea markets, taking road trips, playing ping-pong, pool and Boggle, and organizing other people’s family photograph collections.

Stay tuned.