With more than almost 5 million photos, the New York Public Library boasts a wide-ranging collection that would be the envy of any museum: from 19th century cyanotypes of algae, handcrafted scrapbooks and cartes-de-visite, to classic Farm Security Administration photos, movie location pictures and contemporary digital art.
Just as today’s flood of digital images can overwhelm viewers, culling an exhibit from such a vast archive is no easy matter, because the collection was not compiled in the systematic manner of an art museum’s photo department. Instead, it was amassed over the decades by research libraries in the system, often as supporting material for various subject categories.
“I thought maybe we should try to link an exhibit’s sections more closely to contemporary categories that people are familiar with because of social media,” said Stephen C. Pinson, the library’s curator of photography. “Then we thought the exhibit could look at the history of photography through the contemporary uses of social media, how photography becomes public.”
The result is “Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography,” an ambitious show pegged to the 175th anniversary of the first official announcement of photography. Its familiar organizing principle — the social media categories of crowdsourcing, street view and photo sharing — turns out to be just as applicable to the medium’s earliest era as it is today.
The idea of street view might evoke screen shots of random outdoor scenes captured by Google’s car-mounted camera. But as this exhibit demonstrates, it can also include panoramas of San Francisco by Eadweard Muybridge. Photo sharing? The formal portrait left as a calling card in a carte-de-visite reminds us that maybe there is nothing new under the sun. As for crowdsourcing, a 19th century German album of African portraits done by different people — in a dated attempt to classify races — is an early example of such collaboration.
In the process of getting to these categories, curators at the library made a list of some images they definitely wanted to show, like William Henry Jackson’s photos of the American West; Anna Atkins’s images of British algae; and mid-20th century color slides taken by an American soldier in Italy. They also looked at critical moments in the history of the medium, whether it was the official announcement of photgraphy in 1839 or the Museum of Modern Art’s “Family of Man” exhibit in the 1950s.
Library officials would draw on an archive that was first organized in a systemwide manner in the 1970s, by Julia Van Haaften, who was the library’s first curator. She had pulled together the collection from the holdings of different research libraries.
“It was mind-boggling the number of photos we had,” Mr. Pinson said. “The library had been collecting photos in support of different subjects. It was different from MoMA, which set out to collect photos methodically.”
For example, Mr. Pinson learned that the library had acquired a small portfolio of August Sander’s work, a dozen photos of people smoking. The images were part of a tobacco-related collection at the library.
Then there were the photos a Canadian photographer took of diners at a restaurant — feeding a piglet with a bottle.
“Everyone who dined there had their picture taken feeding the pig,” said Elizabeth Cronin, the library’s assistant curator for photography. “You can’t resist looking at pictures of people with this feeding bottle for the pig while they’re eating pork chops.”
Of course, in an archive as extensive as the library’s there are ample opportunities to feature the work of major figures in the medium’s history, like Minor White and Diane Arbus. But it also includes images like party pictures taken in the 1960s by Malick Sidibé.
The decision to look at the archive through a different set of categories reflected changes in photography since the medium’s last major anniversary in 1989. Back then, the emphasis was to underscore the acceptance of photography as art, something that is now taken for granted. Today, with photography having become such an everyday part of life and social interaction, it seemed like a good opportunity to examine the role and uses of the medium through the years.
As it turned out, the categories so closely associated with social media lent themselves to re-evaluating photography, whose pioneers and devotees were concerned with figuring out not only ways to document, but also to get the public to embrace the medium.
Nowadays, that argument seems to have swung in the opposite extreme, as some suggest that the unceasing flow of images has prevented people from saving individual scenes. But Mr. Pinson differs.
“So much of the discussion today is negative as to the pervasiveness of photography now,” he said. “It’s ubiquitous. But part of what we’re trying to show is that sharing and the pervasiveness of photography has been part of a long lineage that has been occurring since 1839.”
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