Diana Kamin. The MIT Press, 2023.
Note: I approach this review with experience in stock photography editing and content management, as well as fine art and technical photographic education. I am currently focused on library archives and digitization of cultural heritage materials, so I jumped at the chance to review this title, which touches on the nature of picture collections held by libraries and museums and the development of monetized collections in stock and digital collections.
Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy is a deep look at picture collections, their access, and the notion that this circulating access informs the nature of pictures and their consumption. Written by Diana Kamin and published by MIT Press in 2023, the book is academic in approach by nature of its origin in Kamin's dissertation in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Having further developed the content at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, the author presents the reader with opportunities to connect "picture work" across distinct archive types and philosophies. These descriptions of photography will appeal to readers and students most interested in its history, visual information professionals, those pursuing curatorial studies, or any kind of "picture worker."
Using specific case studies, including the New York Public Library's Picture Collection, as steered by Romana Javitz, images as both reproduction and art at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and the genesis of readymade images from H. Armstrong Roberts stock photography studio and collection, Kamin points to the circulation, utility, and consumption of images in these three instances while further demonstrating the evolution of images from physical photographs to digital assets and a new, universal collection. Kamin beautifully weaves the threads that connect art and photo history, library science, museum studies, and commercial photography, citing a robust bibliography of writings that fully inform these fields.
It was a pleasure reading content that included compelling evidence supporting the author's hypothesis: circulation is at the basis of function for a picture. Citations from familiar critics and philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Beaumont Newhall, and Susan Sontag provide a scholarly backbone. At the same time, Kamin emphasizes case study stories and relies on more recent writings to support ideas concerning picture archives and digitization. Kamin melds the day-to-day workings of a library's physical picture collection in the early 20th century with the curatorial concerns of MOMA at its inception while describing the evolution of stock photography; because the examples are concurrent, Kamin paints the path of growth from early unique referents to digital currencies of the 1990s:
[Pictures] represent artworks to be copied down by art history students, or visual sources for a graphic designer, or stock images sufficiently generic to serve as a backdrop for a variety of advertising messages. They circulate as material objects, but their visual content is part of a larger circulation and mutation of forms in postmodern visual culture.
The author's hypothesis defines images post-Talbot's calotypes. Additional description and analysis of early methods of image duplication would provide context and illustrate the yearning for multiple versions of a moment. Larry J. Schaaf, “Biography: William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877),” The Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford University Press), as cited in https://www.gallery.ca/photo-blog/the-calotype-process
When the stock industry shifted to digital, global distribution models, I was a content manager at a stock photography agency that previously prided itself on producing in-house, original, rights-managed content, which passed through the discriminating phases of production, editing, research, cataloging, digitization, marketing, and sales. One day, I found myself in an all-hands meeting called by the CEO. Speaking to the Visual Content team directly, he urged us to quickly source large quantities of recycled visual concepts, saying these prescient words: "We sell widgets, and our widgets are pictures." I was disappointed in the movement away from the craft and concerns of photography towards a market diluted with high-volume generic royalty-free images. The emergence of microstock offerings made pictures homogenous and easy to shop around to global vendor networks for bulk ingestion.
I share this personal account to confirm photography's economies of scale and transmutation from unique physical pictures to circulating digital visual currency, as Kamin writes in Picture-Work. While I might speak in platitudes about my personal and professional excitement for this book, Diana Kamin certainly never does in this detailed, well-illustrated, and compelling read. This publication will find a home in photo history courses alongside critical theory and would support a fantastic special topics course. I appreciated the opportunity to read about picture workers who were not or are not strictly photographers. They have a direct hand in curating and describing images while ensuring their access to a broad swath of end users.
Further, as we move into three-dimensional, augmented, and artificial representations of our realities, we must wonder how form will follow function for Kamin's circulating image economy.
Jennifer Morgan, MFA. Artist, Educator, and Preservationist
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