The Black Star Collection at The Image Centre: the expectations,
challenges, and results of a decade of research in a key photo agency's
print collection.
In 2005, Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University (TMU)
acquired the massive collection Black Star Collection of the photo
agency previously based in New York City--nearly 292,000 black-and-white
prints. Preserved at The Image Centre at TMU, the images include iconic
stills of the American Civil Rights movement by Charles Moore, among
thousands of ordinary photographs that were classified by theme in the
agency's picture library. While the move of the collection from a
corporate photo agency to a public cultural institution enables more
access, researchers must still face the size of the collection, its
structural organization, the materiality of the prints, and the lack of
ephemera. Facing Black Star aims to fruitfully highlight this tension
between research expectations and challenges.
Coeditors Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie have gathered local,
national, and international researchers ranging from graduate students
to established scholars and curators to illuminate the staggering range
of the collection, from its disquieting record of the Nazis' rise to
power to its visual archive of climate change. Each contribution
highlights methodological, epistemological, and political issues
inherent to conducting research in photographic archives and
collections, such as indexing protocols and their impact on research,
the photographic archive as a place of visibility and invisibility, and
the photographic archive as a hermeneutic tool.
Shedding new light on current issues in the theory and history of
photography, this impressive volume containing 100 images will not only
discuss the subjects portrayed in the photographs but will also address
the history of photojournalism, the role of such a photographic archive
in our Western societies, and ultimately photography as a medium.
Like the other volumes of the RIC Books series (MIT Press/The Image
Centre [formerly the Ryerson Image Centre]), this publication will
appeal as much to academics of visual history as it will to photography
enthusiasts in general.
