How the image collection, organized and made available for public
consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual
culture.
The origins of today's kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In
this book, Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image
economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major
institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these
institutions--the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and
the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.--defined the public's
understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast
collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored
figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl
Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored
professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work
communicates ideas about images to the public.
Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image
collections through systems of classification and protocols of search
and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image
culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as
well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these
interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content,
which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing
image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in
the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with
photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians,
and artists on their working practices.
