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The color of a flea's eye the picture collection [photographs by] Taryn Simon

Catalog Data

Photographer:
Simon, Taryn 1975-  Search this
Author:
New York Public Library Picture Collection  Search this
Subject:
New York Public Library Picture Collection History  Search this
New York Public Library Picture Collection  Search this
Physical description:
459 pages illustrations (some color, some folded), portraits (some color), facsimiles, plan (some color) 35 cm
Type:
Books
Pictorial works
Photobooks
History
Livres de photographies
Place:
New York (State)
New York
New York (État)
Date:
2020
21st century
21e siècle
Notes:
Section of "Plates" consists of color illustrations mounted on white paper (some leaves folded once or twice). Section on removed photographs consists of black/white illustrations printed on white paper. Remaining text and non-color illustrations printed on green paper
Purchased from the S. Dillon Ripley Endowment
Contents:
(from table of contents) Pictures at work / Joshua Chuang -- Installation views -- An unlikely futurity: Taryn Simon and the Picture Collection / Tim Griffin -- Plates -- Correspondence and documents / Manuscripts and Archives Division of The New York Public Library ; Picture Collection of The New York Public Library ; the Andy Warhol Museum -- Selection of photographs removed from the Picture Collection and transferred to the Photography Collection of The New York Public Library, 1982-2020 -- Picture Collection subject headings -- Picture Collection librarian subject heading cheat-sheet
Summary:
Taryn Simon's The Color of a Flea's Eye presents a history of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection -- a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies. In her work The Picture Collection (2012-20), Simon (born 1975) highlighted the impulse to organize visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon's photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history -- its classifications, its contents -- seems the stuff of projection. Simon spent years sifting through letters, memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists, media, government and a broader public. These documents also divulge the removal and transfer of photographs from the democratically circulating picture-collection folders to the photography collection in the late 1980s when their marketplace value became apparent. Simon's selection of photographs from these transfers highlights gender, immigration, race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography. -- publisher's statement
Topic:
Cataloging of pictures  Search this
Photography, Artistic  Search this
Catalogage--Illustrations, images, etc  Search this
Photographie artistique  Search this
Data Source:
Smithsonian Libraries
EDAN-URL:
edanmdm:siris_sil_1156740