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Words on Pictures

The Organization of Vision: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection

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Romana Javitz. ca. 1942. Trude Fleischmann. Private collectio n. Origins: an immigrant, an art student, and an “untrained” librarian Romana Javitz was born in Russia in 1903 to Polish parents and immigrated to New York as a child. Her family settled in the Bronx and on the Upper West Side; her mother was a hat milliner and her father an importer of fine woods, giving the family a modest middle‑class footing and daily contact with materials, texture, and craft. This background – immigrant and artisanal at once – matters for understanding her later commitments: she instinctively took seriously both “high” art and the visual culture of ordinary life and work (Worth Beyond Words, pp. 6–7; Words on Pictures , passim). She entered the New York Public Library young, first in the Children’s Room (1919), then part‑time in the Picture Collection (from 1924), while studying painting at the Art Students League rather than library science ( Worth Beyond Words ... , p. 6; Staff News Appendix, p. 161...
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The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus

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  Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted instead of the printed word” and why it functioned as infrastructure for New York’s industrial image economy.   What follows sketches that geography and shows, with concrete examples, how firms and workers in Midtown used the Picture Collection and helped turn it into a major public visual resource.   1. Fifth Avenue and Times Squa...
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