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Words on Pictures

Why did the art market in photographs arrive so late?

  Why did the art market in photographs arrive so late?    The emergence of a serious art market in photographs in the 1960s was not simply the result of suddenly enlightened taste. It arrived late because of deep structural, ideological, and economic conditions that had constrained photography since its invention in 1839. To understand why it took so long one has to look at both the extended debate over photography’s legitimacy as art and the ways its support systems evolved outside the conventional art market.    From the vantage point of the 1960s, the emergence of a serious art market for collectible photographs can look like a belated but straightforward correction: museums began to collect, galleries began to sell, critics began to write, and photographs finally took their “rightful” place alongside painting and sculpture. But if you trace the medium’s history from 1839 forward, the lateness of that shift is anything but incidental. It was produced by str...
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A Professional Legacy

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   Romana Javitz’s career at the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection was not only about building a massive visual archive; it was equally about building a profession around that archive. She treated the Picture Collection as a laboratory for what a “picture library” could be, and then used that experience to help create a professional community—within the Special Libraries Association (SLA), in other libraries, and in graduate library education.    By the late 1940s and early 1950s, large numbers of special libraries—corporate, media, government, museum—were maintaining picture files and photographic archives. Most were subject-based and heavily used, but there were few shared standards for subject headings, storage, or research methods. In a 1965 interview, Javitz captured the situation bluntly: the field of picture libraries was “only three decades old… most picture collections have grown haphazardly and few even today are organized… the field is waiting f...
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