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Words on Pictures

Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection

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The history of the use of visual mateials and photography in the arts, the sciences and in commerce cannot be told without Romana Javitz and the story of her 40-year career as the supervisor of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection.  The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection has been circulating photographs, clippings, prints and postcards to the public for over 105 years. It is a free picture reference service used by many important industries that need visual resources for their work.  Still operating out of t he Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42 nd  Street,   the Picture Collection remains an important resource for teachers and historians, designers and illustrators, as well as artists and photographers. It is, at almost 1.5 million images, considered an encyclopedia of pictures that encapsulates the age of mechanical reproduction.  The texts presented in Words on Pictures highlight the career of Javitz, who, as superi...
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The Organization of Vision: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection

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  The Organization of Vision: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection Romana Javitz. ca. 1942. Trude Fleischmann. Private collection. 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 Stude...
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