Words on Pictures: A speech by Romana Javitz to the Massachusetts Library Association, Boston. 1943

Below is an extended excerpt from Javitz's speech, entitled Words on Pictures, given at the Massachusetts Library Association, Boston, Massachusetts, on January 28, 1943.  

At the peak of her career, Javitz encapsulates her far reaching and prescient vision into the use and misuse of pictures in everyday society. Much of it still applies today. The photographs following are intended to show examples of pictures reflecting the subjects discussed. 

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   "The mounting flood of pictures is permeating all of our lives, and its impact leaves deep impression on our minds. This unexploited pool of power can be tapped to produce ideas, stimulate processes of thinking and provoke action... 

 

   These pictures are not art, they are not pictures on exhibition, they are pictures at work. They are documents, momentarily cut off from their aesthetic functions to be employed for their subject content. Any picture is a document when it is being used as a source of information instead of being searched for its content of beauty...

 

   Most pictorial representation in the past and most photographs today, were made without aesthetic purpose, they were made as illustrations. The mere attempt to communicate an idea graphically should not be claimed to be art. Most pictures have as their purpose the recording of a visual experience, the rendering of the appearance of things. 

 

   While some pictures have been made solely as records, the pictures that were made for aesthetic ends may also serve a utilitarian purpose, may function at times as sources of information. All works of art mirror the world in which they were conceived, the life and the community from which the artist sprung. The artist rarely escapes reflecting his own times. 

 

   The original work of art and its printed copy are functioning as art when they bring aesthetic satisfaction. When pictures are looked at for the subject depicted, and the surface is searched for facts of appearance, then their content of beauty and design is deliberately ignored. If a painting is studied to discover the type of hair-shirt saints wore, this is an end-use wholly outside of the painting’s existence as art...

 

   The story of pictures in libraries is the story of printed pictures and that is the story of the camera. Until our times it was costly and sometimes impossible to make accurate copies of artwork since the printing depended upon hand methods of preliminary reproduction. With the introduction of photo-mechanical processes, pictorial publication was released, and we have not yet experienced its full force. This unbridled multiplication of pictures continues ceaselessly at a gargantuan rate in newspapers, magazines, in the comic strips and through projection machines in continuity across the screen. This expanding stream carries the fixed moments of time to all of the people, the literate and the illiterate, the young and the aged...

   The written and spoken words amplify the meaning of pictures. Since there are no facts within the pictorial image in itself, information must be furnished the onlooker in order to have the picture serve what the onlooker possesses. The interpretation and the meaning of pictures is dependent on the user and on the captions...

 

   Words used with pictures can distort facts effectively and make the pictures instruments of propaganda. The same photograph would appear in an Axis publication labeled: Democracy and the colored races, extinction not protection. Our government would use it in counter propaganda by the addition of other words: Fascism – women and children first – for death. In each instance the readers reaction would be conditioned by the combination of words and picture. 

 

   The use of illustrations in periodicals is more than a century old. Some of them, from the start, were as profusely pictorial as our present picture papers. The success of those first picture magazines was phenomenal in their day but not comparable with the fantastic circulation of Life and Look. 

 

   It was many decades before the publishers learned to edit pictures in order to form them into malleable tools of influence. The earlier papers used illustrations as individual items, as an end in themselves, as decorations and to illustrate something mentioned in the text. Typical of these was the mid-week pictorial which at least superficially was the Life of the last war. This weekly hardly reached a circulation of 25,000. With similar illustrations today pictorial news periodicals are read by millions weekly... 

 

   The fundamental difference is in the editing of the picture. Publishers learned that it is necessary to add story and words, to use a script, layout and typography in order to produce continuity for the subject of a picture. It was long before they realized that pictures are not only looked at but read, that the subject of a picture must be pointed up into a recognizable idea through accompanying words and more pictures. They learned that factual pictures in themselves, bare of words, cannot attract and hold attention and fail to communicate ideas.

 

   While the language of foreign people and vanished civilizations may be indecipherable and unintelligible, the contents of their pictorial records if still whole, are easily comprehensible. While a word takes on new connotations from generation to generation, and its meaning is soon lost, a picture remains constantly a recognizable image. This makes the pictorial language timeless in its understandability, truly without epoch it continues as a leaven in the enlightenment of the people. 

 

   The early relationship of printed pictures with libraries is bound up with the collections of illustrated books. The establishment of print rooms in larger libraries gave the first recognition to pictures as items outside the confines of a book. These collections were assembled to constitute a history of printmaking and the art of illustration. There, prints functioned as examples of the highest skill and as archives on the history of related techniques in the graphic arts. The prints in a library print room do not differ in purpose from those in an art museum. They are reserved for the print lover, the scholar and the artist. For information ends, such as their subject interest, it would suffice to study copies of these prints made photo-mechanically...

 

   The use of the camera in pictorial recording and as an educational medium is still in its beginning stage; it is as revolutionary in effect as the invention of movable type in printing. We are only at the rim of a far-reaching extension of our visual knowledge, and it is impossible to envisage what this will do to books and libraries. Future pictorial libraries will probably include miniature positive prints of pictures as subject indices, documentary moving pictures such as instruction films and newsreels. Stroboscopic photographs and films in slow motion will be available for the public who will probably be able to study them in book-size individual projection devices. All kinds of pictures will be organized for research use, and for their fullest potentiality they will circulate, entering laboratories, homes, schools and studios. 

 

   Pictures organized as sources of information are as necessary to a library as dictionaries and encyclopedias. They enhance and amplify the content of the book stock, they serve the library as exhibit material with which to attract the public and stimulate interest in subjects of communal and universal importance. They help dispel the dimness of the past and animate the words of history. With pictorial data, the playwright recreates a period, an orthopedist traces the shape of hand supports on crutches; an anthropologist disproves false concepts of racial physical characteristics; a camouflage worker learns the appearance of factories from the sky; obscure scientific and technical writings are clarified for the general public. 

 

   The documentary picture collection in a library should be organized on a basis of comprehensiveness, with emphasis on the clear definition and visibility of a picture rather than its artistic content. Since these are documents, the selection by the librarian should be kept at minimum. In a library, the public selects and chooses; in a museum the staff sets up standards since it is the function of a museum to guide the public and set up what the public may see to improve their taste. The library has a different role. With the vigor of impartiality, it marshals documentary pictures and through classification and editing, offers the public an impartial pictorial record of man’s cultural heritage, his life and history which they may use as they see fit. 

 

   Nothing is more amazing and gratifying in work with pictures than the limitless ends to which pictures are put to use by their users. One experience at the New York Public Library picture collection furnishes a good case history of the many roles of a pictorial document, showing the multiplicity of interpretations and applications a single picture can undergo. One of the Farm Security Administration photographs is that of a sharecropper’s wife standing at a shack door. She rests her youngest baby on her hip as two other children cling to her skirt; they are undernourished and unkempt and stare directly at the camera. Obviously, the mother is soon to have another child. This photograph has beauty and the feeling of the cameraman comes through to the onlooker. It was made as a routine pictorial report on the conditions which follow in the wake of drought and dust. 

 

   The Library’s first use of this picture was as part of a display on People and the Soil. A mural painter borrowed it to incorporate the types in a fresco he was painting for a hospital ward. A birth control society needed it as a good illustration on the importance of limiting families; a Catholic charity organization reprinted it on a leaflet soliciting funds for the needy; a Fascist journalist wanted to have it as an illustration in his Milan paper in order to ridicule Democracy and show “documentary proof that such a way of life breeds only poverty among riches”; a lecturer displayed this photograph to his Negro audience to bring to their attention that there are white people who live in shacks and starve and that poverty has more than racial implications. 

 

   A picture that is a straightforward, simple statement of observation is an effective medium for the dissemination of ideas. It can be a dangerous and a benign influence; it can be the source of facts and of lies; it is an insidious source of propaganda. It is always useful for conveying messages to all of the people because it is the most specific, easily understood and cheaply available record of human living. 

 

   We can hardly comprehend the immenseness of this medium of words and pictures. The full effect of the constant infiltration of edited visual printed images is too frequently slighted by those who work with words. Pictures are an active force in education and should be harnessed to the highest purposes, to stimulate the present and succeeding generations. Pictures are essential to libraries where they should join books and serve as documents of man’s own aspect and that of the changing times he has lived in."

Picture Culture

"At the "girlie" show at the fair in Rutland, Vermont" 1941. Jack Delano.

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/831a1d10-2289-0132-ead3-58d385a7bbd0

"Children looking at posters in front of movie, Saturday, Steele, Missouri" 1938. Russell Lee.

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a953a680-bdc1-0136-19d2-085fd82348ab

"Movie advertisements, Herrin, Illinois" 1939. Arthur Rothstein.

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/2d03d570-027b-0138-2939-4bc9e47d927c

Visual Documentation

"Clam seller in Mulberry Bend, New York" 

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-db1b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The first published illustration of poison ivy. 1635.

NYPL Wallach Picture Collection

Communication

"Identification marks on wings of army pigeon" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1918. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/18f36040-c2f6-0138-c9f3-0b13222c6397

Politics and Propaganda

"Poster in farmhome, Transylvania Project, Louisiana" 1939. Russell Lee.

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/829a0ff0-c4fe-0136-5ef5-1522c2943bf5

Information

"Poster by Record Section, Suburban Resettlement Administration" 1935. Arthur Rothstein.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/d270e200-dcaf-0137-dc1d-493169457e63

"Poster by Record Section, Suburban Resettlement Administration" 1935. Arthur Rothstein.

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 15, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c3d6de30-dcaf-0137-a6d6-1722215a1a4d

For the full speech see Chapter 5 in:

Words on Pictures: Romana and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection. edited by Anthony T. Troncale. New York: Photo | Verso Publications, LLC, 2020.   ISBN 978-1-7346409-0-8 (hardcover)  Identifiers ISBN  978-1-7346409-1-5 (ebook)

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