Words on Pictures

  Dorothea Lange's American Country Woman series and the NYPL Picture Collection  In 1964, while working on her retrospective exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dorothea Lange contacted Javitz about placing what became three sets of photographs of her work in the Picture Collection files: A portfolio of what Lange called The American Country Woman ; another a series on the Amana Society of Iowa, made while on a 1941 Guggenheim grant; and a third group a selection of over 200 exhibition prints and working proofs presented as a gift.   Lange understood the mission of the Picture Collection and wanted her legacy of photo-documentation to be a permanent part of it. Lange wrote to Javitz in 1965 about the American Country Woman series:  “There are about sixteen personages in the box and in many cases as accompaniment to the Women is a photograph of where she lives, her habitation. I have worked on these photographs for years, on and off, and they ar...

Rothman's Pawn Shop, 149 Eighth Avenue. 1938. Berenice Abbott. Changing New York  #297.026   Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection , is an anthology of writings by Romana Javitz(1903-1980) that also includes three interviews in which she expounds on the use of pictures, especially photographs, as a tool for documentation. When pictures enter the Picture Collection for circulation they are analyzed for their subject content first and foremost. Subsequently, Javitz and her highly trained staff assign a subject heading that most defines the visible content that dominates or best illustrates what is in the image. With this approach, photographs to be used in the Picture Collection are often washed clean of the photographers or the publisher’s intent. Under this rubric a photograph clipped from a magazine or newspaper can have just as much impact as a fine platinum print if its content clearly defines or illustrates a subject or subje...