Words on Pictures

Marion . Subject heading: Curiosity. engraving, ca. 1850. Stahlstich v. Carl Mayer’s Kunst-Anstalt in Nürnberg. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. Curious? For the nominal cost of $4.99 you can get the ebook Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection.  Covering the years 1916 to 1965, Words on Pictures is an excellent resource for the study of the use and dissemination of printed visual resources during of the age of photo-mechanical reproduction.   The story of the Picture Collection cannot be told without the story of Romana Javitz (1903-1980) who was head of the Picture Collection from 1928-1968. A pioneering librarian whose career spans the rise of print media, cinema and the mass circulation of illustrated magazines and newspapers across the globe. In three interviews included in the publication Javitz reveals a mastery of the semantics of photograp

    Newsstand, 32nd Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan. (1935). Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4f7ea3d9- e040-e00a18064a99 Image ID 482798 By 1941 Romana Javitz was at the top of her field and was known world-wide as an authority on the use of pictorial materials. Many institutions, cultural organizations and corporations began clamoring for guidelines to organize their own burgeoning collections of visual materials.  So i n 1941, NYPL director Harry M. Lydenberg approached the Carnegie  Corporation for funds to allow Javitz time off from her regular duties to craft a  manual for the classification and arrangement of picture collections. In order to  proceed, Javitz, writing to Franklin F. Hopper, who succeeded Lydenberg as director i n 1941, insisted that she would need to first write: “a comprehensive

Cinema and the Document "The slow appreciation of the cinema as an art form may be laid at the oversight of dual but compatible functions of all art, of all pictorial productions. While the moving pictures document and record realistically that which we have seen, experienced and heard, nevertheless they are designed and produced under the same basic principles which condition all other types if pictorial composition. Consideration of any film discovers that the amount of story-telling elements and the subjective content is slight when compared to the amount of production craftmanship required to make the finished work. Photography in the moving film form has within its projected image every element of art, merged into a whole by editing, direction and conception of the relations of time sequences of events portrayed, of images moving and the balance of tone, light, sound and shape. And just as other art forms, moving pictures are good sources for facts... All films,

New York Public Library's Picture Collection, 1940s. Photo by Wurts Bros. New York Public Library Archives ( Visual Materials, RG10 ).  Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and NYPL Picture Collection.  The general public, especially outside the New York City area, is not familiar with the uniqueness of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection. It provides, much like books, the free circulation of prints, photographs, postcards and other clippings, all arranged using subject classification. And they have been doing it since 1914!  T he story of the origination of the Picture Collection and the career of Romana Javitz (1903-1980) can be found in an essay I wrote in 1995 for  the NYPL journal  Biblion: Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and The New York Public Library's Picture Collection Here is an excerpt: " Within two years of the opening of The New York Public Library's Central Building in 1911, the Print Room found itself overwhelmed with requests for p