Words on Pictures

  42nd Street entrance to NYPL Central Bldg. where Central Circulation was located in the now named Celeste Bartos Forum. (top left)   Berenice Abbott's  Tempo of the City: II, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, Looking west from Seymour Building, 503 Fifth Avenue. 1937. Changing New York . NYPL Wallach Photography Collection.   Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted i...

Romana Javitz in the Picture Collection. 1950s. The Annual Reports of the New York Public Library Picture Collection,  and published  from roughly 1916 to the late 1950s, offer a surprisingly rich body of evidence for study and analysis. They are not merely internal memos; read together, they form a longitudinal study of how visual culture, user communities, and the economics of pictures changed over half a century. Several kinds of analysis are possible. Note: See also recently digitized Unfilled Calls, 1925-1928 from internal Picture Collection records.  1. Growth, Scale, and Structural Limits The most obvious thread is quantitative: the rapid expansion of both stock and circulation, and the tension between demand and infrastructure. Stock growth • 1929: 222,828 classified pictures.   • 1934: 456,588 pictures (almost doubled in five years).   • 1936: 625,668 pictures.   • 1939: 877,405 pictures.   • 1943: 1,058,611 pictures.   • 194...