First Impressions

Viewing and handling objects from the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection, 1916-1977 was an exciting an invigorating experience. My group and I examined a box that contained primarily personal communications, handwritten notes, and formal financial documentation for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. As we explored the folders, we would try to gather details–names, dates, locations–from the papers and connect them to the events discussed in the George P. Johnson oral history. For example, we found a telegram that mentioned upcoming travel dates that needed to be adjusted based on obligations Johnson had at the United States Post Office and, after reading the oral history, we knew many details of how Johnson secured that position as well as his various exploits in the role, such as when he faked a leave of absence to travel to Los Angeles for film industry work. While the content of the message in the telegraph was not immediately significant or particularly interesting, it made me step out of my world of text messages and emails and remember how fundamentally different communication was in George P. Johnson’s time. While I had done the reading about Johnson’s life and the history of early African America film, it was the telegram and not the reading, that really forced me to consider the realities of Johnson’s time.

As we begin to make choices about what kinds of objects to include in the exhibition of the collection, It will be up to us to decide which objects will allow visitors to enter into Johnson’s history and consider the historical, social, and political context of his work. In the chapter “Do Museums Still Need Objects?”, Steven Conn discusses the transition from the late 19^th century tradition of presenting a “visual abundance” of objects to the more “modernist” display techniques now used in museums. He writes that by reducing the number of objects on display, there is a change in “the work the objects are being asked to do” (23). I appreciate this formulation for the way that it confronts that fact that, in a curated exhibition, each object must tell the part of the story it has been assigned.

In our first glimpses at the archive, I was struck by the content that was absent or that we were not able to accurately identify. We found, for example, several sheets of undated paper with scrawled notes, very difficult to read, that we could only really identify as lists of names. Who were these people? What was their relationship to Johnson? When was the note written? All of these questions were left unanswered in our first look into the collection. My exposure to the collection, although short, was a unique and special opportunity to physically handle objects from another time. As I explored The Smithsonian’s X3D objects online, all I could think about was how, while indeed fascinating, the visual experience could not possibly compare to holding the objects–their matter–in my own hands.