The physical objects from the special collection that my group handled were photographs and included some negatives. One folder was labeled “miscellaneous”, and was a stack of random photos, sort of like a scrapbook collection. It included young children, family portraits, postcards, and landscape photos showing what the city and area looked like at the time. Most of the photos were not labelled with the names of the people or places in the photographs, which made the context more difficult to understand. We were not sure who he received these photos from, or which ones he may have taken himself. Another folder had a photograph and newspaper clipping about the actor Clarence Brooks, from 1921. The article by Mary Donnelly that included his biography noted how young he was. There was also a comment about how he was in a film for Johnson’s production company, Lincoln Motion Picture Company. It was interesting to see what Johnson thought was important, and how well he preserved these materials.
Reflecting on viewing these materials and trying to understand their meaning and context has me wondering the best way for these works to be displayed in an exhibit. In Stephen Conn’s essay, he notes that different kinds of museums require different kinds of objects, and not all museums will require visitors to interact with the objects in the same way. I wonder how much of being able to physically hold the photographs and see the negatives without them being presented or displayed in a glass case affected my feeling of awe, of imagining what the world was like in the early 1900s, or the fact that one person was able to collect such important, well-preserved materials. I thought an interesting comment from the materiality page on UChicago was Walter Benjamin’s quote about the “indefinitely reproducible” quality of photography, and its lack of “aura” as a result. Part of my fascination with these photographs, was the fact that they were the original artworks. I’m not sure holding reproductions, or looking at a digital copy, would have had such an effect on me. This discussion of physicality and materiality in regards to photographs has me wondering how much of the content of the photographs had an effect, and how much of it was the material and form. Additionally, I think that this will be an important consideration to make when curating our exhibit; ensuring that our visitors can appreciate the photographs as artworks without reducing them to presented “images” behind a display case.
Perhaps we could find a way to exhibit digital reproductions of the photographs in conjunction with some of the negatives? This way visitors to the exhibition would see the physical objects contained in Johnson’s collection as well as the photographic images. I’m imagining the images on a slide show displayed on the central TV screen in Special Collections and perhaps some of the negatives, along with a photo album and other related objects, displayed in a vitrine.
I really appreciated the detail and specificity of the beginning of your post! It’s interesting to see what other people got to look at in the special collections, as my group read through newspaper articles about desegregation in LA schools, vastly different from a collection of personal photographs and negatives. And as for curating the exhibit I agree that we could make a slide show of the images and have them play on a loop on the central TV screen.
I agree that it is important that once we curate our exhibits we make sure that photographs become more then just a captured moment or freeze fame of time. Images may be worth a thousand words but they often fail to accuratly give the viewer an accurate story or meaning behind the image. There is something about physically experiencing something that cannot compare to merely just seeing it, all of your 5 senses are allowed to make an assessment.
In my last DH project, my group was given 10,000 photos taken by amateur photographer and travelling salesman Henry Cushman, who took color photos all over America between 1929-1959. The collection was incredibly well archived with meticulous detail to the type of photo taken. Although we didn’t have the original photos or negatives, I think the sheer number of photos were able to tell a compelling story about Cushman’s life – perhaps this same approach could be applied to the photo collection of George P. Johnson.
Your observations made me think of a drawer in my mother’s house when I was a little girl. She amassed a huge collection of photos including the negatives over a period of forty years. While she was able to collect images easily, curation wasn’t her thing. When the drawer ended up passed on to me I was faced with thousands of images that I needed to sort through and categorize. The physical and emotional experience of engaging with the material affected how I selected and categorized images. I also found myself unable to discard a single one, leaving me with a remnant box of hundreds of out-of-focus, uncentered or somehow hard to perceive images. I couldn’t discard any of them out of reverence for the circumstances of their creation, and a nagging feeling that without them the collection would be somehow incomplete. I think George Johnson may have faced similar challenges, and rose to the occasion in his drive to save it all.