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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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