Visiting the Special Collections library allowed a unique opportunity to interface with original museum quality documents beyond their indexical value — meaning that the physicality of the documents added an additional context to the work that was otherwise undetectable on the web or in photographs. The age and wear of the papers and illustrations, in addition to their typographic layouts, fonts, and seals, all added a temporal/material context that is not as satisfyingly achieved through the digital reproductions of the documents. Feeling the delicacy of the ink and paper with one’s own hands enhances the “spirit” of the material, inasmuch that the physical quality informs a greater story or ideal as to what the documents mean for a viewer. This meaning can range anywhere from awe to uplift to grim understanding, and this spectrum of possibility beyond form is explained by Hegel’ definition of materie — it holds form as a physical object, yet is also indicative of a greater ideal which the object holds. Overall I felt that the physical material put into a context a period of american history which I have difficulty imagining, yet is actually not so far away. The thing that struck me the most was seeing George’s old movie posters up close — the means of printing documents was very different 80-90 years ago, and witnessing the quality of those prints gave me a taste of how different not only the technology was at the time, but the culture and social atmosphere as well.
What this all leads to is a deeper understanding of the obstacles George P. Johnson needed to overcome in order to continue producing and archiving his movies. Something that strikes me deeply is the foresight he had when it came to building a collection of his print documents — the sheer volume of material available in the library is staggering, and it’s impressive that all the items were kept in good condition for nearly a century. What also struck me is the delicacy of the documents, and how easy it would be to destroy or erase an entire material history. Sadly, this is a reality that has happened many times in the past, and seeing the fragility of the objects up close reminded me of both the physical and emotional labor one must undertake to archive the extant documents of a sparsely recorded cultural legacy of a group of historically oppressed peoples.