I’m sitting in a New York Metro station waiting for a train to take me back to Manhattan. I have two bags of books I’ve just bought at an art book fair. I’m a little woozy from having just spent hours wading through hundreds of books. It’s dizzying seeing so many books in one place.
I start looking through my new purchases…
I think about the thousands upon thousands of pictures in these books. Who else has seen them? Who else will see them? Photobooks are such a democratic way to share pictures that I ponder the genealogy of the pictures in my shopping bags. Saving pictures is a thing a lot of people do. There are millions and millions and millions of ordinary pictures with their own history. These pictures are saved, thrown away, cherished, lost, lovingly put in albums, or forgotten in drawers. They are at once the core and the detritus of our lives. How people collect and reorganize these images is interesting to me.
My mind wanders…
I realize that, as usual, I’ve bought a few books based on the re-collection of vernacular photos. “Dark Days” by Melissa Catanese is a dream-like rethinking of photos she worked with in the vernacular collection of Peter J. Cohen. “Le Luxe” is Roe Ethridge’s recontextualization of his own inventory of images which are both vernacular and personal. This gets me thinking about other books in my library that navigate the remapping of other people’s images. Mariken Wessels’ amazing “Elisabeth – I Want To Eat” created from of a collection of anonymous photographs, letters and postcards belonging to a young woman, which the artist stumbled upon in a shop in the Hendrik Jacobszstraat in Amsterdam. Wessels brilliantly forges this archive into a spellbinding visual narrative. Petra Stavast, in her book “Libero”, stumbles on a family archive in an abandoned house in Calabria which she uses as a starting point to reconstruct the story behind the images. Using a combination of her own pictures and pictures from the archive, she beautifully unfolds a tale about family, impermanence, and memory.
The doors of the L train hiss open…
My mind snaps back to the present as I struggle to gather my things and rush to board the train in time. I just make it on but have a nagging thought that I have forgotten something. I turn around and see, as the doors close in front of my nose, my two bags of books sitting abandoned on the Metro bench. It’s ok, I think to myself, I’ll just get off at the next station, double back, and the books will be sitting right where I left them. Who would want a pile of photobooks? I think about the project of Joachim Schmid, “Bilder von der Strasse” in which, for two decades, he collected pictures he literally found in the street. It is a masterpiece made from litter. And this is only one of many found photo projects and books made by the indefatigable Mr. Schmid. Perhaps less well-known is Sandor Kardos’ “Horus Archive which is built from Kardos staggering (and mind bogglingly well-organized) collection of found and vernacular photos. Lost photos are the stock in trade for these guys. Maybe my books are not as safe as I think. At the next station, a train heading back to where I started is just pulling in.
I scramble across the platform, racing for the open door…
I’m so eager to get back to my books, the minutes slog by. I ponder: What happens to lost pictures? Michael Abrams interleaves them into his book, “Strange and Singular”, to be found like money on the sidewalk while you work your way through his collection of vernacular photos. “Nein, Onkel” presents snapshots from the German side of World War II culled from personal albums (I presume no longer in the possession of the person who took the picture) by the Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC has literally millions of these snapshots. These are collections of pictures that have merged and morphed into a different collection of pictures.
The train squeals and slows as we arrive at my original Metro stop…
My eyes scan the benches on the opposite platform for any sign of my orphaned bags of books. Nothing. Gone. Empty.
Joachim Schmid, Peter J. Cohen, Frank Maresca, Mariken Wessels, Petra Stavast, Roe Ethridge, Peter Piller, Rodger Kingston, Daniel Cowin, Thomas Walther, Robert Jackson, and countless others have built collections, archives, and projects around the everyday photo removed from its original context. Who knows, maybe my little collection of their collections will find their way into some new and unexpected place. Perhaps whoever found them will start their own collection. Thus passes all libraries (sic transit omnia biblio).
-Evan Mirapaul