"Why is photography important?" and "How does one become a collector of photography?" with Helen Trompeteler, Deputy Director of Silver Eye Center for Photography

5. Why is photography important? 

Photography is a vital form of creative self-expression. It can create empowering spaces for connection with ourselves and each other. When artists center curiosity, empathy, and social concern in their practice, photography can challenge conventions, biases, and structural inequalities. Through such photography, we can imagine and work towards more equitable futures. Photography is important to me when it provokes me to critically question history, society, and representation and continually reflect on how photographs are made, read, circulated and understood. Most of all, photography is important in any way that an individual finds meaningful. That relationship has the potential to be limitless. 

Spring by Marc Wilson from the series ‘Travelogue 1’ made in Ukraine between 2018-2021. © Marc Wilson

6. How does one become a collector of photography? 

Relationships are fundamental to becoming a collector of photography - whether with artists, gallerists, curators, arts workers, cultural producers, or writers. Start going to events at galleries or organizations whose programs directly support and engage with artists. These experiences will offer the opportunity to discover new work, develop your interests, and connect with artists directly in meaningful and authentic ways. I don't think the commercial value should drive your collecting. But instead, collect what you love and fully embrace that this will inevitably change and grow in unexpected ways.

In Pittsburgh, we are fortunate to have many accessible pathways to start collecting. Such local opportunities include editions from Silver Eye, regular juried shows by local non-profits such as Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and Brew House Association, Small Mall, and the emergence of new independent art galleries such as Here. Most of my recent personal collecting has been through fundraising initiatives raising awareness on issues that are important to me. I encourage new collectors to consider how their collecting purposefully aligns with their values. Ultimately, when collecting work by contemporary photographers, you directly support the future development of their artistic practice, which is one of the most rewarding reasons to start collecting.

"Who is Your Favorite Photographer?" with Helen Trompeteler, Deputy Director of Programs at Silver Eye Center for Photography

For the next part of our On Curating Photography series with Helen Trompeteler, Deputy Director of Programs at Silver Eye Center for Photography, we asked about her favorite photographer:

Camerawork No. 8 / Lewisham: What are you taking pictures for? (London: Half Moon Photography Workshop, 1977. Cover photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins)

I cannot name just one favorite photographer - I have many that constantly change and evolve! Inevitably, I connect with particular bodies of work due to my changing personal circumstances. I relocated to the US in 2020. While I feel settled in my new home, I am still negotiating a long separation from my family due to Covid. I have experienced that the aftermath of the immigration process creates a constant tension between progress and loss and preoccupation with generational cycles of family and time. Consequently, I especially connect with contemporary photographers whose work explores these in-between psychological spaces associated with migration. Photographers such as Atefeh Farajolahzadeh, Priya Kambli, Kalpesh Lathigra, and Vivian Poey, to name a few.

I have also recently enjoyed returning to twentieth-century emigre photographers whose work I have always cherished. There are some photographers whose work has stayed with me for decades such as Lucia Moholy and André Kertész. However, I am always looking, questioning, learning, and unlearning. Fully embracing these uncertain, even vulnerable, states of knowledge and being is essential to creativity, including curating and writing.

"What goes into curating a photography exhibition?" Interview with Helen Trompeteler, Deputy Director of Programs at Silver Eye Center for Photography

When thinking about curating photography, it is important to consider what goes into the process, and how it compares to other forms of visual art. We spoke with curator, writer, and Deputy Director of Programs at Silver Eye Center for Photography Helen Trompeteler, whose curatorial practice ‘promotes photography as a fine art medium that can provoke contemporary dialogue, foster community, and inspire more equitable futures’ on what goes into curating a photography exhibition.

“When I begin developing a new exhibition, I critically ask myself how this exhibition will create new opportunities for connection with audiences and serve the artist's creative vision. Many additional self-reflective questions affect my curatorial approach, but these foundational concerns inform all my subsequent decision-making. These decisions include final image selection and layout, paper and framing options, and the writing, design, and pacing of interpretive text. All these elements are part of storytelling in the physical exhibition space. They will affect how audiences engage with photography and whether the artist will realize their aims.

Installation view of Mouse Trap with photographs by Patricia Voulgaris, 3 March - 23 April, 2022, Silver Eye Center for Photography. Photograph by Sean Carroll.

Curating is a highly collaborative process. I collaborate closely with all our artists at Silver Eye. I strive to provide a framework of care, support, and facilitation so they can take new creative directions or risks in their practice. I feel very fortunate to collaborate with colleagues, including Sean Stewart, who shares his immense expertise in printing and production. 21st-century definitions of curating perceived the curator as a solitary guardian or authoritative voice in defining an aspect of knowledge or taste. However, my curatorial approach always aims to be conversational. I focus on introducing themes, references, ideas, and frameworks for individuals to explore on their own terms. Collaborators are essential to my curatorial thinking, including everyone who engages with the exhibition and shares their perspectives.”

Challenging the Canon: Olga Yatskevich on Photobook History

Co-founded by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich in 2012, 10x10 Photobooks foster engagement with the global photobook community through the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of photobooks. The PGH Photo Fair has partnered with 10 x 10 Photobooks on all their previous touring reading rooms, including in 2019 for How We See: Photobooks by Women, which presented a global range of contemporary photobooks by women.

Follow-up project, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999, focuses on historically significant photobooks produced by women. Officially released on 1 November 2021, the book was recently shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation Catalogue of the Year Award 2021.

Helen Trompeteler spoke with Olga Yatskevich about 10x10’s ongoing exploration of photobook history and the underrepresentation of women in this field. 

How does your own cultural and personal background inform your approach to the photobook? Do you have a particular early experience with a photobook or reading room which inspired your engagement with this art form?

My interest in photography is fairly typical. My grandfather was a serious amateur photographer, I would spend hours looking at family photo albums and often re-arranging photographs. I spent a big part of my life moving between countries, first with my parents as a kid and later for school and work. I was constantly exploring new places and taking photos felt pretty natural. And I’ve always been a book person but my interest in photobook shaped when I moved to NYC. I started making connections with the local photo community, both in person and online. That’s how I met Russet Lederman, my partner in 10x10 Photobooks. I invited Russet and Jeff Gutterman, her husband, to come to a photobook meet-up I was organizing and talk about Japanese photobooks from their extensive collection. In a way that was the beginning of our 10x10 project.

We started 10x10 Photobooks with a very simple idea - to bring to New York contemporary Japanese photobooks, not easily available through regular distribution. We invited ten people to suggest ten photobooks published by Japanese photographers. We brought these books in a pop-up reading room and invited people to come to the space and spend time with the books. The project came together in just about two months. Our first reading room, titled 10x10 Japanese Photobooks, was launched in September 2012 during NY Art Book Fair, and was sponsored by the International Center of Photography.

Histories of the photobook have existed for some years now. For example, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s multi-volume history published between 2004-2014 was a high-profile series on this subject. However, the politics of selection is an important consideration. The photography and publishing industries have frequently had their histories shaped by ‘gatekeepers’ with social or financial influence. For example, Helmut Gernsheim and Beaumont Newhall wrote hugely influential books that shaped twentieth-century photo history, neither of which included many women photographers. At 10x10, your collective approach to constructing histories resists this model of selection, incorporating more democratic forums for dialogue across reading rooms, publications, and events. Can you talk a little about this underlying ethos of co-creation?

From the very beginning 10x10 was about community, collaboration, inclusion and diversity. 10x10 was about bringing together people with different backgrounds - publishers, photographers, collectors, writers, designers, curators - and various interests within photography, but with common passion - photobooks. 10x10 wanted to provide a platform for a conversation. Almost a decade later we are a non-profit organization, and our mission is the same - to foster engagement with the global photobook community through an appreciation, dissemination and understanding of photobooks.

We have completed four major reading rooms - focusing on Japanese, American, contemporary Latin American Photobooks and photobooks by women. To put these projects, we brought together a diverse group of contributors. They followed a similar format; our experts were asked to each select a number of photobooks. We also ask each selector to write a short statement to explain what brings these books together, which helps people understand the individual books and to see the connections between them. 

When 10x10 produced How We See, the program of touring reading rooms relied on the tactility of the objects. In interviews at the time, Russet Lederman discussed that 10x10 didn’t include historical works due to the inability to show them and have the public interact with them. One of the aspects of the new book I love is how objects have been photographed to emphasize a wide variety of material histories and qualities. How will this translate into what is shown in the reading rooms program for What They Saw?

We had the photobooks included in all our previous reading rooms. Inviting people in a space where they can touch books, flip through the pages, smell the ink was always essential to us. That’s why we also donated the books from each reading room to a dedicated public library, so people continue to have access to them. Many books discussed in What They Saw are still available for a reasonable price, and we were able to purchase a good portion of them. But there is a number of rare books too, like Anna Atkins’ “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions” (1843-1853). Some of them are unique albums, like the one put together by Kate A. Williams with the cards collected during her travels in Europe to share with friends, or a carte-de-visite album by Arabella Chapman, a Black middle-class woman in Albany, New York; her albums include photographs of friends, family, and leading abolitionists. These types of publications are unique, we hope to create flip through videos to showcase them. We also tried to illustrate them extensively in our publication. We are planning to partner with institutions that already have many of these books in their collection. Our first reading room will be in partnership with the New York Public Library in May 2022. 

Arabella Chapman, Carte-de-Visite Albums, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

To truly challenge the canon of photo history, I think it is essential to collaborate with experts from other fields – across political, cultural, and social disciplines – as all these factors work towards shaping and constructing knowledge. Can you talk a little about the selection of writers for What They Saw and whether this was a concern?

Producing a publication like this one requires a big team. We invited Mariama Attah who is curator of Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool to write an overview essay. To address the current photobook history, she brings the metaphor of a popular Mercator projection that distorts the relative size of landmasses. She articulates a number of questions we are trying to cover with this project. The book has ten chapters, and we brought scholars, both western and non-western, to write them. These chapters also map key political, cultural and social events that influenced those decades, and briefly mention the books discussed in detail for that chapter putting them in that context. Carole Naggar is a photography historian, and also a writer and poet. Elizabeth Cronin is a curator at the New York Public Library. Paula Kupfer brings a Latin American perspective, while Michiko Kasahara offers a perspective from Japan. Jörg Colberg, originally from Germany and now based in the United States, is a writer, photographer, and educator. 

A huge amount of communal effort went into this publication. Many people contributed to this publication; our acknowledgement list is pretty long. We also had a number of PhD students and researchers who contributed drafting book blurbs. Our designer, Ayumi Higuchi, had an enormous task of putting together all the elements, and I think she did an incredible job.   

There are many practical and structural reasons why women photographers have been omitted or underrepresented in history. Many male-owned nineteenth-century studios relied on female labor, but their names and histories have been largely unrecorded. Sometimes women photographers operated under a pseudonym, or their change of name through marriage means their lives become harder to trace through archival records. As periodicals and the magazine industry boomed during the early twentieth century, images were often reproduced uncredited. Reclaiming and working with historical material within photobooks can be a way to address these omissions. Please can you talk a little about this theme of archival loss or absence - and perhaps give a few favorite examples of innovative photobooks that have addressed this specifically?

There were a number of factors that kept women’s names from the proper acknowledgment in the publication and public eye. To expand this conversation and widen the frame, we had to reconsider our definition of a photobook, so we included individual albums, maquettes, zines and pamphlets. But we are expanding this conversation to include not only women, but make it as inclusive as possible. 

Take for example, Isabel Agnes Cowper, for over 20 years she was the official photographer in the South Kensington Museum but was not credited in any of the publications and remained neglected until recent research and the scrutiny of the museum archives. Now she is recognized as the first woman to hold the title of official museum photographer. Her photographs document museum exhibitions, objects in its collections and the construction of museum facilities. In our publication we included one of the earliest volumes illustrated with her photographs, “Catalogue of the Special Loan Exhibition of Decorative Art Needlework Made Before 1800” published in 1874. 

There are many forms of individual self-publishing. But more broadly, power dynamics are often involved in every stage of the photobook process – editing, captioning, design, circulation. Editing and sequencing especially rarely receive critical study within the history of photography. Many post-war historians emphasized notions of the master photographer at the expense of this broader contextualization of the medium. How can we encourage an approach that moves away from solely focusing on notions of single authorship to acknowledge these wider contributions and contexts?

Women have consistently contributed to the photobook history, and as early as the mid 18th century. However, their contributions were often neglected, misrepresented or diminished. What They Saw starts to identify where we might find these voices. It is important to keep questioning dominant historical narratives, as individual contributions too often get lost or overshadowed. To represent these fragmented and incomplete histories, we included timeline entries that need further research. 

There are examples of women supporting their husbands in their commercial photographic endeavours, and hardly getting any mention. In the 1860s in Japan, Ryu Shima had a studio with her husband and most likely contributed to two albums, her name is not credited. Ashraf os-Saltaneh, an Iranian princess and one of the earliest women photographers in the country, kept her husband’s diary and most likely used her photographs for illustrations. There are so many examples. Uncovering and sharing these stories help us to see a bigger picture.  

Zofia Rydet, Mały człowiek, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

Especially since the 1970s, women have found a platform at the intersections of theoretical, political, and autobiographical writing in photography. Even before this, photographers such as Dorothy Wilding and Madame Yevonde safe-guarded their place in photo history by writing memoirs, seeking empowerment by telling their story in their own words. So, I’m interested in how women have had to write themselves and their careers into photo history. Jo Spence’s undergraduate thesis was recently published in full for the first time. This exciting revisiting of past visual texts encourages a much richer history and new opportunities for contemporary dialogue. The use of language is an integral part of who is represented and how. Therefore, please can you talk a little about this relationship – how do you see these intersections between life writing and the traditions of the photobook?

Gisèle Freund wrote the first Ph.D. on photography in 1936, and a couple of years later Lucia Moholy, Both a photographer and a scholar, wrote “A Hundred Years of Photography”; it sold out immediately, in forty thousand copies. It was 1942, when Elizabeth McCausland, an American historian and art critic, wrote one of the first essays on the still new medium of the photobook titled Photographic Books. Sadly, her legacy got forgotten over the years, her essay wasn't referenced in any of the recent anthologies. When we launched our How We See project, we also reprinted the essay and had copies available during the reading rooms. Kristen Lubben, in her essay Partial Histories: Looking at Photobooks by Women for “How We See”, talks about McCausland and her contribution. 

A potential critique when drawing attention to creative practice on the grounds of gender alone is that it is, in a way, reductive. The statistics you gathered while producing How We See, and regularly shared by groups such as Women Photograph and Guerilla Girls are irrefutable. Nevertheless, speaking in binaries between male and female gaze can be problematic. How can we make these discussions as inclusive as possible, incorporating non-binary and genderfluid identities into these discussions of photobook history?

Our How We See project, required that all photography contributions in a selected book are women, and those who identify as women. We used the same approach for What They Saw. As we explore the photobook history, inclusivity is one of our primary goals.

The potential of movement that is inherent with photobooks have made them so central to political movements, including second and third-wave feminism. Zines, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets can all be shared easily, sent cheaply, travel between countries – they are an effective way of circumventing the establishment. Can you talk a little about your views on what constitutes a feminist photobook? How do you see the potential of photobooks as agents of such political action?

What makes a photobook feminist? There is no simple way to define this. In early years access to publishing was rather privileged, and many women who had this access used it to state their independence, economic, sexual or artistic. Today photobooks are versatile, inexpensive and democratic. They can easily travel, share ideas and ultimately empower. 

There are definitely a number of photobooks I would consider as an example in What They Saw. From a late 19th century album made for the Women’s Social and Political Union by Christina Broom and Isabel Marion Seymour with portraits of the Suffragettes to Elsa Dorfman’s “Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal” which documented the rich social life of a young woman in the 1970s and Abigail Heyman’s "Growing up female: a personal photojournal", giving us a frank portrait of what it means to be female in the United States in the 1970s.

I think a great example of political action is a photobook, a pamphlet to be precise, by Alice Seeley Harris titled “The Camera and the Congo Crime”. Published around 1906, it is one of the earliest examples of a humanitarian photographic campaign. Harris’ images reveal the colonial atrocities endured by the Congolese people. It played a key role in bringing attention to these atrocities committed under King Leopold II. 

Or another, perhaps more known book, and an example of both feminist and protest book is “Immagini del no” (Images of No) published in 1974, with photographs by Paola Mattioli and Anna Candiani. It was published in the wake of the Italian referendum to repeal an earlier law legalizing divorce. It made a direct appeal for political change in women’s issues. 

Christina Broom and Isabel Marion Seymour, WSPU Postcards Album, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

Paola Mattioli and Anna Candiani, Immagini del no, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

Many factors impact women’s ability to sustain a creative practice – including class, money, domestic and caring responsibilities. The business aspects of women’s creativity are often completed neglected in photo histories. Historically, there has often been a snobbery around art-making and book-making being seen in this context of commerce. The reality is that to live creatively is often to live fragmentally across many different models of working and living. Does What They Saw invite a provocation to think differently about how we view success? Or, indeed, evaluate and record success within history?

How do we define success? What is our criteria for progress? In early years only women with privileged social positions were able to pursue photography. They were married to someone or came from privileged families. (And obviously, there were other factors, outside gender.) They had the means to purchase equipment, or to learn photography at first as a hobby. These women were trailblazers, they paved the way for others, and considering the context in which they worked, their contributions are extraordinary. 

Each chapter in our publication sets the historical context for the books discussed within it. What are the factors that contributed to making certain books possible? We spent a lot of time searching for photobooks by Black women made between the 1960s and 1980s. We don't know how many women tried to publish books in those years, but as we talked to people it became clear that there was simply no funding for these books. “The Decorative Arts of Africa” by Louise E. Jefferson, released in 1974, is a rare example of a book that did find support. Jefferson was also the first Black woman with a director’s position in the publishing industry. Has that had an impact? These are the questions we are bringing up.

In the past few years, a number of great photobooks were published showing the body of work that was 40 years old, and just did not find recognition it deserved at that time. 

Presenting diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic backgrounds has been central to What They Saw from its inception. How can we work to ensure against future gaps and omissions in photobook history, in particular the lack of access, support, and funding for photobooks by non-Western women and women of color? How do you think publishers can better support a range of visions that are non-Western?

When we started working on How We See, we conducted research to get an idea on the representation of photobooks by women. The numbers were quite shocking. Photobooks by women made up only 10.5% of the entries in the six major “book-on-books” anthologies, three major photobook publishers had only 16.2% of photobooks by women in their online titles. However, I think if we look at the past three years, we will notice a shift. I think the conversation, on different levels, is very important. It is essential to have editors who are sensitive and consider different voices. We need to engage designers with various backgrounds. We have to continue to advocate for inclusivity within the high-profile sectors of the photobook community. As one puts together exhibitions, publishes photobooks, organizes fairs, acquires books for libraries, manages awards, let’s make sure the process is inclusive. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem is not that they are untrue, but that they result in incomplete narratives.

Ellen Kolban Thorbecke, People in China: Thirty Two Photographic Studies from Life, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

Lesley Lawson, Working Women: A Portrait of South Africa’s Black Women Workers, in ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999’. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

The identity and interests of collectors play an essential part in shaping histories. The MUUS Collection supports What They Saw and its associated research grants. Please can you talk a little about how this relationship with the MUUS Collection started and has evolved? What can you tell us about this year’s research grants and what to expect regarding future programming relating to them?

10x10 Research Grants on Photobook History was initiated and administered by our board members, David Solo and Richard Grosbard, and were launched last Fall. We are grateful to the MUUS Collection, and their generous support of this important initiative. Their mission which is to make visible their photography collection and archives through exhibitions, scholarship, donations, licensing, and the printing of images and books, overlaps with 10x10’s.

With this grant 10x10 contributes to our mission by encouraging and supporting scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history. The first year’s theme focuses on research into the history of women and photobooks from 1843 to 1999.

We received a good number of submissions and our jury members - Susan Bright, Sarah Meister and Ingrid Masondo – were impressed with the range and strength of research topics. While we originally planned to select two grantees, this year we decided to award three grants, $1,500 each.

Faride Mereb, an artist and independent publisher from Venezuela, will process and digitize archives of Karmele Leizaola, an important contributor to the publishing scene in Venezuela. Yasmine Nachabe Taan, Associate Professor in visual culture at the Lebanese American University, will focus on Catherine Leroy’s photobook “God Cried” (1983), a little-known book about the intense and violent conflicts in Beirut. Uschi Klein, a researcher at University of Brighton, will collect more materials about the life and work of Romanian photographer Clara Spitzer.

We will have public events to share the progress of their research with the photobook community. The high number of submissions indicates that we need to continue to support more research into the history of the photobook.

Lastly, how has your work on this project and with 10x10 Photobooks influenced your own collecting practices?

This is definitely a two-way process, our personal interests in collecting photobooks inform our 10x10 programming. Our projects come together as we engage in long conversations and brainstorming sessions, we try to determine overlooked regions and subjects, bring fresh ideas and share what inspires us. Needless to say, that through our projects I always discover new books, and purchase many of them for my own collection. Photobooks provide an opportunity to meet people, - artists, publishers, designers - support their work and share them with a wider audience.  

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999. Courtesy 10 x 10 Photobooks

To find out more the work of 10 x 10 Photobooks, visit their website or follow them on Instagram @10x10photobooks

Evan Mirapaul in Conversation with Dan Leers

Co-director of PGH Photo Fair Evan Mirapaul has been collecting photographs of people with violins for 30 years. He recently spoke with Dan Leers, curator of photography at Carnegie Museum of Art and curator for the forthcoming exhibition In Concert: Photography and the Violin from the collection of Evan Mirapaul, opening in late January 2022 at Transformer Station in Cleveland, Ohio. This conversation highlights how Mirapaul started his collection and how the collection has developed.

Dan Leers: Evan, one of the reasons you’re interested in pictures of violins is because you used to play. Can you tell us a little about your musical career?

Evan Mirapaul: I was born in Akron, Ohio, where there was a pilot program for the Suzuki violin- training method. I was in second grade and thought it might help me make some new friends. I asked my parents, and they said “OK.” And so began my bumpy road with the violin.

DL: Who was your first teacher?

EM: The Suzuki method is classroom based, so in the beginning, all you do is group learning, most famously with variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” That’s why the collection includes both a portrait of Suzuki himself giving a private tutorial to a little girl and, at the other extreme, a stadium- sized Suzuki lesson with young children playing the violin in unison.

DL: What about the rest of your family? Did anyone else have musical genes?

EM: No one played, but everybody listened. My father was a Cleveland Orchestra subscriber and went every Saturday night from before I was born until he literally couldn’t go anymore. There was a stereo in the house and LPs from a variety of musical styles.

DL: I imagine that many of those albums had covers with captivating artwork. Do you recall flipping through your dad’s record collection?

EM: I do. I remember albums that are still used to introduce young people to classical music—Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten. There was a recording of Peter and the Wolf with kind of a constructivist cover. And there was a piece, Escales, not specifically for children, by the French composer Ibert. I guess I heard people saying his name with the French pronunciation, so I drew the letter E and a bear.

DL: That’s hilarious! What other kinds of art do you remember from growing up?

EM: My parents were very engaged with art, especially through the Akron Art Museum. My father studied painting and drawing there as a hobby and even took a drawing master class with Larry Rivers when he was a visiting artist. My parents were friendly with lots of local artists. They would socialize with them, too, so not surprisingly, most of the art in our house was by people they knew.

DL: Didn’t they also visit Pittsburgh to see the Carnegie International occasionally? That would seem to demonstrate more engagement with the art world at the time than most people, right?

EM: As far as I know, my parents went to the International many times. When I was very young, like one year old, my father saw a Rothko painting and loved it. He went as far as inquiring what it would take to buy one and was told it was $10,000. At the time, that was probably close to the value of their house, so the purchase didn’t happen. But a small businessman in Northeast Ohio in 1961 or ’62 inquiring about buying a Rothko? I can’t imagine there are a ton of other examples of that.

DL: No, I think you’re probably correct about that. So where did your musical career go after your initial studies?

EM: When I was 15, I went away to high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA). Because the program went from seventh grade to a Bachelor of Arts, many of my friends were college age, and they helped me develop a sense of a larger musical world. One classmate had studied with the first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, and he introduced me to all these Juilliard Quartet LPs. I heard the Bartók string quartets for the first time and Alberto Ginastera, a composer from Argentina. They were definitely eye—or ear—openers, and it started to change what I listened to.

After I graduated from NCSA’s high school, I enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Music. At that time, in the early ’80s, musicians were getting orchestra jobs outside the country, and I knew a few who had just returned from stints with the Filarmónica de Caracas. When I was only 19 or 20, I was eager to get some professional experience, so over the course of a month, I withdrew from school, packed up my stuff, and bought a plane ticket to Venezuela. But I didn’t love it there, so after one season, I decided to return to the States and go back to school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

DL: Wow, that’s quite a whirlwind adventure! I’m impressed with how bold you were, but I guess that’s just part of being a professional musician. How was your time in Dallas?

EM: Rocky, but while I was there, I became friendly with Phil Weinkrantz, who owned a musical supply company. One day he said, “Evan, what are you screwing around in school for? You know you can make money as a violinist. Go look at the union paper, find a place where you can win an audition, then win the audition and be a violinist. Go make a career.”

And that’s exactly what I did. I came in second or third for jobs in Houston and Minneapolis, but I won a position in the Phoenix Symphony, which I joined at age 22 or 23. I left there after a year to join the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, but I only stayed one season because I was then hired as assistant principal second violin in the Montreal Symphony. And after two years, the Pittsburgh Symphony hired me, in 1987, as assistant principal second violin, a chair I held for seven or eight seasons. I was never a hotshot fiddle player, but that’s not necessarily what orchestras want. I could always get a job.

DL: At 25 years of age, you had already lived and worked in Caracas, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Montreal—that’s very impressive. I think when I was 25 I was just leaving a job at Whole Foods and still trying to figure out what to do with my life. Still, it must have been nice to be closer to home when you got the job in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is also where you got your start collecting violin pictures, right?

EM: Yes. In late 1989, I got a call from my father saying he’d been contacted by a family friend named John Adams, an Akron attorney who often represented the estates of people declared mentally incompetent by the court. A judge had assigned him to oversee the affairs of a musician couple, Sam and Sylvia Spinak. They owned a bunch of violins, and John needed to assess what was there. Knowing I was a violinist, John asked me to help. I made the two-hour drive from Pittsburgh and arrived at my father’s condo to find his spare bedroom covered with violins, violas, and bows. John told me it was just the start.

DL: Seems like that might have been an understatement ...

EM: It was a huge understatement! Sam and Sylvia were British-born musicians who worked in the U.K. and Canada before settling in Akron. They’d studied and performed with some of the big names of 20th- century classical music, especially British classical music. Although they were primarily violinists, they were passionate collectors. When I first saw their house, it was chaos. There were bookcases sagging with memorabilia, and open books everywhere, as well as boxes stuffed with pictures and autographed scraps of paper overflowing onto the floor. There were also tons of musical stuff: a piano, a spinet harpsichord, a viola d’amore, lute-back mandolins, recorders, saxophones, clarinets, a hammer dulcimer, violins—lots of violins—a few violas, and dozens of bows.

DL: What did you do to try to get a handle on everything?

EM: I didn’t know much about the pictures, and I certainly didn’t recognize them, as I do now, to be a valuable photographic archive. To me, it was a memorabilia collection, and I treated the contents as if they were baseball cards: you wanted a Mickey Mantle more than you wanted a reserve infielder. From a violinistic perspective, I knew who the Mickey Mantles were, but there were a lot of second-string shortstops. So the first thing I did was to create a rough inventory so I could say, “OK, there are 14 boxes of violin music, three boxes of viola music, and half a box of recorder music.” I did the same with the photographs: culled the political pictures from the musical pictures and then separated those into a shoebox of violinists, a shoebox of pianists, and so on.

DL: Were there any pictures that just jumped out and immediately caught your eye?

EM: There was an early, signed picture of Pablo de Sarasate, a Spanish violin virtuoso and composer, that was really cool. And there was a signed letter from the Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski to a violin maker. He’s not a household name, but if you’re a violinist, you grew up with his études and concert pieces, so you absolutely know who he is. It was a thrill to touch a document that he had written and once held in his hands.

DL: That is cool, but still, going through all this material sounds like such a daunting task.

EM: It was. It stretched into years. Ultimately, all that the lawyer and the probate judge wanted to know was what it all was worth, because the whole point of the exercise was to generate income to sustain the Spinaks. So I shopped everything around: I took the autographs and the photographs to auction houses and dealers who specialized in such material, but nobody was terribly interested. There was so much chaff and very little wheat. From a business standpoint, it just wasn’t very attractive.

Eventually, I realized that, for a relatively small investment, I could take control of the whole thing. I made a record of what had been offered by whom, and I told the court, I’m willing to match the highest offer—which was already fairly low—and add something extra. And so I was awarded the entire collection.

DL: OK, I guess you’re a braver soul than most people. What did you do after you were awarded possession of this mountain of memorabilia? Did you have a strategy for forming it into a collection?

EM: First, it was just a taxonomic exercise. I had to figure out who the people were in the collection. This was pre-Internet, so armed with some textbooks, I started trying to identify names. From the beginning, I had no interest in keeping pictures of political figures, so I sold those. With the musical pictures, for the most part, I wasn’t interested in conductors, pianists, or opera singers, so I sold those too. I learned that buyers in the autograph market didn’t really care about the image, it just needed to have the signature. To be fair, I also wasn’t looking at them photographically either because my level of visual sophistication wasn’t that high yet.

That changed when I moved to New York in the late 1990s to start a string quartet. Instead of scouring catalogues for pictures, I could now go to dealers’ apartments. I would ask to see violin pictures, and they would bring out box after box. I could comb through them for hours and find things I liked or thought were good. But I also could ask, “Who’s this?” or “What’s that?” It was both interesting and instructive.

DL: New York is such a great city. I lived there for 12 years and was constantly surprised by the diversity of people and businesses. There were always new discoveries to make, and, of course, you could easily spend an entire day in legendary bookstores like the Strand or Argosy.

EM: The appeal of New York is that there’s this cross- pollination of people and ideas. If you went to a party where there were musicians and composers, you’d probably meet writers and visual artists as well. I also started to go to museums and, in some small way, became involved. Museums have committees for younger collectors, like the Junior Associates at the Museum of Modern Art and the Young Collectors Council at the Guggenheim. I was in all of them at one time or another. I’d see things and talk to people about ideas that interested me. It broadened my perspective. I learned the most at ICP (International Center of Photography), and it was socially welcoming too.

DL: You mentioned that you moved to New York to start a string quartet. What ended up happening to that and your music career in general at this time?

EM: The quartet wasn’t working out in a variety of ways. When I considered everything that would be required to sustain it, I decided I didn’t want to continue with quartet playing. It was a good time to take stock. Looking around the profession, appealing opportunities to make a living as a violinist were fairly limited. I could go back into an orchestra somewhere, I could try to start another chamber group, or I could freelance, which was a shrinking field because digital instruments were replacing live players. I realized practicing the violin wasn’t what I wanted to wake up in the morning and do anymore. Mentally, I was done being a violinist.

DL: When was this roughly?

EM: Not roughly. It was March 15, 2004.

DL: Oh, sounds like you’ve got a clear memory of it.

EM: It was the final performance of our quartet, the Elements String Quartet. We worked really hard knowing we would be done after that. I practiced as much as I could so it would be a strong finish for everyone—and for me too. We played a few encores and took our curtain calls. I then walked backstage, put my fiddle in its case, and closed it. I essentially never opened it again.

DL: For someone who had essentially been working as a professional musician since the age of 19, ending the quartet must have left a major hole in your life—not to mention your schedule. I guess it’s only natural then that you started to look for something to fill that gap.

EM: As it happened, ICP had an international seminar program and one of them was in a villa on Lake Como in Italy. I thought, That shouldn’t be horrible. I grabbed my camera, a bunch of color-transparency film, flew to Italy, and did the program. While I was there, I was highly engaged by one of the faculty members, Christian Erroi. He didn’t just talk about apertures and focal lengths. When our slides came back from the processor, he would give me a little personal master class on the critical theory behind looking at photographs. Christian would say, “Don’t just look at each slide in a binary way, like is this a good picture or a bad picture?” He urged me to look at a picture and ask how might I see it? How else could it be evaluated? What narrative might it express? Why is the composition balanced or not balanced? Why is color interesting in this one and not that one? Nobody had ever talked about photographs with me like that. I was certainly no scholar, but that was how I started acquiring photographic literacy.

DL: Wow, learning the fundamentals of photography while staying in a villa on the shores of Lake Como sounds incredible! I’ve always found ICP to be a democratic place with exhibitions and classes that appeal to photography insiders and the general public alike. Were there other staff members there who continued your photographic education once you were back in New York?

EM: It was really remarkable. The director of education, Phil Block, was a big help, as was Karen Hansgen, who was in charge of publications. The curatorial staff was elite but accessible. Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers, and Brian Wallis were all mounting thrilling shows. I was fortunate enough to receive a backstage view of their efforts. Christopher, for instance, would invite me to sit in on some of his portfolio reviews with significant artists, encouraging me to dive in and ask questions. It was a high-level education of the most generous kind.

At the same time, Brian Wallis was at the forefront of rethinking vernacular photography and how it overlapped with fine-art photography. I hadn’t thought a lot about what vernacular photography meant to the medium’s history or value. But ICP was collecting things that were the equivalent of the pictures in my violin collection that I’d been treating like baseball cards.

The Spinak collection contained plenty of pictures that were of no interest to me, but I thought, Maybe someone with Brian’s perspective could discern their value as photography. So in 2005, I carried a box of pictures to the ICP curatorial offices in Midtown Manhattan and spread the images out on the conference table. Brian said, “Set aside the pictures you want to keep and tell me why you want to hold on to those and not others.” We looked them over, and Brian asked me questions: “Who’s this?” “What’s this?” “What are you thinking about?”

After all that, I said, “Are any of these interesting enough for the collection because I’ll give them to you?” He said, “No.” I was confused and asked, “Why not?” And Brian explained, “Because you’re going to keep them all. You have the beginnings of something here. You are unique in terms of your combined interests. There are certainly people who know more about photography than you, but you know a lot. There are certainly people who know more about the history of the violin than you, but you know a lot. But nobody knows more about those two things together than you.”

DL: Of course I’m biased, but I’m glad to hear there are other curators who understand that part of their job is to help people understand the value of what they have and what they know.

EM: I agree. After my talk with Brian, the proverbial light bulb lit up over my head. I’d been looking at pictures of violinists for my entire life. The idea that there was this entire class of images, of which there were millions, had never sunk in before. So I started returning to some of the same dealers and saying, “You specialize in autographs, but do you also have violin photos that have been set aside because they aren’t signed and, if so, may I see them?” Sure enough, people started bringing out the stuff from the back room that had no value to them—and I could buy them cheap.

The search expanded, the idea expanded, and, because of the Internet and eBay, the world expanded. When I traveled to Berlin, for example, I was able to look online and locate who was selling this kind of stuff. I’d find a dealer in some random East German neighborhood, and the door would open to a house packed floor to ceiling with World War I photos, including some with soldiers playing violins. It was crazy.

DL: That baseball card mentality must’ve gone out the window pretty quickly then, but I’m guessing a whole new set of issues arose. How did you then discern which pictures were worthy of your collection? What were your criteria for buying one thing but not another?

EM: What started to come to the fore was that the violin was an object that communicated a variety of meanings. It could be so fluid in what it communicated, depending on who was holding it and where it was being held. Other objects used as props in photographs are usually quite static in their meaning—somebody holding a flower doesn’t change anything about who they are. The violin was different. A Roma violinist presenting his instrument to denote his profession in a Josef Koudelka photograph is using it very differently than a wealthy girl trying to demonstrate her wealth and privilege in a casual portrait, yet it’s the very same object in their hands.

It’s my understanding that there are very few, if any other, objects in the history of art that are so fluid in their meaning, so I started to look for that. I searched for geography. Are there Japanese or Chinese pictures? Where else? And how far back can I go? For a while, 1853 was my earliest image, and then 1847, and then 1846, and then things started to get close to the birth of photography. I discovered that the representation of the violin stretches across the entire history of the medium, so I started trying to find different processes that charted its evolution: daguerreotypes, autochromes, tintypes, ambrotypes, dye transfers, and so on.

I also started considering the violin’s metafunction in the photograph. In some, the musicians are simply trying to promote their careers, but you also see the violin used in advertising. “Jascha Heifetz drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon,” so it must be great because he’s such a classy guy. Again, it was fluid. Sometimes, the ad implied: this is the best corn bread because down-home fiddle players love it. And sometimes, it was: a Lamborghini is so sophisticated and elite because it’s being shown with a Stradivarius. But it’s the same object, and it’s being represented as promoting widely divergent things.

DL: Does being a musician change the way you relate to the pictures in the collection? You must see them in a very different light than someone else.

EM: I certainly look at them differently now, more photographically than musically. When I see a portrait of Jascha Heifetz, I no longer imagine him playing. With the Gjon Mili photos of Heifetz, in which Mili attached a light to the end of his bow, I can tell from the position of the light and the placement of his fingers exactly what measure of a particular piece of music he’s playing. That doesn’t make it a better photograph, but I can unpack the violinistic elements in ways that aren’t available to non-musicians.

DL: What about your response to pictures when you’re flipping through boxes of actual photographs versus clicking on JPEGs on eBay? That must be very different too.

EM: Absolutely. The most recent example was a mammoth-plate tintype, which is even larger than a full plate, that I was able to buy at auction. Online it looked like hell, with condition issues and cracks, but the bidding was light so I won it. When it arrived, my first thought was not how damaged it was, but rather, Wow, what an image! It was incredible to hold this artistic object to which paint had been applied by hand. You could almost feel the presence of the violinist captured in it. That’s very different from experiencing it digitally.

DL: I have to ask even though it’s probably an impossible question for you to answer. Do you have a favorite picture in the collection?

EM: Someone once suggested that I explore the archive of the Magnum photographers’ collective to discover new material. I spent a couple of days on their website trying every search term I could imagine to find violin pictures. At one point, I came across a portrait by Eve Arnold, and it was labeled something like, “Samuel Spivak plays backstage.” I thought, what are the chances that there are two violinists from the time named Samuel S-P- I-something? Might it be Sam Spinak, the source for the collection’s initial pictures? I got in touch with the Spinak family and said, “Hey, is that your dad?” And it was! The journey from the birth of the collection to discovering a portrait of its progenitor captured backstage in his youthful prime by an important Magnum photojournalist, and then actually acquiring the image—it’s just very special.

DL: Wow, what an amazing story! That seems to bring the narrative of your collection full circle. It also makes me wonder if you think you’re done acquiring pictures? If not, where do you go from here?

EM: It’s never been my goal to have the biggest collection of violin pictures in the world. If it had, I could have quintupled the number of pictures long ago. But there are at least 2,000 objects right

now, and I don’t need it to be substantially larger. I don’t know if there will ever be a moment when I say “stop,” but I have significantly slowed down the rate of acquisition. Future additions would have to be things that aren’t yet represented in the collection’s narrative.

Also, while I occasionally think about the pictures that got away, I’ve been more interested in the ones that don’t actually exist. I wish there were more Nadar photographs, but, to my knowledge, there’s only one with a violinist. And how great would a motion study of a violinist by Muybridge be? Or one taken by Lartigue on some impossibly marvelous French estate? I wish there were a Halsman “jump” picture—wouldn’t you love to see Richard Nixon jumping while holding a violin? But he didn’t do one. I can see it in my head, but it doesn’t exist.

DL: I love that because you’re imagining an ideal you’ll never attain but to which you can aspire with all future acquisitions. Also, you just mentioned some midcentury photographers, which reminds me that I want to ask why you don’t collect all the way up to the present.

EM: There are a couple of reasons. I guess the biggest one is that, at some point, the violin began to lose its place in the cultural pantheon. It ceased to be a cultural totem, perhaps replaced by the electric guitar. All of the factors that go into the violin being depicted widely in photographs earlier on—that it’s

portable, that it’s a big part of culture, that it spans many different cultures—started to go away. And by the time we get to the 1960s and ’70s, Suzuki has appeared, and suddenly, everyone is sawing away. That’s a relatively new development. It’s chronicled in the collection, but it also marks a shift: the violin has lost ground as a significant cultural marker.

And the violin is certainly not being represented in popular culture in the same way these days. For instance, there’s no one like Jack Benny functioning as a major influence on physical comedians; he’s seen more as a throwback to an earlier time. So instead of serving as a common reference point for an audience that played a violin, or wanted to, it’s merely quaint. That lost sensibility informs every aspect of contemporary depictions of the violin. It’s shown less in portraiture, it’s shown less in print advertising, it rarely appears in movies, and it’s never shown in commercials as it once was.

DL: Do you think photography’s evolution has played a role in this too?

EM: I’m not sure. The slippage of the violin in popular culture is probably the biggest factor. The great studio portraits in the collection by the likes of Irving Penn and Nickolas Muray were commissioned either by publications because of public interest or by musicians with cultural currency. At some point, the big-name commercial photographers weren’t being commissioned or weren’t as interested in the violin as an idea, so there’s no Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, or Paolo Roversi pictures. When today’s violinists ask for portraits, studios are repeating the tropes of the ’20s and ’30s, but now in color instead of black and white. The result is they get, say, George Hurrell’s visual inventiveness being mimicked in color rather than a new approach. The major publications of the past would commission Penn to photograph violinists, but more modern practitioners like Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle, and their disciples are just not taking pictures of violinists.

Once I realized the visual language wasn’t developing in this area, my collecting fever started to cool. There certainly are still interesting pictures to be found that were made later than what’s in the collection. The photos of the musician Laurie Anderson come to mind; they are stark black-and-white images in which she holds a graphically white violin. But they’re an outlier rather than a representation of broad cultural engagement. And so, rather than having a few scattershot examples that lead up to the present, it made sense to me to wind things down in the ’70s when the violin still carried some cultural weight and semiotic significance. Might there be a renaissance? Who knows, but if there is, I’ll be watching for it.

This conversation between Evan Mirapaul and Dan Leers took place on January 22, 2021.

'Photography in Four Dimensions': Paul Messier on Conservation

Over many decades, Paul Messier assembled the most extensive collection of historic photographic papers in the world. In 2015, this collection was foundational to creating the Lens Media Lab (LML) at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH). As founding Director of the LML, Paul leads a collaborative research team dedicated to developing methodologies that characterize and interpret the material history of the printed photograph. Approaching cultural heritage collections as datasets, the LML collaborates with communities across Yale and partners with many of the world’s leading collecting institutions.

Helen Trompeteler spoke with Paul about the origins and continuing aims of the collection. They discussed recent projects from his extensive career in conservation and current challenges in the field. 

To begin with, please can you tell me about what prompted you to start your collection? For a long time, such material was often considered ephemeral by museum collecting. So, it seems that you identified a unique focus at the right time.

I'm not an antiquarian at all. I was really after data. I would be lying if I said I knew what I was doing from the first minute. But after a few months of earnest collecting, I realized all this material was out there. It was ultimately Ebay aggregating all of that material. I was always interested in it as a kind of a genome of black and white photography. 

I had this notion that a black and white silver gelatin print — we give it that name in conservation or media identification — but this huge amount of diversity and material history was wrapped up in that material. The stories hadn't been told. 

And that was also coming out of my Lewis Hine research. Such a collection would have been extraordinarily useful. 

Thinking about those major authenticity cases that happened in the art market during the 1990s — surrounding Lewis Hine and Man Ray, for example — please can you briefly summarize how they advanced the field of photography conservation?

Authentication can spur these projects that turn up from the market. Sometimes we think they are isolated incidents, but they represent a lot of gaps. And if you take it seriously, you look at those gaps, and try to build them and then go beyond them. That's really what we tried to do.

Just looking at the collection itself, it's about 7000 examples of papers, from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. It’s now preserved at Yale, where it’s accessible and can be studied, like a seed bank.  That speaks to preservation, artistic intention, and authenticity. It has a lot of different resonances. When you think of it as a scholarly asset, the sky's the limit in terms of what scholars and people are interested in. 

Book of specimen prints on different papers, produced by the Gevaert company circa 1935, showing a wide range of paper texture, gloss, and base color. Image credit: Paul Messier

A recent project at Yale focuses on William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. [The first photographically illustrated commercial publication was issued in six volumes between 1844 and April 1846, with prints made by Nicolaas Henneman]

What are the aims of this project and some of its key findings?

That’s an ongoing study. We have a partial Pencil of Nature at the Yale Center for British Art. We wanted to basically throw some analytical capacity at the Pencil of Nature and think of it as a primary source. Let it speak to us through our experience, our eyes, but also our instruments. And let it tell us its story. 

I’m not discounting any of the scholarship that’s been invested in Talbot at all. But what happens when you cut that out and just let the objects speak? 

Since the beginning of photography, questions around fading and image permanence have been of great concern. Accordingly, the research team investigated the light sensitivity of this material:

One of the things that we saw was really interesting. We were checking on light sensitivity with a tool that has its home here at the IPCH, a microfade testing device, to determine whether these can be displayed responsibility. And for the most part, the answer is yes. Not all, as there are many variations across the prints and the Pencil of Nature, but for the most part, they’re surprisingly light stable. 

A microfade tester is used to determine the lightfastness of a salted paper print from Henry Fox Talbot’s, The Pencil of Nature held by The Yale Center for British Art. This unit was modified to help determine the sensitivity of the photographs to near ultraviolet radiation. Image credit: Colette Hardman-Peavy

Other analyses included using methods from data science, scraping the Bodleian’s online catalogue raisonné to group prints bound in the Pencil of Nature, and comparing these with prints that were never bound. The LML compiled more than 30,000 images and developed an algorithm that led to identifying causes for deterioration:

We definitely saw a ‘Pencil of Nature’ effect. They tended to be in worse condition overall. We couldn’t tie it back to Henneman’s practice. But there did seem to be traces of organic oxidizing gases coming out of bound volume. And we can only imagine that those concentrations would have been higher when the Pencil of Nature was first made. And so maybe that’s a clue — the inks, papers, and adhesives were creating an adverse microclimate for the prints.

Now we've got our data, our baseline; we’d love partners that have the Pencil of Nature to join. So, we can compare results and build a material database of existing Pencils of Nature.

Front cover of Bill Brandt - Henry Moore, editors Paul Messier and Martina Droth, Yale Center for British Art / Yale University Press (2020). Book Design: Miko McGinty. Image credit: Paul Messier

Last year’s exhibition and publication on Henry Moore and Bill Brandt explored how the historical narrative of both artists completely intertwined with material histories. Brandt’s annotations on the reverse of his prints provide a wealth of information about his intentions when reproducing his work for various media. Please can you give an overview of your work on this project and how your reference collection can inform such studies on one photographer’s lifelong practice?

Brandt is not unique in terms of 20th-century photographers of that generation. He started printing for the printed page when he made a photograph. It wasn't with the art market in mind. The market in mind was the mass media through the vehicle of the printed page. 

Occasionally exhibitions would happen, and he would make substantially different kinds of prints. An example most people would be familiar with would be right at the end of his life, working with the Marlborough Gallery. His Marlborough prints were very much made as fine art objects. He probably would have been amazed at that concept as a working photographer during the 30s and 40s. These embody all of the contextual material-based clues of what a 1970s exhibition print was supposed to do. They have a more grained surface, which reduces gloss so that when you put the print upright, you are not getting a glare. It also breaks down detail. At that point of his life, aesthetically and functionally, he is thinking about broad masses, abstract and contrast forms, almost two dimensions. Double weight papers are a much more substantial object, and he’s got a more flamboyant and expressive signature. 

Compare that to something that would have been made for Lilliput magazine in the 1940s — typically, these ferrotypes with very glossy papers are about increasing tonal range. So, your blacks are much more saturated, and the tonal scale is now longer. And that's important when you go to press because press tends to compress that tonal range. 

The way that ties back to the reference collection is if you look at the diversity of materials available until the late 60s-mid 70s, photographers had to be literate in that diversity and use those materials and that universe of options. Almost every package of paper in the reference collection expresses these four dimensions — gloss, base color, base thickness, and texture. These are the variables, and each photographer has their own approach that can tell you a lot about what they’re trying to do — are they trying to generalize form? Is this an interpretive exercise, or are they just trying to reflect reality?

Packages of photographic papers dating from the 1960s-80s. Image credit: Paul Messier

You have participated in various collaborative student-led initiatives such as a Yale and Princeton project on Clarence H. White and your work with students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. How do you see the role of such collaborations in encouraging greater diversity in the field of photography conservation and changing perceptions of scientific work? 

I frame these very much as about building literacy for the reader. If you're my age, we have seen a completely analog media where you have no choice but to master manipulating materials if you want to make an image. And we've seen that completely change. I'm not sentimental about that change, but it is historic. Because of my interest in material history, and because of the opportunities that I have been given, I'm really fortunate to be able to educate people, that may be digital natives for example, who would not intuitively understand what making an image with those materials would actually entail. What can we learn when we encounter a print and a collection? 

Going back to the Fox Talbot example, what can it tell us as a primary source directly? Maximizing that encounter with that physical object is a form of literacy. And I think given what's going on in visual culture, this is a time when we should make an effort to prolong that, again not from some perspective of sentimentality, but because this is shared culture.

Smaller arts institutions often face social-economic barriers to borrowing artworks or enabling physical access to collections, especially early photography. We discussed these challenges and the relationships between physical and digital access:

It’s a tremendous challenge, but I think every institution with a photography collection can do something within reach to enhance the preservation of your collection. In other words, there are often some relatively inexpensive, fairly minimal efforts that can buy you a greater percentage of preservation before getting into really specialized environmental techniques. 

I do have a problem with the notion, which I'm surprised still exists, that once you have the image, you have preserved the object, which is completely not the case at all. I mean, the object is this unique package of materiality and temporality. That is one of a kind and unique, and that cannot be digitized. 

One of the things that we've tried to do at the Lens Media Lab is develop simple tools to get at these four dimensions — tools that can be deployed widely that can be comparable. 

For example, if I am looking at a László Moholy-Nagy photogram — we did a project at the Art Institute of Chicago not too long ago — we could see clusters form around where he was working at certain time periods. So, if you want to know where your prints fit within this baseline — we can send you these tools and give you a bit of training, and they’re easy to use. Now you've got a data set that you can compare to a larger Moholy material-based catalogue raisonné.

That’s one way that smaller institutions can connect meaningfully with this ongoing research is to tease out meaning from materials by sharing their data sets. At the Yale Institute, we think a lot about pushing our research out the door and making things inexpensive and practical. So, for example, we’re looking very hard at the microfade testing technique from an engineering standpoint to make that technique as widely available as possible. 

The Lens Media Lab also harnesses some AI and machine-driven techniques. For example, the lab uses computation to take a two-dimensional image and essentially make it a three-dimensional model. However, the future role of AI models and methodologies in photography conservation still requires further consideration:

I feel like people can sometimes get lulled into this understanding that since the methodology is science - AI, neural net — it’s more valid. It might be in some instances, but not necessarily, at the end, there is no baseline of truth.  

I would love to see these techniques applied in blind studies where we actually know the result, but the algorithms don't know the result. And let’s compare, then we have a scientific basis and some sort of understanding of the reliability of the technique

Packages of paper from the Messier Reference Collection of Photographic Paper. Image credit: Paul Messier

You previously described your paper collection as the genome of black and white photography. Now, contemporary photographers work across hugely diverse mediums — including film, video, sculpture, and textile, for example. Do you think your collecting activities will evolve to incorporate such broader contemporary material histories? Or do you have other pioneering current material collections to recommend to our audience?

I have a lot of color material, but that was never really my focus — and certainly very little inkjet or digital printing media. 

My friend and colleague Henry Wilhelm has a collection of this material that’s still in private hands. There are others, Mark McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Jürgens; both have a lot of this material.

One of the things I was fortunate enough to do was take a private, individual obsession and turn it into a scholarly asset. So that needs to happen to some of these private collections, if at all possible. Part of that is the recognition that this material is not just ephemera. It is material that has a vital role in ideas of authenticity, preservation, and material history.

That’s a knowledge gap in a way, and that’s maybe the biggest hurdle right now is that these collections don't fit neatly into any sort of museum or archive catalogue. 

The cultural sector has been drastically impacted by the Covid pandemic, with cutbacks to many areas of practice, including conservation. It is often difficult for organizations to fund long-term preventive work on collections unrelated to an exhibition or publication. We discussed these risks, with Paul suggesting that ultimately, communication is key to ensuring the future stewardship of collections:

As conservators and people in the cultural heritage preservation sector, I worry that we don't do enough to communicate. We take it almost as a given that society and culture value the work we do and are willing to invest in that work. We don't do enough to proclaim what the value is and what we're bringing back to the equation. 

What's the relevance of our work? And that’s on us. I feel like we could do a lot more about that, especially at this moment when material-based visual culture is pivoting to a completely disembodied visual culture. We really need to start making this case very clearly. And that, again, ties back to this building of literacy. If we're going to convince future generations that this preservation obligation is something that they should meet and not neglect, we have to work on that literacy. What experience do you have with an object that you can't have anywhere else and that you can't have with a digital surrogate? What does that mean to you? 

To find out more about Paul Messier and the work of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH), visit their website or follow them on Instagram @yaleipch @paulmessier.