Collecting Photographs: The more our mediums change, the more our archival tendencies remain the same.

After taking a series of photos during an event or even throughout my vacation, I often feel overwhelmed and vexed thinking about how to organize and caption each photo. The initial excitement is still there — that feeling of “I’ve caught something unique and different that the world has yet to see through my lens,” both in the figurative and literal sense. However, developing a system in which to order, caption, tag, and file away these photos can become a daunting effort if you’ve taken hundreds of photos throughout the course of your travels.

With that said, I can only imagine how archivists at the New York Public Library must feel when combing through boxes and entire stacks of photos and other kinds of visual images in the attempt to make sense of how to properly organize the media for the public’s research uses. Paintings in a museum took time to create, but photographs are often created in a snap. As John Sarzowski, director of MoMA’s department of photography stated: “The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process — a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made… but photographs, as the man on the street puts it, were taken” (Crimp).

It doesn’t really matter whether an artist chooses a blank canvas or a camera. The photograph is just another medium, a conduit to convey the theoretical aspects of an artist’s subjectivity. I can only imagine the series of archival planning involved in curating these photographs and creating entirely new collections out of previous ones by consolidating them into sections such as “Art, Prints, and Photographs.”

The reclassification process, according to Crimp, is based on each photograph’s “newly acquired value, the value that is now attached to the ‘artists’ who made the photographs.” In a way, it’s like organizing paintings by subject (19th Century Art), topic/technique (Impressionism), and then by the artist (Monet, Manet, etc.). I personally don’t find it to be that revolutionary to designate a librarian with the new job of reorganizing and curating entirely new photo collections by “artist.” Who else is going to sift through these materials and help us make sense of it? However, what I do find noteworthy in the endeavors to do so is the subject matters that each photographic material captures — images that document particular events and which otherwise cannot be reproduced instantaneously by painting them.

As a graduate student looking back on the history of archiving and retrieving photographs, I thought that John Tagg’s articleThe Archiving Machine; or, the Camera and the Filing Cabinet, was a little amusing. “[T]he photograph’s mechanism of capture could not operate so irresistibly if not embedded in the entirely nonmimetic machinery of the catalogue and the file.”

Although Tagg is referring to a file cabinet in that quote, I also can’t help but think of the way in which I plug in my camera into my computer to upload the newly captured images. My MacBook Air still detects a certain ordering system in my Nikon DSLR camera’s memory card. Like the file cabinet, I have a medium with which I have “the possibility of storing and cross-referencing bits of information and collating them through the particular grid of a system of knowledge.”

Paintings are to photographs and JPG screenshots, as filing cabinets are to memory cards and Instagram pages, as index cards are to meta tags and hashtags. Of course, the methods of archiving are going to differ based on the type of medium (e.g. the paper that photo was printed on if printed, the type of camera used to capture the images). The mediums of art and documentation may have changed over the last century, but the overarching concepts of retrieving, ordering, and storing these visual media in specific epistemological receptacles remain the same.