The Color of a Fleas Eye: The Picture Collection

(Hardback)

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Description

Taryn Simon's The Color of a Flea's Eye presents a history of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection-a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies. In her work The Picture Collection (2012-20), Simon highlighted the impulse to organise visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon's photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Moustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history-its classifications, its contents-seems the stuff of projection. Simon spent years sifting through letters, memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists, media, government and a broader public. These documents also divulge the removal and transfer of photographs from the democratically circulating picture collection folders to the photography collection in the late 1980s when their marketplace value became apparent. Simon's selection of photographs from these transfers highlights gender, immigration, race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography.

Reviews

The book becomes, more than anything, about how images are used, digested, sorted, consumed by the public--itself another purposefully physical object.--Megan Liberty "Brooklyn Rail"
The Color of a Flea's Eye encapsulates Simon's longstanding interest in the visual exploration of institutions, systems of organization, networks, and kinship.--Michelle Elligott "MoMA"
A huge book... It includes plates of the photo collages that Simon made in her studio by photographing images from folders that she arranged by hand. There is a rich history of [curator Ramona] Javitz and the Picture Collection, including correspondence and a list of all folder subject headings.--Arthur Lubow "New York Times: Arts"

Author Bio

Taryn Simon (born 1975) directs our attention to familiar systems of organisation-bloodlines, criminal investigations, mourning, flower arrangements-making visible the contours of power and authority hidden within. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, each of her projects is shaped by years of research and planning. Simon has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the MoMA, Tate and Neue Nationalgalerie. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums around the world. Joshua Chuang is head of The New York Public Library's Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Tim Griffin is executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen.