New life: for Visual Studies Workshop Research Center

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Joanna Heatwole

An Interview with Andrew Eskind by Joanna Heatwole, October, 2003

Andrew Eskind is best known in the photographic archives community as the editor of successive editions of Index to Photographic Collections (GK Hall 1990, 1995, 1999). During his tenure at the George Eastman House he initiated the extensive database on photography as well as their web site (www.geh.org). He currently serves part-time as resource person for Visual Studies Workshop graduate students as well as developer for the Research Center on-line collection access. He has previously contributed to Afterimage.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Afterimage: New images are appearing on the Research Center page of the VSW website (www.vsw.org). Could you elaborate on this project?

Eskind: Ideally, it would be wonderful to be able to provide on-line access to the entire VSW photography collection. It is a large and diverse collection, so it won't happen overnight, but if the Library of Congress can put a significant portion of its enormous Prints and Photographs collection on-line, we ought to be able to catch up--at least on a proportionate basis. We have to start somewhere.

So where have we started?

What you won't find yet are the VSW holdings by well-known fine art photographers. In some cases, similar or identical work can already be found on gallery sites, or photographers' own sites, or in print publications. But, we're also slowed by the need to secure permissions. When public collections such as VSW acquire prints--either directly from artist/creators, or from third parties--no extra permission is needed to exhibit them, or make them available for study, or even to catalog them the old fashioned catalog card way. But web-based finding aids are a form of publication, and we need to find rights owners and obtain permissions. Afterimage readers with work in the collection are welcome to contact us to provide this important detail.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of large collections that researchers--even if they visit us here in Rochester--would have a difficult time fathoming. First is the Soibelman Syndicate News Agency Collection. Everyone has heard of the Bettman Archive (now owned by Corbis which is putting major chunks of it on its commercial web site). Well Soibelman was a lot smaller, a lot less well known, and operated over a much shorter time frame, but is similar in many ways.

The other collection which I find especially intriguing is the Fox Movie Flash collection photographed mostly by Joseph N. Selle (1906-1988). Because it consists entirely of 35mm negatives on 100 ft rolls of film, and there are over 900 rolls, no one has ever attempted to figure our what they're all about or even print them in the 25 years they've been here. Before that, even Selle only printed those frames for which pedestrians in San Francisco sent in 50 cents for a souvenir postcard of themselves on Market Street or Union Square. So the staggering one million frames represent previously unseen images. That, all by itself, I find quite amazing.

What on-line resource will we find today from the Soibelman Syndicate Collection?

Rather than just select a few highlights, I thought it would be useful to try and indicate the scope of subjects and the organization that Soibelman used while operating as a picture agency. Their folder structure was still intact. So there's now a link from the Research Center page to a 'folder inventory' for that collection. Gradually, more and more of the folder names on that list will link to web pages with some or all of the images. The most ambitious link so far is to the Spanish Civil War material for which Bill Johnson developed a finding aid as a 'proof of concept' demonstration roughly a year ago. Most of the folders won't soon receive that depth of cataloging. Take a look at those folders which do already have links: dogs, dance, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, bicycling - we'll be adding more almost daily. Another aspect of this 'skim the surface' approach is that visitors to the web site are invited to e-mail us (library@vsw.org) with requests for folder contents not yet processed. Responding to where there's interest assures us that the effort is worthwhile.

And your favorite Fox Movie Flash Collection?

Mr. Irv Schankman provided the funds for us to scan the first 12 rolls of the 900. That's 18,000 frames!! Only two rolls so far - 3000 frames--are on-line. The sequence is preserved--good frames, bad frames, they're all there and in order. The introduction to those rolls illustrates just how dependent we are on internal evidence in the images to establish dates, the photographer's shooting habits and locations, etc. Although we could select and print the pleasing images and prepare an exhibit which 'discovers' Mr. Selle posthumously as a previously unknown photographer (similar to Lee Friedlander's discovery of the Storyville portrait negatives of E.J. Bellocq), I'm more intrigued by the potential of using these images as raw source material by media artists or documentary film makers. It presents an incredibly dense record of pedestrian traffic on a daily basis over a 25-year period in a very limited geographic area. I'm sure there's someone who could derive meaning out of all this visual data.