The streets of San Francisco: encounters with the Selle collection of street vendor photographs

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2007 by Christopher Burnett

We frequently come to know archives through the weight of their sheer number in mass, which quantifies and qualifies their origins, ability, and options for future interpretation. These cumulative possibilities normally make up an archive's "story." Many archival reclamation projects are bent upon telling this story (such as the 2006 DVD collection and book, Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (1)), but the archive that is the focus of this essay involves a number of pictures that defy regular narratives. The Joseph Selle Collection at the Visual Studies Workshop, with over one million negatives of street vendor photographs, defies regular narration through its sheer magnitude of numbers and invites speculation about a different category of archive: the dual act of storytelling and counting.

This hybrid status may lie beyond the types of picture archives and their corresponding patterns evocatively proposed by the late historian and archivist Paul Vanderbilt. Responsible for modernizing major picture repositories such as the Picture Division of the Library of Congress, Vanderbilt opened the eyes of a new generation of historians and picture researchers to the interpretive possibilities of these resources. Vanderbilt listed four principal types of collections: 1) trade agencies; 2) working files of particular serial publications or promotional agencies; 3) critical collections of outstanding specimens (such as museum collections); and 4) repositories devoted to preservation as such. (2) This last category offered the most far-reaching possibilities for Vanderbilt as they were based on the contingencies of future development.

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These future contingencies invited the use of archives as an exploration rather than the routine selection of illustrations to accompany prescribed arguments. To encourage an open-ended, imaginative use of pictures, Vanderbilt worked out a long-term practice of forming combinations of images, usually in pairs, that were unrelated to each other by the usual archival categories of photographer, time period, geographic location, genre, and subject matter. Escaping the regulation of narrow control vocabularies, the pairings would reveal an unexpected line of interpretation and lead to larger associative patterns of imagery and ideas. Vanderbilt put his theories into practice over much of his career by posting combinations of unrelated pictures. These informal, reading-room "exhibitions" stimulated the imagination and encouraged conversations with like-minded visual researchers.

The key to these stimulating possibilities was the large number of pictures associated with this final type of image repository, posing unexpected and revealing juxtapositions and linkages. Another insightful historian and picture researcher, David Nye, drew on this potential with the photographic archive of General Electric. (3) There, Nye found a system of relationships between constituent elements of the corporation and its ideology that were only visible in the archive taken as a whole. Pictures directed toward consumers and management interrelated with those made for workers and the engineers. These various facets of the corporation only reveal themselves when the archive is apprehended systematically and within the current of many images rather than the single outstanding one.

Similarly, the key to unlocking the value of the Selle Collection lies in the many rather than the one, but this collection carries a multitude that sets it apart from Vanderbilt's institutional "preservation archive" or Nye's corporate "image world." The one million-plus images in the Selle collection are the product of a specialized small business in San Francisco, Fox Movie Flash, engaged in the bygone pictorial practice of street vendor photography. As such, the plethora of pictures belong to one overriding set, as diverse as they may be within that type. Since the pictures were all taken with a specially modified motion picture camera and stored on 100-foot rolls, the standard half-frame negatives are readily digitized using standard motion picture, post-production scanning equipment. This capacity for digitization animates much of the potential of this new type of archive and made possible the exploratory projects that ensued with the Selle Collection at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW, publisher of Afterimage) in Rochester, New York.

My purpose with this article is to recount these projects--both in the sense of telling the story of and assessing the impact of numbers and the digitization of images--and to speculate on further project possibilities with special archives of this kind. The projects are Andy Eskind's groundbreaking initial work with the collection that established the basis for David Mount's video 17532 Pictures (2005) and Elisabeth Tonnard's artist's book, Two of Us: Encounters (2007). Each artist worked with the same set of images (about 18,000 digital images scanned as a pilot project). While each work bears its separate identity and provocative meanings, they share an overriding ambition "to verge on something else" that stems from the intractability of very large numbers. There is an instability and questioning that causes each artist/researcher to direct their project and seek meanings outside of regular boundaries. These experimental projects point out that archives of very large numbers operate as a kind of new math--an entirely different logic causing archival work to "verge" on boundary-testing genres and hybrid "artistic acts."