Spectators, Broad Street, 1930s. Philadelphiana Collection

Share your memories of researching in the Print and Picture collection. Were you researching a landmark or family residence? Was it an assignment for a class project? Does the location have a story? Email your stories to erefpix@freelibrary.org. 

Review of Free Library Event
by Thomas Gartside

When I showed my eighth graders the card for an event at the Philadelphia Free Library they were outraged by the ticket price. Cries of “What’s so free about that?” and “Why should we have to pay?” bounced off the walls.

Here’s the short lesson. Dr. William Pepper loved ideas and thought they should be free for everybody, not just the wealthy and privileged. He believed an educated electorate was needed for a working democracy. So he tapped his uncle George for the start up money and founded the Free Library in 1891.

Ideas aren’t so free anymore; the rich uncle has long since passed away and the task of supplying free ideas requires an infrastructure that nobody wants to pay for. Yet many of us continue to enjoy their services for free.

This Saturday, March 26, The Print and Picture Collection is sponsoring a “free” lecture on documentary photography as it kicks off a new “free” exhibit called Documentary PIX: Philadelphia Century of Change. The exhibit, curated by Stephen Perloff, Editor of the Philadelphia Photo Review, and Blaise Tobia, Professor of Media Arts at Drexel, raises some important questions about visual literacy. The show juxtaposes images from the library’s vast collection with images of photographers working today.

Nothing less is at stake than the ability to discern the truth of visual information. Photographers a hundred years ago uniformly adopted a set of picture making conventions, which are often assumed to insure objectivity. Today photographers have more sophisticated tools at their disposal and each choice is a subjective filter of information.

In the digital age it has never been more imperative for citizens to be educated, not just in the verbal realm, but in the realm of images. But as libraries are pinched by budget cuts, access to ideas shrink, and the citizens’ intelligent participation in democracy declines.

Back to what is free and what’s not free. Following the free lecture there will be a ticketed reception and silent auction to support the Print and Picture Collection at the Philadelphia Free Library. Works from some of the featured artists will be included in the silent auction. This is a great opportunity to expand your visual intelligence, and support a great idea at the same time. Don’t forget to tell your uncle!

Bio: Thomas Gartside is a teacher of English and Reading at Center School in Abington, Pennsylvania.

___________Friday, March 18, 12:51 pm

A talk with A.D. Coleman

New Art Examiner, 7/83

by Thomas Gartside

A.D. Coleman began writing about photography in the late sixties. His essays, which appeared in The Village Voice and the New York Times, represented the first serious and consistent attempt to analyze photography in a public forum. Significantly, the initiation of this public discourse coincided with what has been called the "photo boom," and there is no doubt that Coleman has been a major influence on the character of subsequent writing on photography. Since that time he has written for Afterimage, Artforum, Camera Arts, Camera 35, Lens on Campus and many other publications. He is on the faculty of New York University and he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE). This interview was recorded at a meeting of the National Conference of the SPE in Philadelphia on March 16, 1983.

A.D. Coleman. Photo by Barbara Alper.

NAE: In the preface to your book, Light Readings, you made this comment: "I began writing about photography because I was excited about photography, curious about the medium and fascinated, even frightened by its impact on our culture." What prompted that initial excitement, and that tremendous plunge into the world of photo criticism?

AC: My initial interest was really the result of having contact with both a considerable amount of photographic prints and some of the then-current literature on photography. I am referring primarily to the writings of William Ivins, Marshall McLuhan and what appeared in the magazine Aperture.

NAE: Do you still have that excitement?

AC: The excitement or the interest is somewhat different now. When I started doing my writing, I had very little in the sense of an overview of the field-just a very broad fascination with everything that was going on. I also had the newcomer’s very naive and ingenuous enthusiasm for virtually everything that came down the pike. At this point, obviously, some 14 years after I started my work, I'm more selective in my responses, and enthusiasms. On the flip side of that, perhaps a little jaded, perhaps even a lot more jaded, and less easily provoked by kinds of work that once excited me very much.

NAE: In the second half of your statement you said that you were frightened by the impact of photography on our culture. What did you find to be particularly frightening?

AC: Well, particularly frightening at that time, and still disturbing to me now is the fact that photography is a medium that has enormous effect on us. It is a medium from which we receive, I would estimate, fifty percent of our informational input. Yet, proportionately, the amount of attention devoted to the analysis and criticism of photography as communications-not necessarily photography as art but photography as a communications process—is truly minimal, compared, let's say to the kind of attention we give in the educational-structure to people trying to understand the written language. We give practically "no attention to the analysis and use of visual lan¬guage forms.

NEA: Why is this study so critical? Is there something particularly insidious about visual language? It seems fairly clear that visual input enters the brain in a more direct and less filtered fashion than does verbal or written input. As a consequence, the amount of visual input to which we're exposed is potentially enormously manipulative and influential in shaping our perceptions, our behavior, our sense of the world, etc. That's one of the reasons I feel it's imperative that as a culture, we develop a more profound response and analytical relationship to all visual communication, and since most of that comes to us through the lens image in one form or another, that we in particular study photography as a language form.

NAE: It seems that our culture takes photography for granted-at face value. How does the concept of syntax relate to the examination of this problem?

AC: That term syntax was originally applied to pho¬tography by William Ivins. He observed that photography is not the universal language that it is often touted as. In a very broad and general sense, it is most certainly a linguistic structure that has a syntax, an infrastructure which de-termines those things which can be commun¬icated and those things that cannot be commun-icated within it. It's imperative that we develop understandings of that syntax, and that we de¬velop a critical vocabulary which I would hope ultimately would not be either an obscure, or elitist, or academic vocabulary but would be one that could be employable by the average person in an everyday, ongoing, analytical and critical relationship to the images around us. So you perceive your role to be directly related to forwarding this kind of information? At this point, that's the direction I'm moving towards, or perhaps I'd rather say moving back to. That was a very strong part of my original impulse when I began to write about photog¬raphy. I subsequently got very caught up in writing about the work that was being pre¬sented publicly in the late sixties, early seven¬ties by people who fall into the category of artists, creative or serious photographers (none of which I find very satisfactory descriptive terms). I've ended up feeling that, although that work continues to fascinate me and I think that it's very important work for the public to scrut¬inize, that as an area of concern for me as a critic it is too limited. At this point, I'm interested in broadening the issues that I address to include the larger issue of photography’s impact on culture.

NAE: Do you have a sense of your own impact in the world of photography criticism? Well, I certainly would like to think that I've had some impact. It's very difficult to quantify.

AC: I'm not sure that for a critic it's very easy to know in any specific sense what kind of impact you've had. I can only, in that sense, hope that I've had some kind of positive impact to counteract what I see to be the potentially negative impact. The beginning of my writing coincided with the photography boom, which has had, to my mind, a very negative effect on photography. (This includes the destruction of what was once called the photography community as such, and I as a critic, contributed to that by virtue of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that observation changes the nature of the thing observed.

NAE: You mentioned in your introduction again that you were leery of your function as an "intentional filter," and I assume that this is what you're alluding to?

AC: Right, or at least in part. Certainly the fact that suddenly there was attention being paid to a field which previously had had little critical attention made a change in that field including, among other things, an intensification of the self-consciousness of its practitioners. I think there may also have been positive benefits, but there were negative consequences as well. Aside from that it's simply my hope that, if nothing else, my writing has provided some kind of a focal point for others to bounce their ideas off, to use in shaping and defining their own concepts. I believe that I have given them something tangible, and I hope something fairly definite, to argue with and even to reject.

THOMAS GARTSIDE is a free-lance photographer and writer who teaches at the Chilmark Photography Work-shop on Martha's Vineyard and has written for the Philadelphia Photography Review.