Press Release

Story Behind the Picture Collection at The New York Public Library and Its Creator, Romana Javitz

Exhibition Opens January 17

Subject Matters: Photography, Romana Javitz and The New York Public Library, on view in the Stokes Gallery (Center for the Humanities, third floor) from January 17 through March 28, tells the story of the visionary curator Romana Javitz, who, during her 39-year tenure (1929­1968), built the Picture Collection at The New York Public Library into a world-renowned resource by acquiring works by many of the century's leading documentary photographers long before libraries added photographs to their art collections.

The Picture Collection, housed in a corner of the Mid-Manhattan Library's third floor, is a huge circulating and reference archive of five million images ­ illustrations clipped from books, magazines, newspapers, and catalogues, as well as postcards, prints, and photographs ­ organized under nearly 12,000 subject headings. Created in 1915 as a modest collection of pictorial materials, the Picture Collection is now a goldmine of information for approximately 40,000 yearly visitors. Most of these are illustrators, designers, and artists who use it for research and inspiration, but anyone with a New York Public Library card may borrow pictures.

The exhibition showcases a selection of original photographs acquired by Javitz, now identified as the Romana Javitz Collection and included in the holdings of the Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. "Fascinating in themselves, the photographs reflect Javitz's continuing commitment to documentary photography over the four decades of her career at the Library," said Julia VanHaaften, co-curator of the exhibition (with Anthony Troncale, Associate Head, Digital Unit, Preparation Services) and curator of the Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

While many of the images are recognizable and of considerable photographic merit, Javitz was not trying to amass a collection of great works of art. As the exhibition title indicates, it was the subject matter of pictures that interested her. An artist by training, Javitz put aside her aesthetic responses to photographs and evaluated them as documents of information. "As a librarian," she once explained in an interview, "I find that I want very much to read the facts in the photograph." Very early, she recognized photography's potential as a powerful tool with which to document contemporary American culture and to make the information accessible.

The turning point for Javitz and the Picture Collection came in the 1930s, when the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to document the effects of the Depression on rural communities. Roy Stryker, a Columbia University economist who subsequently became one of Javitz's many close friends in the art world, headed the project, and on its completion sent the duplicate file of 40,000 photographs to the Picture Collection (the original file was deposited in the Library of Congress). Here was exactly what Javitz had envisioned: images that captured and recorded the day-to-day lives of farmers and their families and, by extension, life during a particular period of American history.

Javitz's ability to acquire this extraordinary collection, despite her tiny acquisitions budget, was largely due to her gift for lasting friendships. Photographers she befriended over the years donated important bodies of their work to the Picture Collection. Correspondence from photographers illustrating these relationships are displayed in the exhibition, as are pictures by unknown photographers and various ephemera that give a sense of the eclectic, topic-oriented nature of the Picture Collection. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman's amusing comic-book homage to the collection published in The New Yorker in 1995, will also be on display.

The photographs range in subject matter from harrowing images of Lewis Hine's industrial laborers and Dorothea Lange's migrant workers, Farm Security Administration photographs of Depression-era rural life by Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, to the urban counterpart of Berenice Abbott's WPA photographs of New York City landmarks. The exhibition also highlights Rosalie Gwathmey's and Esther Bubley's post-World War II documentary photos, Helen Levitt's evocative scenes of 1950s New York, and includes a photographic essay by Beuford Smith, one of the young photographers associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.

One exhibition case features Library call slips on which patrons have sketched pictures to identify their requests ­ a method that Javitz suggested to users of these visual materials that could not be classified according to a conventional Dewey Decimal system. But she made the collection accessible by inventing a quirky and unorthodox, yet immensely flexible system of classifying items according to ­ what else? ­ subject matter, which is still used today.

Javitz was formally recognized for her contributions inside and outside the Library ­ the latter included her creation of the Index of American Design, the first comprehensive documentation of American decorative arts ­ when she was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1967. The following year, she unhappily took her mandatory retirement; but for the next 12 years, until her death in 1980, Javitz remained passionately involved with her life's work, continuing to teach other institutions how to organize pictorial documents to make them accessible. If she were alive today Javitz would no doubt be intrigued by the latest, and most far-reaching, system ­ digital imaging ­ which will make images from The New York Public Library accessible to researchers around the world.

For recorded information about exhibitions, the public may call 212/869-8089. Exhibition hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. - 7:30 p.m., and Monday, Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. (Closed Sunday.) Admission is free.

The exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. The Romana Javitz Collection of 2,220 photographs was catalogued under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

pro: ls, hs: 12-23-97

thoerenz: pro: 12-26-97