NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Sam Bloom

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Sam Bloom is an award-winning multimedia producer and creative director. The New York native has conceived, developed, launched, and produced everything from TV series to magazines to consumer apps. She is the co-founder of Souvenir Shop, a new, NYC-based studio for event production and artistic programming in film, fashion, and the arts. 

When did you first get the idea for your research project?

Zohar Benjelloun and I are the co-founders of Souvenir Shop, and our friendship and creative partnership have always revolved around a shared love of visual culture. Some of our favorite activities are all about the pleasure of looking, collecting, and considering art and culture in unexpected ways: digging through the Printed Matter Book Fair, sourcing treasures at flea markets in Paris, Marrakech, and New York, watching (and then dissecting) movies and museum exhibits.

That’s why we were so excited to do the February curatorial takeover of the Picture Collection’s Instagram account. Our theme was Talking Pictures: we wanted to put photos in conversation with one another, creating new meanings, visual pranks, and unexpected dialogues. We took inspiration from artists like Sophie Calle, John Stezaker, Barbara Kruger, and Robert Rauschenberg, who all work with relational images, collage, and recontextualization to build new narratives.

It was especially fun to do this together: we have different personal aesthetic lodestars but a shared sense of humor and admiration for process and theory. We found a lot of joy in finding, selecting, and reshuffling images to tell new stories.

What brought you to the Library?

I’ve worked across many visual fields over the years, and I’m constantly seeking ways to ground my work in rich visual histories. The Library’s Picture Collection has been an indispensable resource. I’ve always been drawn to analog culture: the golden age of magazines, the tactile experience of flipping through printed materials, etc. It requires a slowness and consideration that’s often deemphasized in our digital age.

In a way, I’m trying to harness something from pre-internet times and push back against the moodboard-ification of everything. I’ve noticed that the same images recirculate endlessly: what starts as an obscure offline cultural reference in one corner of the internet suddenly appears everywhere. The internet’s greatest strength—democratization and access to infinite information— is also its greatest weakness. Culture critic Kyle Chayka has written about the art of developing personal taste in an age when algorithms loom over aesthetics and culture: selection bias has created these endless feedback loops that only serve us what algorithms think we’ll like. It’s flattened and created a sameness across culture and stripped away the reward of cultivating personal taste through discovery. It’s also robbed us of that feeling of being genuinely surprised and of stumbling into the unexpected. 

The Picture Collection became a mainstay for me the moment I realized that 90% of the images I’d pull in a day were things I had never seen before. It’s one of the few places left where it’s possible to physically handle a century of visual culture, print ephemera and rare imagery, and find unexpected juxtapositions.  Because it's curated not for people but by people, creative intuition, slowness, and consideration are rewarded in a way that’s tactile, messy, and deeply gratifying. 

Describe your research routine

I’m a big “rabbit hole” person. I like to go wide, sample a little of everything, and then editorialize. The Picture Collection is basically a collection of 1.5M + tangents: one folder leads to another, a keyword sparks a new idea, and suddenly you’re deep in a subject you never planned to explore. 

The Picture Collection has no shortage of rabbit holes, with a nearly 400-page index of folders with 1.5M + images, covering everything from dirigibles to impersonators to window displays. If I started at 10 AM, by noon I’d end up with a totally unwieldy stack of folders for Jessica Cline and the heroic Picture Collection staff to reshelve (sorry, Jessica). I’d have hundreds of images to scan by the end of day, so many that the flatbed scanner froze multiple times from overuse. 

Research is fun because it’s an incredible view into how someone thinks. I love projects like the artist Taryn Simon’s The Picture Collection, where she dug into NYPL's archives and reclassified images based on how visual information is categorized, revealing the strange, subjective logic behind it all. How we group and name things, what gets its own folder, what doesn’t, says just as much about us as the images themselves.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

While looking in POSTERS - 1960s, I came across Tomi Ungerer’s Electric Circus poster. My grandfather was a part owner of the East Village psychedelics club, The Electric Circus. I had no idea I’d find a piece of my own family history in the middle of my research.

The Electric Circus was basically the blueprint for the modern club experience. A lot of what we now take for granted in nightlife was pioneered there: immersive lighting, live performances mixed with music, themed party nights. 

The whole thing was designed to feel like you were stepping into another reality: pulsating light shows synced with the music, experimental performance art happening alongside DJ sets, like people in elaborate costumes, mimes, and actors doing weird, surrealist skits while bands played.

It was also one of the first places to treat a club as a mixed-media experience. The music was the main event, with live bands like Sly and the Family Stone and The Velvet Underground playing in a space filled with psychedelic projections and surreal set designs. It was ahead of its time in how it blurred the lines between art, music, and technology, paving the way for everything from Studio 54 to today’s superclubs and festival experiences.

To stumble upon ephemera from the Electric Circus felt like a wink from my colorful grandfather, who so loved to have fun and created it wherever he went.

What is your guilty pleasure distraction?

It’s a kind of research-adjacent procrastination, but poring over auction sites like LiveAuctioneers. Facebook Marketplace is my current infinite scroll.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

Always check the backs of the photos! So many are double-sided, and sometimes, the best images are in a folder labeled one thing that might secretly hold something completely different on the flip side. Research isn’t about finding exactly what you set out for but stumbling into something even better.