dear readers, i hope you are not feeling green or purple today, like the monkeys in this image. enjoy your own altered photo at the warholizer.
Five years ago I heard Joel Meyerowitz speak about his photographic project dealing with the destroyed World Trade Center. When asked what it was like at the site where all of the pieces of the Center were being sorted and stored he said that the pieces had been “cataloged” into piles of like items, with “everything…in its place,” like a “library of images” (1). The description of the library as a kind of placeholder for like items drew a striking comparison to my own artwork as well as a coincidence because I am a librarian as well as photographer. His words prompted me to begin thinking of my artwork as a catalog.
Objects in a library are cataloged according to a science, requiring consistency in sorting things so that people can find them later. My own work would be put into the library category of serial, “…appearing in parts or intervals” (2). A serial also implies that it is indefinitely continued. Serials are the wild card of the library, unpredictable and ever changing, as I have always viewed my own artwork.
My artwork began as and has continued to be a visual discussion of my curiosity with things that seem out of place, aberrations in nature, the perfect “serial.” Leaves that have unnatural curves, flowers that are missing or have gained an extra petal; these are some of the things that draw my attention. I gather these kinds of objects and then scan them into the computer via flatbed scanner.
After years of working on this series I find that I have amassed quite a number of pieces. Continuing to mentally catalog my work, I sorted my images according to type. This process has been astounding, because it has become clear to me that I tend to choose the same kinds of objects even though my intention was to choose them based on their differences.
The cataloging process is something that all photographers do, whether they choose to use the library terminology or not. It is the nature of a photographer to gather material, whether analog or digital, and organize it in serial form. It is our human nature to find patterns and repetition. Choosing to acknowledge our patterns, to be aware of the collection of images we’re making, may not happen until we’re called to it as I was by Mr. Meyerowitz.
I’ve found this process to be immensely helpful in focusing my attentions on the vocabulary of images that I’ve created. I do see my artwork as a serial; unpredictable, ever changing, and certainly indefinitely continued.
1. National Public Radio, “Joel Meyerowitz.” Fresh Air.
2. Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary OnLine, < http://www.m-w.com/dictionary>
when i introduce myself professionally, i tell people that i am the head of metadata and content management at our library, which usually draws an, “i’m impressed” facial expression, and then the inevitable question, “what is that?” have you been wondering the same thing? here’s what it means:
my department is a one-stop shop for all back-end processes. we buy all the books, e-books, journals, e-journals, and databases for our medical library and the dental library, pay for them, put them into the catalog, activate the electronic things, and monitor everything so it is accessible. my department is commonly referred to as “technical services.” i have a pretty fantastic staff that performs all these duties, leaving me to focus on how data are entered into the library catalog to keep the information consistent and neat, develop new ways to do things, and look at statistics. a lot of my job is statistics: how many times was this e-journal used, how many books do we have in the library, how many journal issues entered the library last year. those statistics point us to decide whether or not to renew a subscription, add more concurrent users for a popular e-book, or withdraw an old and unused book from the shelf.
i negotiate the license agreements for electronic resources at our library. this task isn’t always performed by a technical services department, but i happen to have had some experience with licensing in the past and so took it on. i also co-manage copyright issues for our library. for fun i do original cataloging of items like spiral-bound flip books that stand on their own and have transparent sheets that lay on top of photographs of teeth.
my job is varied, and i am always amazed at how much one department can get done if it is well organized and supported. so go on and keep your, “i’m impressed” face on!
despite the squicky name this is a nice site for free image downloads. the advanced search box is well composed and intuitive.
you must register to download images.
i did a basic search from their front page for diabetes and retrieved a series of images of a person testing his blood glucose. in the retrieval set were several images of a dog, which initially seemed out of place. i clicked on one of the dog images and saw that the description tells us that the dog, lucy, has diabetes. aww…
