Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be
Frank H. Goodyear III (Author), Lisa Hostetler (Author), Casey Riley (Author), Laurie Anderson (Afterword)
Photographer Marcia Resnick (b. 1950) earned recognition as part of the legendary Downtown New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Her portraits of the era’s major cultural figures, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Belushi, and Susan Sontag, have contributed to the scene’s mythic status.
The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph
Author: Kate Palmer Albers
We live in an era of abundant photography. Is it then counterintuitive to study photographs that disappear or are difficult to discern? Kate Palmer Albers argues that it is precisely this current cultural moment that allows us to recognize what has always been a basic and foundational, yet unseen, condition of photography: its ephemerality.
Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens
Lily Cho
Exploring how identification photographs function as mechanisms of capture and captivation.
Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain.
Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection.
Edited by Anthony T. Troncale with a forward by Jessica Cline.
In the pre-digital era, the age of mechanical reproduction, the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection provided the free circulation of prints, photographs, postcards and other clippings to its constituency of local and international artists, illustrators, advertisers, and businessmen.