| Newsletter for Collectors - Vol 10.10 | December 20, 2016 | | | Home • What‘s New • Photographers • Online Exhibitions
Contents • Alphabetical • Styles and movements • Articles
Visual Indexes • Galleries & Dealers • Timelines • Techniques
Library • Contact us Welcome to another Luminous-Lint Newsletter.
Memories of Matt Isenburg |
Within a couple of years of starting Luminous-Lint I received an email from John Wood and he suggested I should contact Matt Isenburg about daguerreotypes about which I knew little. John said that when I first talked with Matt I should say that I wanted to talk to him because he had the finest collection of daguerreotypes there is. A little flattery goes a long way! So I contacted Matt and told him this and we became fast friends. In my life I've had many friends but few mentors and Matt was that to me and I cherished it.
The grave of Josiah Johnson Hawes with Matt Isenburg who was President of the Daguerreian Society at the time
Matt died in November 2016 and an obituary by fellow collector Marcel Safier is on the British Photographic History website. Many of us have shared episodes from our "through-the-night" conversations with Matt about early photography and life in general. As we spoke on the phone at three or four in the morning, he‘d call any time he felt like it or couldn‘t sleep, he‘d email through images of objects in his astounding collection and explain their significance. He was like this with everybody and his passion for the subject was boundless. Matt will be missed by all those who love photography.
The Daguerreian Society stands as a testimony to his devotion and open-hearted enthusiasm.
Reflections on institutional use of Luminous-Lint |
In November 2016 the library at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles took out an institutional subscription to Luminous-Lint. With the help of Francis Terpak I met with around twenty Getty staff to give a background to the project.
The meeting was most enjoyable and I strove to get across not only how to use Luminous-Lint but also the thinking behind how information on photohistory is structured on the website. The project brings together thousands of collections and therefore the connections between individual images can be informative and at time surprizing.
Content Management Systems, such as TMS and Mimsy XG, are designed for storing information on single items but digital rights management, thesauri and other parts of the workflow may need to be handled by separate software. Where off-the-shelf software fails is in storing connections between objects although this can partially addressed with tags. The tricky thing about tags is that they do not store sequencing within the returned group of images so if you selected "camera obscura" as a tag the display order of the images is not necessarily meaningful for a researcher.
Maintaining the links between objects within a single collection is therefore difficult within a CMS package, not impossible, but difficult. So given this how can organisations store information held outside their own information systems? All images have a context and no single institution has all of that context so where should it be stored?
Take for example a seascape by Gustave Le Gray. We would need to store: provenance data, exhibition history, conservation information, publications etc. But how about where other copies of this photograph are available or how does this relate to other photographs by Gustave Le Gray or salt prints and albumen prints of the sea or clouds? One way is by adding this information into a comments field but that means the information is unstructured and basically unusable except by the person using the single image.
All research in the arts is contextual and that means that each object has added intellectual value through other objects related to it. Traditionally this "intellectual value" has been tombstoned in articles, exhibition catalogues and monographs that are out-of-date as soon as they are published. Real world exhibitions are limited by wall space and object availability, publications by the number of images that can be included, rights issues and printing costs. There have been projects that address this issue by putting catalogues online such as the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) supported by the Getty Foundation and launched in 2009 and the issues in the Interim Report (2012) are as relevant today as the time it was written. The risk with updatable catalogues is that they remain stand-alone items not integrated into the overall flow of art history.
During the talk at the Getty Research Institute I described how Luminous-Lint is rather different as it addresses the overall framework of photohistory and links together objects not only within single collections but among many collections. The Information Architecture allows the content to be accessed from the individual image, the visual indexes, fragments or themes and this is highly flexible. After the presentation I gave an hour long demonstration during which people could raise any research question they liked and I retrieved relevant material from Luminous-Lint.
Within institutions there are obvious, and not so obvious, uses for Luminous-Lint. Cataloguers use it to check different versions of images, dates, authentication details such as signatures and studio stamps. Researchers use it for getting overviews of a subject but where it excels is in exhibition planning. For hard-pressed curators planning future exhibitions involves a vast amount of work and Luminous-Lint can assist by highlighting images in other public and private collections that might be relevant. In a few minutes a curator can access checklists of related images that would take months or years to research. Access to well-structured content encourages different ways of thinking about an exhibition. Effectively Luminous-Lint frees one from the confines of a single collection by providing fast access to a global perspective.
The content within the Themes on Luminous-Lint varies in depth but it is not like a printed publication as it is additive and each day improves in hundreds of small ways.
Luminous-Lint has come a very long way over the last few years and I‘d like to thank the staff at the Getty Research Institute for the opportunity to contextualize the project.
A timely example of connections |
Whilst I was visiting the Getty I had wanted to see the exhibition "Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France" but unfortunately it had closed a few days before.
Book cover for Karen Hellman (ed.), 2016, Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France, (Getty Publications)
So unable to visit the physical exhibition I checked Luminous-Lint and the photograph used on the book cover is a cropped version of "The French Fleet, Cherbourg" taken on 4-6 August 1858 by Gustave Le Gray in the harbor of Cherbourg in Normandy, France. One of the ways that image can be displayed on Luminous-Lint is in a visual index checklist.
Checklist for the "Gustave Le Gray > French and English fleets at Cherbourg (August 1858)" visual index on Luminous-Lint
An examination of the index shows that the image used by the Getty is in the Getty Museum collection but the four others are in two other institutional collections, one in France and one in England, and two American dealers have, or had, other related images. The images are scattered around the world and as other images are located they will be added in seamlessly to Luminous-Lint. The importance of the project is partly in these difficult to locate connections and in how the resulting sequences of images can be used to construct Themes.
I would have loved to have seen the "Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France" but that was not to be. Luminous-Lint addresses the conundrum of how we can curate online versions of real world exhibitions that improve over time and are always available.
One can also drill down far deeper if required. For example here are some early photographs of "Ports, harbours and docks" and I‘ve not seen a real world exhibition on that yet.
Part of the visual index for "Ports, harbours and docks" on Luminous-Lint
By the way if you have other images taken by Gustave Le Gray, or other photographers, taken in Cherbourg in 1858 let me know and I‘ll add them in.
The use of Luminous-Lint in Education |
Over the last semester Gilles Massot, an authority on Jules Itier (1802-1887), and lecturer at La Salle University in Singapore used Luminous-Lint to teach a history of photography course. The assignment for students involved using images from the internet and Luminous-Lint to create blogs that explore connections within the subject. To examine one of the resulting blogs by JONNGHW you can see it here.
This educational use got me thinking about ways in which individual lessons and entire courses can be structured on Luminous-Lint with rich supporting materials. For subscribers I‘ve added a section on Using Luminous-Lint in education with suggestions. This section will be enhanced over the coming months with additional approaches and best practices.
If you are using Luminous-Lint to support educational courses let me know as I will be able to offer support.
Subscriptions are available to access 1200 Themes on Luminous-Lint, powerful Visual Indexes, tools to contextualize single images, reading lists, specialized indexes and some of the more detailed parts of the website. Luminous-Lint is an evolving resource where all parts are enhanced and added to every day. Your support is necessary for this unique project to flourish.
Details about subscriptions
Thanks to all those subscribing to, and supporting, Luminous-Lint as it continues to improve.
If you would like to give a gift subscription to an individual, or an institution, that is simple to arrange so send me an email at alan@luminous-lint.com for details.
All the best for the Holiday Season, Alan |
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George Michael James Giles (1853, 20 December - 1916, 24 August) was born.
Sune Jonsson (1930, 20 December - ) was born - Sweden, Västerbotten, Nordmaling [CP says Nyåker]. Swedish photographer.
Tsuchida Hiromi (1939, 20 December - ) was born - Japan, Fukui Prefecture. Japanese contemporary photographer.
Tony Vaccaro (1922, 20 December - ) was born - US, PA, Greensburg. US Army Combat soldier photographer during World War II at first with the 83rd Infantry Division. He took photographs as he fought his way through Europe. From 1945-1949 he stayed in Europe and documented the U.S. occupation of Germany. In 2001 a More...
Hans Watzek (1848, 20 December - 1903) was born - Bohemia [now Bílina, Czech Republic], Bilin. Austrian pictorialist and a member the ‘Das Kleebatt‘ group in Vienna in the mid-1890s.
Bill Brandt (1904, 2 May - 1983, 20 December) died - UK, London. Bill Brandt became an acute observer of British society but was also interested in distorting the human form through the use of mirrors and extreme depth of field to create memorable images. His nudes on pebble beaches and his details of carefully More...
B.J. Ochsner (1869, 10 January - 1953, 20 December) died - US, CO, Durango. |
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