viz. - The Harry Ransom Center

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor: The Impoverished Viewer

clsloan — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:55:34 +0000

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor features photographs of the impoverished tenants of a San Fransisco hotel and of an affluent group of select individuals, also shown in their homes. As the most obvious dimension of the title suggests, the photos serve as a comparative essay on class and the disparity of wealth in America. Goldberg compiled this collection through the late 70s and early 80s and it was originally published by Random House in 1985. The Harry Ransom Center's current exhibit, Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age (September 10, 2013 – January 5, 2014), includes several images from Rich and Poor.

As I walked through the exhibit, alternately admiring the pieces and feeling guilty for not knowing enough about photography to be properly appreciative, Goldberg's work in particular caught my eye. The composition of these pieces is, in and of itself, visually striking: a black-and-white photo is surrounded by white space marked with heavy, black, handwritten text. The presence of text has interesting implications for meaning as well. As I read through the testimonies attached to the images, I found myself compelled to think about the ethics of photojournalism and the limits of visual media. My encounter with each piece unfolded dynamically, and reading the text after carefully taking in the images led me to reflect on my role as detached observer with no little amount of distaste. For instance, while I closely examined the image of the piece signed “T.J,” my geared-for-interpretation-brain zeroed in on the woman's not-quite-sexy pose, the tilt of her head, the flatness of her stare, the bed as the only other notable feature in the frame.

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

I cobbled together something about female sexuality and kept idly wondering whether this picture was trying to challenge norms or partake of them while I read through the text. It says, “To me Life seems so messed up But lilttel by lilttel i am trying to over come that. Because it is hard being a woman and to accept me as I am. T.J.” This visceral commentary caused me to be immediately overcome with the insufficiency of any interpretation I could possibly bring to bear on this photo. The model herself, with her intimate, affective link to the creation of this image, to the experiences the photo gestures towards, to the reasons behind the tilt of the head, the pose, the bed, had already asserted an incredibly rich analysis of this image, and any others paled in comparison. All of a sudden, Rich and Poor acquired new, media-oriented dimensions for me. The richness of the images grew poor against the force of the models' statements. The poverty of my own understanding as a viewer came into harsh relief.

Of course, this striking experience itself was carefully tailored by Goldberg, with the help of his models. I have yet to read through Rich and Poor, but, from what I've gleaned off the internet, I understand that the statements on the photos were hand-chosen by Goldberg, and the authenticity of the handwriting, suggestive of a spontaneous overflow of emotion, itself is an artistic technique. However, Goldberg's collection still asks viewers to examine their own privilege and think hard about both financial and artistic exploitation.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

The Many Leaning Subjects of Arnold Newman

Calliope — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:39:51 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Porch and Chairs, West Palm Beach Florida, 1941

In between portraits of famous luminaries at the Harry Ransom Center's Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibit, there are a group of images from the photographer's early career that feel anonymous and private. They include pictures of landscapes, nameless figures, and modest structures--all subjects that seem to have been chosen for their compositional character rather than the associations they bring to mind. The above photograph from that period of a decontextualized porch and chairs resists our curiosity to see the whole house and place it in a particular setting, focusing us instead on form and line. The un-forthcomingness or formal starkness of this picture seems dramatically foreign to the photography of Newman's later career, the period of his well-known "environmental" portraits, which situated iconic individuals in settings that explained or extended their identities. (Rachel's post further glosses and complicates this term). Despite this, I'd like to point out some unifying threads between this quaint little study from West Palm Beach and a few, more recognizably Newmanian photographs, all of which are currently on display at the Ransom Center.

"Porch and Chairs" derives its charm from a few compositional elements. The first is the picture's close crop. Newman left a very small margin around the porch, especially to the right and left, which highlights its distorted shape. The lateral boards at the top of the photo give us the sense that Newman's camera is held level, but all of the lines one would expect to be vertical in the picture--the shutters, the right and left panels of the door frame, the porch's central support and the two cut-away walls--are slanted, making the structure appear unstable and droopy. Our eyes search the bowed and jagged siding for ninety degree angles to no avail. As much as they purport to be squares, the spaces within the porch frame are more like rhombuses that lean faintly to the left. Yet the tilted aspect of the porch doesn't overwhelm or unsettle the photo, because the two chairs in the lower right corner "lean" in the opposite direction. These backward-bending chairs may have no effect on structural soundness of the rickety building but they do provide the balance needed within the composition.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Vallauris, France, 1954.

The crop planned here, which resulted in the famous Picasso portrait below, accomplishes something a little different from the "Porch and Chairs" framing. Newman begins with an image of a leaning subject, reorients it, and restores balance and energy to the painter's mien. Even after these modifications, there are still signs that he was leaning over in the original pose. The rightward pressure of Picasso's hand visible in the creases on his forehead offsets the positioning of the subject toward the left side of the frame. The hand, in other words, acts as a frame-within-a-frame that repositions and counterbalances the visual weight of the leaning subject.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Ernest Trova, Sculptor, Pace Gallery, 1971

Several other Newman portraits at the Harry Ransom Center feature leaning subjects and frames-within-frames. In this photograph of the sculptor Ernest Trova, for instance, the white jutting walls of the gallery (instead of Newman's red crayon) crop nearly half of his body from view, and what's left of Trova's trunk is pictured leaning against this "environmental" frame. We get the sense that the thrust of his lean is the only thing keeping him from being squeezed out of the picture.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

In this shot, Ansel Adams appears comfortably wedged between a beam and the frame of a sliding glass door. Behind him and inside his house a group of frames hang on the wall. The placement of the photographer in front of a pane of glass that, in turn, superimposes reflections of the trees outside on the framed artworks within the house suggests a communicability between each of these layers that may refer to Adams' work. Indeed, capturing the photographer, his beloved trees, and the art on his walls within the same bounding line suggests the inseparability of all of these things.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Joel Meyerowitz, photographer in his studio, New York, 1993

This final photograph of Joel Meyerowitz leaning against what must be the entry to his darkroom emboldens me to talk more directly about the importance of leaning and internal frames for Newman's work. From a compositional standpoint it seems to me that, like the tilted porch frame and the crooked-backed chairs of our first image, the lean and the frame of Newman's later pieces give them a crucial sense of counterpoise. In Newman's portraits of artists, these frame-like structures inevitably take on a more definite significance because of the inescapable relationship between artists and frames. Deliberately positioning these art makers within at least two sets of frames--the borders of Newman's photograph and what I've been calling its internal frame--emphasizes the fact that they have momentarily relinquished artistic control and have become art. Perhaps leaning or pushing back against the frame is the only way they can reassert a modicum of control.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Conspicuous Radios

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before creating the “Patriot” radio, Norman Bel Geddes had long been involved with traditional, cabinet radio design. And while many of his cabinet radios follow the robust, furniture-esque aesthetic common to radios of the day this radio, created for the New York World Fair, 1939, breaks that mold. The “Patriot,” rather than simply blending into the décor of a room, forcefully makes itself known. This radio, rather conspicuously, embodies a particular patriotic flair. Most prominently, it features the seven red and six white stripes of the United States flag. Its knobs feature stars, and in most models red, white, and blue are the predominate colors.

Image Credit: Tube Radio Land

It would be unfair, though, especially in retrospect, to label the “Patriot” radio as something like nationalistic kitsch. Even if it was produced in order to “create an optimistic and useful emblem of American technology, industry, and identity” (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History) it carries with it an unabashedly forceful design that cannot be brushed aside. Rather than merely carrying the trappings of or a symbol for a nationalistic spirit this radio operated, specifically as an object, to promote itself more than any nationalism. So that while a flab might be mobilized to act as mere symbol this radio carries with it more weight. And unlike the various wood-paneled cabinet radios that worked to hide themselves, to blend into parlors, the “Patriot” radio works actively captures a user’s attention. The music it relays becomes a sideshow.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Geddes also designed a portable shoulder radio for Philco in 1946. This predates the mass production of transistor based devices by roughly ten years. That it still relied on vacuum tubes rather than the significantly smaller transistors accounts for its relative size. Even taking tubes into consideration, though, this shoulder mounted radio imagines a future where music is nearly ubiquitous. In some ways, though, this imagined future isn’t ours. While our current musical commonplace is almost painfully private—headphones on every head and earbuds in every ear—Geddes’ shoulder radio trends toward both a publicly embodied object and a public sound. The radio, with its brilliant white speaker, draws the eye, so that publically it works on multiple senses. It presents mobile music and spectacle both, and we can begin to see this radio as the ancestor to the shoulder mounted boom boxes of the eighties.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Turning toward our current musicscape, though, and the exceedingly common iPod (and its progeny) there’s a vastly different design principle in play. These devices are conspicuously inconspicuous. For all of their sleek lines and glossy screens and solid weight they shrink away as objects. Instead, they present themselves, present their use, as accessories, devices, prosthetics for a particular attitude. They work exactly as they should, beautifully when used how they are intended to be used, but they do so underhandedly. These are objects that bottom from the top.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Upending the familiar hierarchy of use these objects become the users and the humans are cast as device. And while it isn’t anything uncommon for human’s to be used by objects—I think the case could be made that the outcome of good design is that the human user becomes the used—the iPod, especially, and its descendents are particularly pernicious in their deception. They order not only a specific relation between object and human but organize a breadth of relations. Our encounters with music (economically, situationally, emotionally, environmentally) are shaped now, in large part (whether or not you use an iDevice), by the force of Apples music player. And they do it by simply tucking into things—your pocket, palm, car, stereo, desk. They elide their own presence and appear as nothing more than a ‘natural’ extension to an already configured human body.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: Musings on Contradictions with the Harry Ransom Center’s Etched Window Façade

Lisa Gulesserian — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:29:43 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Two images related to one of the most respected French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, grace the Harry Ransom Center’s etched glass façade. Yes, the images of a disturbingly beautiful flower bud and a similarly ominous bouquet on the cover for Baudelaire’s 1857’s collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal, are on the Ransom Center’s south and north windows because the Center has holdings of Baudelaire’s work in their French Literature collection. But, maybe the Ransom Center’s choice to use Baudelaire twice when there are many other French authors they could have chosen to represent leads us to another reason why Baudelaire is so prominently represented in the Center’s public face. Baudelaire has always been a dialectical figure of contradiction—twentieth-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin found in Baudelaire the linchpin around which he could situate the conundrum of urbanity in the nineteenth century. In Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project (compiled between 1927-1940), Benjamin muses that the “uninterrupted resonance which Les Fleurs du mal has found up through the present day is linked to a certain aspect of the urban scene, one that came to light only with the city’s entry into poetry. It is the aspect least of all expected. What makes itself felt through the evocation of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse is the infirmity and decrepitude of a great city.” The contradictions of the metropolis—the high and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque—are everywhere in Les Fleurs du mal. Like Benjamin, the Ransom Center uses Baudelaire in their window façade as one figure through which we can view the many contradictions of visual representation and archival work.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal deals in visual contradictions. The title of Baudelaire’s poetry collection, often translated as “The Flowers of Evil,” immediately makes its main contradiction clear. Flowers are often associated with love, youth, spring, and vitality. Stereotypically, evil is tied to images that are often the opposite of themes associated with flowers. So, a beautiful flower that is simultaneously evil makes for a slight contradiction under typical visual tropes. Baudelaire’s evil flower (illustrated by Odilon Redon) has thistles that look like needles, a single razor-sharp leaf, and large black splotches. Yet, it’s still beautiful.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

The ominous flower in the Ransom Center’s façade brings a visual contradiction to the fore with its placement next to Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph from 1936, Migrant Mother, of a beautifully anxious woman in the Depression. Both images are beautiful, but there is something sinister lurking underneath, whether it’s the evil of the flowers or the worry of the migrant mother. And there are many images like Lange’s or Redon’s that are beautiful but depict something frightening, disgusting, or depressing.

Image Credit: Brown University Library Exhibits

Besides showing that visual images can play with contradictions, Baudelaire can also bring up another contradiction—that of the past in the present. In the portrait above by Georges Rochegrosse, Baudelaire is haunted by the past in the present. To Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire represents this contradiction in his very being. Benjamin is surprised by how the “‘Old-fashioned’ and ‘immemorial’ are still united in Baudelaire. The <things> that have gone out of fashion have become inexhaustible containers of memories.” The past is alive in Baudelaire’s life, and Benjamin explains that “It is very important that the modern, with Baudelaire, appear not only as the signature of an epoch but as an energy by which this epoch immediately transforms and appropriates antiquity.” It is here that Baudelaire represents a quality highly valued by Benjamin—the quality to view the world, with its objects and its people, through a different lens. Like the figure of the collector in The Arcades Project who sees treasures in the relics of the past, Baudelaire sees value in rethinking and reviewing the past in the present. Of course, as a place that houses many archives, the Ransom Center might be equally invested in bringing the past into the present. In using Baudelaire on their façade, the Center could be asking us to think about the contradictions of visual representation and archival work. I think that Walter Benjamin would have been proud.

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:08:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Art Deco was a remarkably successful and widespread architectural and artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The movement was one focused on decoration—the geometric, symmetrical forms of the buildings and drawings of the movement were influenced by ancient Egyptian flourishes. As Edward Said reminds us, since Napoleon’s foray into Egypt in the 18^th century, “Egypt was to become a department of French learning.” Along with Napoleon’s soldiers, “chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” were tasked with “put[ting] Egypt into modern French.” Started around the heyday of archaeological work in Egypt (King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1922), Art Deco internalized the general Egyptomania of the times. “Art Deco,” says British historian John M. MacKenzie in his book Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, “though not oriental in any obvious overall way, owed much to oriental influences: the geometrical patterns, often brightly coloured, the strongly projecting corbels, the sunbursts, winged elements, (like clocks rendered as solar discs), and other features.” Most of us are familiar with the architectural epitomes of this style, NYC’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. Both of these buildings make use of Egypt-inspired tropes, such as the lotus decorations on the elevators in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Image Credit: Archaeology.org

François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of the books of Genesis is no different when it comes to using Egypt-inspired visual elements. His depiction of the Creation is composed of brightly colored animals bursting (like sunrays) off the page. The whales spew water in symmetrical arcs, while a tidy group of partridges march along the bottom of the engraving.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Schmied was an Orientalist in the clearest sense. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmied internalized the Egyptomania of his times. He even painted himself in “Oriental dress” at the beginning of his career in 1927. His willingness to take on the dress of the Other might be a sign of Schmied’s identification with the Orient of the past.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Shmied’s clear investment in the Orientalist project is critical to reading his illustration of the Book of Ruth. In his engraving for the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, Schmied chose to depict Boaz with darker skin than the outsider from Moab, Ruth. Moabites were excluded from the Jewish community as stipulated by God in Deuteronomy 23:3–6.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Ruth, as a Moabite, was allowed to congregate with Israelites because she was a woman (and Moabite women were begrudgingly accepted by Israelites). The story of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage is one of acceptance and compassion—Boaz marries the widowed and impoverished Ruth and fathers a son with her in the direct line of David and Jesus. Their story is not one of passionate love—nowhere does the Bible describe Ruth’s and Boaz’s physical attributes. So, it’s especially interesting that Schmied made Ruth into an olive-skinned beauty and Boaz into a dark-skinned savior. Schmied’s artistic choices might reflect his internalization of another culture, that of “the Orient.” In any case, his engraving is a unique one of an oft-depicted Biblical scene that merits much critical analysis.

See the engravings yourself at the Ransom Center’s exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The exhibition is up until the 29^th of July.

In Miniature: Bel Geddes’s “Doll House for Joan”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:25:05 +0000

Image Credit: SliceofGreen

In anticipation of the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming exhibition of Norman Bel Geddes’s futuristic designs, I’ve become completely fascinated with the work of a man whom the Ransom Center describes as “an innovative stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner who, more than any designer of his era, created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future—streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic.” This week, instead of focusing on the futurescapes of Bel Geddes after 1927 (the year Bel Geddes launched his industrial-design career), I will discuss a lesser-known Bel Geddes—the man as a father who built fantastic doll houses for his daughters. This man was a big dreamer (per French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whom we’ll meet later in this post), one who dealt in miniatures.

In the Ransom Center’s finding aid for the “Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers” housed at the Center, I found an interestingly domestic reference—one for a “Doll House for Joan.” In this helpful finding aid, I learned that Bel Geddes sketched and drafted the doll house just as he would any architectural or urban plan. Even elevations—though on a miniature scale—were noted! Bel Geddes made this detailed doll house for one of his two daughters, Joan, sometime in the early 1920s. I’m fascinated to see that before Bel Geddes decided to shift gears from stage design for theater and film, he tried out some of his nascent architectural skills with a miniature structure. I’d like to think that Bel Geddes’s ambitions to become an architect and planner were encased in his building a doll house.

Image Credit: Libraryland

Gaston Bachelard might agree with me. In The Poetics of Space (his magnum opus published in France in 1958), Bachelard muses about our relationships with “intimate places,” from childhood homes to closed drawers. His chapters weave poetry and personal experiences with dreams. The chapter most applicable to today’s discussion of Bel Geddes’s doll house is the one titled, simply, “Miniature.” In this chapter, Bachelard uses Poe and Rimbaud to discuss the power of miniatures in our everyday lives. The most wonderful thing about miniatures, according to Bachelard, is that “Values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.” What’s important about miniatures isn’t their intricacy nor their accurate representation of reality. For Bachelard, “the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness . . . Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.” The ‘big’ (in terms of ideas, aspirations, and dreams) is encased in the ‘small’ (in terms of size, scale, and material).

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

I see glimmers of Bel Geddes’s future in his doll house from the 1920s. The structure is taller than it is wide (a nod to the tall skyscrapers in Bel Geddes’s future cities?). Its façade is clean and sparsely adorned (a design aesthetic made popular by Bel Geddes later in his career). And on its roof is a clothesline (as everything Bel Geddes designed was simultaneously fanciful and functional—see his designs of radios and restaurants). I’m tempted to believe, like Bachelard, that “when we examine images of immenseness, tiny and immense are compatible . . . If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.” I see greatness in a doll house, domesticity in massive urban plans.

See the mini/immense doll house plans and accouterments yourself in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives now, or wait until September to see them in the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes exhibition.

Future City from the Past: Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:31:56 +0000

Image Credit: a456

I’ve been thinking a lot about future cities these days, though I’ve mostly been focusing on real-world metropolises as futuristic settings in TV shows and movies. Today, I’m going to shift gears to describe an idea for a future city from the past, Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” advertising campaign for Shell Oil from the late 1930s. The campaign predicts (critics might say “encouraged” or “enabled”) a car-centric, highway-laden, city whose residents “loaf along at 50 [m.p.h]—right through town.” Bel Geddes’ “tomorrow” continues to resound today.

Image Credit: a456

There’s a common theme in yesterday’s future city and today’s—the car. When last I spoke about possible future cities, I critically assessed artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II”, an installation where toy cars zipped across a future Los Angeles surrounded by huge strips of freeways. Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” is eerily similar to the future city Burden envisions. Both futures see unimpeded cars as the epitome of modern efficiency. And both images of the future are utterly devoid of people. Bel Geddes explains this lack by telling the readers of Life Magazine (where the “City of Tomorrow” ad campaign ran for months) that “tomorrow’s children won’t play in the streets.”

Image Credit: a456

Despite these similarities, there is a difference between Burden’s art installation and Bel Geddes’s advertising campaign, and this crucial difference is one of context. Burden created his art installation for public viewing at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). Burden’s dealer Larry Gagosian footed the bill for Burden’s project, while LACMA board member Nicholas Bergguren later bought the project. The key point is that the stakeholders in the project’s success are art dealers and museum board members.

Image Credit: Best Ad

The stakeholders for Bel Geddes’s project’s success are a lot less innocuous. Shell Oil, one of the biggest petroleum distributors in the world, hired Bel Geddes for their massive, multi-segment advertising campaign. Looking at the elaborate advertisements, it’s obvious that Shell is using Bel Geddes’s designs to sell a future lifestyle that would make them millions (billions by today’s standards) if Americans decided to make it a reality. A transportation system dependent on cars would guarantee that gasoline would be a necessary commodity in the future. And it is exactly this gas-fueled future that was embraced wholeheartedly by the city planners of America in the decades following Shell’s campaign. Campaigns like Shell Oil’s “City of Tomorrow” lulled viewers into equating automobiles with ingenuity, modernity, and efficiency. Urban planners like Robert Moses and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright only realized what these viewers wanted to see: more roads, more highways, less impediments. Yet without artists and modelers like Bel Geddes to visualize a future of cars and people-less thoroughfares, what we have ended up seeing years down the line could have been a lot different.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

If the “City of Tomorrow” has piqued your interest, be sure to check out the Harry Ransom Center in the fall when their “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” exhibition is up and running. Until then, visit the Ransom Center’s preview page for images and background related to the upcoming exhibition.

Researching in Card Catalogues

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The following post concerns my recent visits to the Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Center. The images, such as the one above, were derived from unpublished scholarly notes that I never would have found if I didn't use a card catalogue. Since I have been in the process of writing my dissertation in the Department of English Literature, the resources at the Harry Ransom Center have guided me toward avenues of research I did not initially expect to pursue. I would like to relate a personal narrative and a few thoughts about why I’ve enjoyed accessing the Center’s extensive and rich archive by means of the card catalogues. The views expressed below do not reflect those of the Center, but are entirely my own. I do not write from the point of view of a library scientist, although I might gesture toward their expertise in my personal reflections on old-fashioned metadata. Instead, I hope to reassert what many students at the University of Texas already know, concerning the advantage of our proximity to the Harry Ransom Center. Specifically, I would like to suggest the need to actually visit the Reading Room to realize the full extent of the possibilities for research there.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Recently, I came across an exciting discovery after browsing the Harry Ransom Center’s website. This pertained to a trove of over 2,500 books, periodicals, and pamphlets, which Reginald Harvey Griffith donated to the University of Texas at Austin just prior to Dr. Harry Ransom’s founding of the “Humanities Research Center” in 1957. I happened to have known that Griffith taught at the University of Texas during the middle of the twentieth century, and that he shared ties with a group of scholars at Harvard who wrote quite extensively on eighteenth-century “Club” literature (my area of specialization). I was not able to find out what was in Griffith’s archive, however, because this was not listed online. When I visited the Reading Room and inquired as to the materials in the collection, I found out that the contents of this archive were only accessible in three separate card catalogues, marked as “Manuscripts File,” “Provenance File,” and “Collections File.” The staff at the Center was extremely helpful in instructing me as to the significance and intricacies of these card catalogues, as well as the appropriate methods for calling books and manuscripts out of special collections.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

In my initial sweep through the three separate shelves of Griffith’s Collections file, I discovered titles of several 18^th centuries texts that I had never before encountered. While sifting through all three separate card catalogues, furthermore, I found cross-listings to other scholars of 18^th century literature, whose books and manuscripts I did not know were part of the Center’s holdings. This search eventually led to individual file cards, which revealed their handwritten letters to famous scholars well outside the field of 18^th century British literature. Although I entered the reading room with a specific objective in mind, the information in card catalogues led to possibilities I could not have predicted. Studying manuscripts is more time-intensive than reading print, but the documents have a mystique and value for being originals. Below, for instance, is an image of G.A. Aitken’s note for his purchase of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

While the Center’s online finding aids are a great place to explore the collections from a distance, search a transcribed catalogue, or view a digitized archive, there is a good deal contained in the actual card catalogues that is not online. Beyond this specific difference, there are others that deserve recognition. For instance, the direct access of online search terms may have a tendency to limit search results, since it often produces a list of just what you’re looking for. Not to say that I don’t cherish online databases or that I could study happily without them, but I also appreciate card catalogues for their capacity to surprise. If card catalogues are not the vanguard, they still have an experimental edge. Have fun with them! I particularly like choosing a given year in the “Dates” catalogue [which organizes the Center’s collections in chronological order (typically yearly)], and seeing what’s there. Another option (which I haven’t tried it yet) might be to explore the “Publisher’s” catalogue in some similarly open-ended fashion. These games will pass the time while you’re waiting for your books to arrive. My point is that card catalogues aren’t restricted to Luddites only, and the combination of old-fashioned adventurism and the wireless internet can be a powerful one. This argument goes deeper than simply looking at old editions of books, but it involves an entire procedure of seeking them out in the first place. As online research increases in speed, immediacy, and (seeming) transparency, even advanced students may feel the urge to scoff or cringe at the thought of long narrow boxes and rectangular typewritten index cards. Writing from personal experience, I can say that card catalogues have their own charm and usefulness.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center