Around the time I had sent out the last Newsletter, Jim Rutkowski sent me a copy of “Family Album,” the catalog of the show from his collection at the Columbus [Ohio] Museum of Art. Rutkowski, an artist/sculptor, collected in a wide and continually expanding range of subjects and formats. His collection embraces a large range of photographic objects going back into the mid-19th century. It reminds us (yet again) that functional photographs with ostensibly mundane purposes have offered very rich layers of social and artistic significance from the beginning of photography. There is some distinction to be made between photographs made by a professional photographer for some client (most photographs before the late 19th century) and those made within a private world for consumption within the person’s intimate or family sphere, and often eventually discarded (this is what we generally think of as snapshots.) In both cases the sophisticated contemporary collector finds pleasure and meaning that often works against or in spite of what seems to be the original function of the work. In this sense the collector is making a creative contribution to the work simply by selecting it and putting it in some new context.
Having brought together such a large quantity and range of photographs, Rutkowski found different themes emerging within the collection. As the photographs were in so many sizes and formats, it became unwieldy to put the actual objects into different organizational modes. He discovered how to re-photograph the original photographs and re-size them into similar-size prints that could be organized in loose-leaf binders. The pages could then be re-arranged in different configurations. Now that they were all the same size the pictorial information could be more easily compared. The prints could be re-arranged in different configurations without disturbing the originals. In this way themes emerged that were not part of the original organizing structure. A wonderful example of this is his discovery of the role of cakes in some of the photographs, and this led to his seeking out other photographs that embodied or extended this theme. As a sculptor he is of course extremely aware of the physical nature of objects, but this aspect of the collection has led him to see the photographs more as bearers of information than as material aesthetic objects. The discoveries about the role of cakes in private and public occasions can be more easily made via the same-size reproductions than from the original objects.
By coincidence, just as I was thinking about the Rutkowski catalog, a visiting dealer/collector friend whose interests are quite different, also told me he was organizing his collection by means of photographic copies.
Earlier Newsletters, such as No. 8, “Bird Watching,” have explored the urge to “collect” things that have no material value [such as sightings of birds], and also the way a thread of collecting can lead to unexpected discoveries. Somewhat separate from the thrill of seeking and acquiring new material is the exploration within one’s own collection, as facilitated in this example by the arrangement and rearrangement of photographic copies.
This made me wonder about the compulsion to OWN the material, to collect the actual objects and not just copies of the objects. After all there is a great pleasure in arranging material that one does not actually own. I myself take great pleasure in arranging the material that comes together in a few months’ time for my BE-HOLD auction catalogs. The catalogs are a display of this arrangement, and that is why I continue to produce these catalogs when the material itself is also offered on the internet. And then I am happy to pass the material on to become part of other arrangements, rather than to keep it myself. Museum curators know the pleasure of arranging instructive groupings of material gathered from other collections. Even when an exhibition is curated from the holdings of a single institution, it is the institution and not the curator who owns the material. When an enlightened institution such as the Gilman Paper Company engages a great curator such as Pierre Apraxine to form a collection, one can only imagine that the curator internalizes the collection and has something of the same creative personal involvement with the material as if he were the actual owner. (He had the benefit of assistance from many others, particularly his long-time assistant Lee Marks and Maria Hambourg of the Metropolitan, among others.) Thus Apraxine can take great pride in the collection going intact to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a collection “widely considered… one of the most important such private collections in the world” [from Alex Novak’s E-Photo Newsletter No. 86.] Scholars and critics know the pleasure of discovering and articulating insights in material that is not owned, and may even be dealt with only through illustrations and slides and scans and not the actual physical object.
So why can’t the pleasurable arrangement of image content just be made, for example, by photocopying images from magazines, or downloading images from the huge and growing storehouse of images available on the internet? Why is there the compulsion to actually own a collection of material? Why do photographic copies of images from one’s own collection feel different from copies of objects we don’t own?
This is separate from the obvious pleasure of having around one or in reach objects that one can savor and enjoy. I am involved with more and more larger prints, and so I appreciate the way many people have their collection around them in their homes, or just out of reach but available to look at or show. I have to temper my critique of that aspect of collecting that is a branch of interior decorating.
But even collectors who have their best images stored away in a bank vault have a special connection with those objects. The thought of them is far different from the thought of a photograph in a book or a museum that may be loved, too, but in a different way. And this feeling may have little or nothing to do with monetary value.
I was fascinated by another item in Alex’s Newsletter—the arrest of the Shiek Al-Thani of Quatar. With impeccable taste and seemingly unlimited resources he had put together a fabulous collection of masterworks of photography (among other works of art.) Five museums are being built in Quatar to house the collections. Al-Thani’s problems seem to derive from his presumed need to develop his own personal collection alongside these public ones. While there are likely enormous financial implications to these transactions, one can suppose that the primary motivation is not monetary, but rather the internal collector passion to “own” certain works and not just to have them in nearby institutions, even if they remain associated with the name of the curator.
The emotional foundation of a collector’s need to own is as individual as each collector is from every other. People internalize their roles differently. Some teachers, scholars, curators have so internalized their careers as to be as passionately rewarded by a discovery as a collector will be by a “find.” Some dealers are happy to have certain works to offer and have little desire to own them. I myself only collect in certain very limited areas. I’m happy to assemble a temporary collection of material to offer in each auction, and don’t lust to own them. Some other dealers and auction specialists collect in areas that are very peripheral to the primary material they offer. Other dealers have become dealers primarily to support their own collections. Some dealers have personal collections that overlap with their holdings, and they can “dip into” their collections to add to their stock.
It does seem that there is a special magnetic zone around a collection that starts from some personal or even happenstance acquisition. This can often propel the collector into extensive research within and outside the collection, and of course into the burning desire to add to the collection. For most people who read this, “owning” has deep roots, and is an energizing aspect of life.