There's an old picture collection, mainly clippings from books and magazines and advertisements, filed in about 12,000 manila folders in the New York Public Library. It's sort of an anachronism at this point, but it's also an analogy for search engines.
For years, artist Taryn Simon has been examining the way we classify images, and how search functions have changed it. She continues with her latest installation, The Picture Collection, which opened Wednesday at San Francisco's John Berggruen Gallery.
To create the project, Simon pulled 40-some folders from the more than 1.2 million images in the New York Public Library's picture collection. She chose the categories she thought were most interesting — including "Hand Shakes," "Rat Catching," "Rear Views" (mostly people's backsides) and others — and laid each folder's contents out in a series of frames. The whole thing is based on a cataloging system Simon sees as the basis for the search engine.
"The thing that's interesting about it for me is, it's kind of this precursor to Google, and kind of the anticipation of Pinterest and Instagram and this idea of visual communication, and this impulse to archive and catalog certain terms with an image identity," she says.
Starting in 1915, the library's collection grew to be the world's largest circulating picture library. Employees clipped indiscriminately, from magazines, books, and postcards, but also from prints and fine art. In the decades since, artists mined the collection for inspiration. Andy Warhol is said to have absconded with numerous folders, and Simon found the collection as a girl.
"I've been going to the picture collection since I was little, and always looking for ideas and inspiration," she says. "It's been replaced by Google and these other image-sourcing possibilities on the internet, so it becomes a bit like the map. It's lost its utility."
The Google analogy is a big part of why Simon put this work together. But it's more than just an anachronistic history. Simon's selections reflect the times; she used the "Israel" and "Financial Panic" folders, for example. And it has shades of her previous project, a search-engine scrubber that she worked on with coder Aaron Swartz.
Imageatlas.org is a black screen with a search box. Enter a term, and it'll show you the top image results for that term, differentiated by country. Simon used it to explore differences in how certain countries' search engines expressed politically loaded topics.
Image Atlas and The Picture Collection examine the way we categorize images kind of like autocomplete does. But unlike Google, images in the library's collection could be filed only in one folder: a photo of a yellow duck in the rain could file under "Yellow," "Duck," or "Rain."
The Picture Collection will be on display at the John Berggruen Gallery until March, then tour in the United States and abroad, including Brussels and Israel.
