Reconsider: On my reading list

Over the past week I have been reading Patti Smith’s recently published memoir Just Kids about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her life in New York during the late 60s through the 1970s. Smith’s account of Mapplethorpe and their simultaneous pursuits in art, poetry and rock ’n’ roll is incredibly charming. I’m enthralled with everything she has to say—I love Patti. But aside from my personal infatuation, throughout the book Smith discusses the state of photography in the 1970s, recounted Mapplethorpe’s own movement toward the medium, deeply indebted to his relationship with curator and collector Sam Wagstaff, his patron and lover. Here Smith recanting her trips with Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe to purchase photographs, and how Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe’s personal interests in photography informed each other’s pursuits:

The three of us would scour Book Row, the dusty secondhand bookstores that once lined Fourth Avenue. Robert would go through boxes of old postcards, stereo cards, and tintypes carefully to find a gem. Sam, impatient, and not impeded by cost, would simply buy the whole box. I would stand aside listening to them argue. It sounded very familiar.

Scouting bookstores was one of my specialties. In rare instances, I would root out a desirable Victorian cabinet card, or an important portfolio of turn-of-the-century cathedrals, and on one lucky excursion, an overlooked Cameron. It was on the cusp of collecting photography, the last period where one could find a bargain. It was till possible to come upon gravure prints of large-format field photographs by Edward Curtis. Sam was taken with the beauty and the historical value of these photographs of the North American Indian, and acquired several volumes. Later, as we sat on the floor looking at them, in his large empty apartment flooded with natural light, we were impressed not only by the images but by the process. Sam would feel the edge of the photograph between his thumb and forefingers. “There’s something about the paper,” he would say.

Reconsider: Photographs In (and Out) of the Museum

This intervention is concerned with how America chose to depict the national landscape across alternate historical moments. In addition to displaying artist books by Ed Ruscha (see previous post), late 19^th and early 20^th century photography will be exhibited from the California Historical Society archive in Special Collections at the USC Doheny Memorial Library. Specifically, the majority of images are from an extensive photography collection within the CHS’s holdings assembled between 1860 and 1930 by relatively unknown photographer C. C. Pierce. 

The collection includes images taken by Pierce but also numerous works by other western photographers. Some of the most well known images within the collection to be shown in the intervention are by George Fiske, whose photographs of Yosemite were widely distributed tourist items sold in the national park at the end of the 19^th century. In fact, an advertisement for Fiske’s studio was featured in Galen Clark’s 1910 tourist guidebook The Yosemite Valley: its history, characteristic features, and theories regarding its origin. In addition to Pierce and Fiske, the intervention will also utilize images by photographer Adam Dove (who I have been able to find no information on), as well as other anonymously produced pictures.

 George Fiske, Galen Clark on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, ca.1900, Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library

Advertisement for Fiske's Studio in The Yosemite Valley (1910)

Reconsider: Palm Trees Found

From an early stage in planning our intervention, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) was identified as a potential work to add to the exhibition’s landscape painting galleries. Every Building, a small object in book form, unfolds into a 25 foot long accordion with two continuous horizontal bands of photographs depicting both sides of the Sunset Strip. Every Building is one of many artist books Ruscha created during the 1960s and early 70s that have subsequently been identified as significant across multiple historical categories: pop art, conceptual art, artist books, post-war photography and theories of postmodernism being a few. The USC Architecture and Fine Arts Library has many of Ruscha’s books in its collection (including two copies of Every Building), but (of course?) they are now held in the libraries rare books section.

While doing research on Every Building and other books by Ruscha I noticed that A Few Palm Trees (1971), the last book Ruscha published in this period, was listed as “missing” at the AFA library (concerning), however another copy was available at Leavey, a general reference library at the university. I thought this seemed peculiar and possibly just a typo on the library’s website, but to be thorough I decided to investigate.