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The Social Medium of Photography

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday May 20, 2015

How people share photographs has become one of the most discussed subjects of the digital age. Digital natives have only the experience of seeing their family histories unfold, almost instantly, on the screen. The family photo album has been replaced by social media sites, and the snapshot has nearly disappeared, both physically, and as a metaphor. This generation has missed the experience of dropping off film to be processed, and wondering, in the meantime, if their pictures "came out".

Enter to the discussion the Hillman Photography Initiative, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. In 2014, this “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image” invited the local community to share their personal photographs and stories online and at scanning events throughout the city. A wide range of photographic processes were submitted from large format black-and-white portraits dating as far back as the 1880's to color Polaroidsof the 1970's to camera phone photographs in the 2010's. 

Over a period of just one year, the project grew into a digital archive of more than 1,500 images, illustrating the ways in which the conventions of snapshot photography are used to document ordinary, everyday lives while more broadly, attempting to unearth a city's cultural history through the photographs of its inhabitants.

As part of this process, artists Melissa Cantanese and Ed Panar, owners of the Spaces Corners photo bookshop, were invited to the museum as artists in residence. Their installation, called The Sandbox: At Play with the Photobook, transformed a small first floor gallery into a playful hybrid space for encounters with the photobook: part reading room, part bookshop, part library, part event space. During the three months that the installation was open to the public, visitors encountered a rotating selection of photobooks and intimate events emphasizing contemporary trends that give the medium its character.

Cantanese and Panar then took on the project of editing the continuously incoming archive of photographs into a book, The People’s History of Pittsburgh, co-published with CMOA, and released this week.

They selected over two hundred images from the collective album, reinterpreting the collection into a seamless flow of images that cycle through common and often sentimental themes of domestic life—summer picnics, family suppers, sports outings, first kisses, and dance recitals. 

The photographs, stripped of their original captions, take on new meaning. A People's History of Pittsburgh, Volume One invites the reader to enter into these shared stories without knowledge of the who, what, when, and where—to reimagine their own histories, and to consider that any history begins with what is revealed and what is hidden. 

A People's History of Pittsburgh is a project of the Hillman Photography Initiative at Carnegie Museum of Art whose first cycle investigates the life cycle of images: their creation, transmission, consumption, storage, potential loss, and reemergence. To learn more about the initiative and to explore the digital archive, visit www.nowseethis.org. Copies of the book are available for purchase online here.

 

 

 


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