Darin Mickey, a photographer and chair of the creative practices program of the International Center of Photography, browses the Accidents folder of the New York Public Librarys Picture Collection, in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in New York, July 30, 2021. Founded in 1915, the collection lends images to library users who are seeking visual information of a mind-boggling range. Gus Powell/The New York Times.
by Arthur Lubow
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- Artist Joseph Cornell once requested a picture of a street urchin with a white cockatoo. Andy Warhol borrowed hundreds of images for inspiration and never returned them. For more than a century, the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library has flourished, gloriously but precariously, as a shape-shifting misfit within a Dewey Decimal grid. Founded in 1915, the collection lends images to library users who are seeking visual information of a mind-boggling range: Praying, Fairies, Expositions, Rear Views more than 12,000 rubrics from Abacus to Zoology, a history of taste that is still expanding. Its files are classified by subject matter, and available for browsing on open shelves. You see the people go through it and touch it and have the spontaneity of discovery, said Taryn Simon, the conceptual artist who has been photographing the Picture Collections treasures for nine years, making collages that can currently be seen at the Gagosian here. ... More