The 109th Public Collectors publication for those who are keeping track!

 

From the back cover:

Before photographers transmitted photos to their editors digitally, hard copy darkroom prints were used. The backs of these printed photos frequently have various handwritten or rubber-stamped credits and notes from the photographer or newspaper staff, written directly on the photos, or on forms that have been adhered to the surface. If the photo was used in an article, sometimes a slice of the article or caption will be mounted on the back. If one photo was used on many different dates, the photo may be stamped repeatedly to indicate when it was published. 

About seven years ago I became aware of the massive secondary market for newspaper file photos. I was gathering photos around certain subjects (particularly for a collection and book about people who appear at protests dressed as the grim reaper), and sometimes I had to buy bulk lots of photos in order to get the specific images I needed. One seller on eBay mainly lists individual photos but would occasionally offer larger lots, and this is how I got myself into a fun kind of collecting trouble. I ended up buying four separate lots from this seller, each containing 500 different photos (I never counted them – maybe it was more?). Most of the 2,000 photos covered the subjects of crime, protests, and both human-made and natural disasters. I identified some photos that I could resell (anything connected to the Manson trials is easy money, it turns out). Those sales paid for everything I wanted to save and keep thinking about.

The many remaining news photos have become raw material for other projects. I’ve made some small publications using fragments of different images (such as focusing on protest signs and costumes) and used the collection for a curatorial workshop at a college once where students identified various themes and created temporary groupings. I store the photos in boxes and pull everything out once in a while to see what might have escaped my attention before. 

For this publication, I’ve turned my focus to the backs of the photos, which I sometimes find more compelling than the images on the front. The aesthetics of these compositionally complicated objects remind me of drawings that the artist Robert Rauschenberg made with newspaper photo solvent transfers, or works by Cy Twombly where sheets of white paper are activated with expressively copied poetry, asemic writing, oil crayon marks, and bits of color. 

The data-rich photo back views in this booklet have accrued information in many collaborative ways. The person that rubber stamped the dates may not be the same person that took the photo, or the worker that clipped the caption that was ultimately used in print. Notes are written and scribbled over, and many photos feature various number stickers and codes that may have come later in life for these objects. I hope others will find these traces of editing and newspaper production history as interesting as I do. I’ll end with a note that I mainly chose these photos based on their visual qualities rather than their subjects, but readers should know that some photos feature strong descriptions of violence that you may not want to read while looking at the other elements. 

 — Marc Fischer / Public Collectors