"Words on Pictures"
Excerpt from Javitz, Romana, “Words on Pictures: An Address by Romana Javitz, Superintendent of the Picture Collection,” New York Public Library, Before the Massachusetts Library Association, Boston, Mass., January 28, 1943 (permission of the Massachusetts Library Association)
Excerpted by Diana Kamin
The mounting flood of pictures is permeating all of our lives, and its impact leaves deep impression on our minds. This unexploited pool of power can be tapped to produce ideas, stimulate processes of thinking and provoke action.
Libraries seem to worship the printed word as the sole conveyor of knowledge; they leave the pictorial aspects of the world to the museums. Satisfied with the power of words, they have slighted the great infiltration of pictures and left their use to commercial channels of sensationalism and advertising. Librarians should not depend on printed words alone but should utilize the printed picture as an adjunct to books. The physicist Clerk Maxwell, said “there is no more powerful method for introducing knowledge into the mind than that of presenting it in as many ways as we can.” Instead of scorning pictures, libraries should take full advantage of their power in the communication of ideas.
These pictures are not art, they are not pictures on exhibition, they are pictures at work. They are documents, momentarily cut off from their aesthetic functions to be employed for their subject content. Any picture is a document when it is being used as a source of information instead of being searched for its content of beauty.
We have inherited a tremendous mass of pictorial representations from past centuries. The camera has brought us the image of the world today and fixed a record of it for the future. Through photo-mechanical methods all of the art works of the past have been reproduced in print in countless copies. We now have a full-bodied pictorial history of man, the outer aspects of his living—the face of human events. From prehistoric times, we have the hunted exhausted bison, copied from a cave drawing; percussion instruments of Ancient China photographed from tomb figurines; the martyrdom of saints pictured in medieval prints which once were sewn into garments of pilgrims to stave off evils; we have “stills" from newsreels showing a sailor crouched against the deck expanse of an aircraft carrier, darkened by the shadow of a Zero’s flight overhead. At the moment the consideration of whether these are good art or not is secondary, the subject alone is important. These are the pictures that keep for us the appearance of the past, the visages of people and their rulers, the contour of their lands, the shape of their bread and their tools, the mechanism of war machines and the features of gods. […]
Most pictorial representation in the past and most photographs today, were made without aesthetic purpose, they were made as illustrations. The mere attempt to communicate an idea graphically should not be claimed to be art. Most pictures have as their purpose the recording of a visual experience, the rendering of the appearance of things.
While some pictures have been made solely as records, the pictures that were made for aesthetic ends may also serve a utilitarian purpose, may function at times as sources of information. All works of art mirror the world in which they were conceived, the life and the community from which the artist sprung. The artist rarely escapes reflecting his own times.
The original work of art and its printed copy are functioning as art when they bring aesthetic satisfaction. When pictures are looked at for the subject depicted, and the surface is searched for facts or appearance, then their content of beauty and design is deliberately ignored. If a painting is studied to discover the type of hair-shirt saints wore, this is an end-use wholly outside or the painting’s existence as art.
At all times there have been draughtsmen employed in the production of records of outward appearances—the shape, the color, the proportions of man and nature. They illustrated scientific writings, copied what they saw around them, and made factual drawings of newly learned facts. For example, when Leeuwenhoek made his microscope, he wrote a book describing what he saw through its lenses. To give reality to his words and convince his contemporaries, he used drawings throughout the text. These depicted for the first time a world previously unseen by human eyes. Leeuwenhoek drawings do not belong in a museum of art, logically they join books in a library as part of its organization of knowledge. […]
The story of pictures in libraries is the story of printed pictures and that is the story of the camera. Until our times it was costly and sometimes impossible to make accurate copies of art work since the printing depended upon hand methods of preliminary reproduction. With the introduction of photo-mechanical processes, pictorial publication was released and we have not yet experienced its full force. This unbridled multiplication of pictures continues ceaselessly at a gargantuan rate in newspapers, magazines, in the comic strips and through projection machines in continuity across the screen. This expanding stream carries the fixed moments of time to all of the people the literate and the illiterate, the young and the aged. […]
It is difficult to imagine ourselves without our common lifelong exposure to pictorial experiences, without the family snapshot, the Sunday rotogravure, the newsreel, the history of art illustrated with photographs; to relive a time when the appearance of individuals in the public fields of government and social reform, the famous author and the notorious criminal, was unfamiliar to all those who had never seen them face to face. When the image of the world could be fixed by light, trapped forever on a surface and then reproduced mechanically in mass duplication, we were presented with a great educational force and a rich, unlimited source of social influence. […]
Since a picture by its nature, can depict only a fixed moment of time, it has no continuity of action. Only one scene, one aspect is visible at a time and what preceded a recorded moment cannot be discerned. Pictures without labels and identification are useless as a source of information. This holds true for documentary pictures but for a work of art no addition of words is necessary in order to have the onlooker inspired and moved.
The written and spoken words amplify the meaning of pictures. Since there are no facts within the pictorial image in itself, information must be furnished to the onlooker in order to have the picture serve as a factual source. The more information the onlooker possesses, the fuller is the content and the greater the usefulness of a picture. The interpretation and the meaning of pictures is dependent on the user and on the captions. […]
When picture magazines first appeared a decade ago, the book publishers shook their heads and decided to combat this apparent threat to reading, by publishing more and more picture-books. This was a false alarm since pictures do not challenge, they add strength to, the power of printed words and actually stimulate interest in reading. Text, words, many words are necessary to fill out the rest of a pictures, to add action, and all that lies behind external appearances. Words added to pictures, likewise pictures added to words, merge into a graphic, strong medium for the transmission of ideas.
While the language of foreign peoples and vanished civilizations may be undecipherable and unintelligible, the contents of their pictorial records if still whole, are easily comprehendable. While a word takes on new connotations from generation to generation, and its meaning is soon lost, a picture remains constantly a recognizable image. This makes the pictorial language timeless in its understandability, truly without epoch it continues as a leaven in the enlightenment of the people.
The early relationship of printed pictures with libraries is bound up with the collections of illustrated books. The establishment of print rooms in larger libraries gave the first recognition to pictures as items outside the confines of a book. These collections were assembled to constitute a history of printmaking and the illustration. There, prints functioned as examples of the highest skill and as archives on the history of related techniques in the graphic arts. The prints in a library print room do not differ in purpose from those in an art museum. They are reserved for the print lover, the scholar and the artist. For informational ends, such as their subject interest, it would suffice to study copies of these prints made photo-mechanically.
Since the beginning of this century, there have been general files of printed pictures in most public libraries. Some of these grew rapidly into circulating collections of hundreds of thousands of pictorial items, notably those of the Newark and the New York public libraries. To John Cotton Dana is credited the vision which first recognized the importance of maintaining a picture service in a public library. After the publication of his guide to the classification and organization of picture collections, many libraries followed his pioneer leadership and started collections of their own.
The finest documentary picture files are not those in public libraries, but in specialized fields such as the Frick Art Reference Library in New York City and the photograph morgue of the Chicago Tribune. In one library, the Liepperheidescher Kostumebibliothek, Berlin, funds were provided for the parallel acquisition of pictorial as well as verbal documents on the history of dress.
Because of the overwhelming cost of administration and labor, most library picture collections have not received encouragement and have grown up entirely because of genuine necessity and public requests. They have had no funds, no specialized equipment, no reference tools and generally were ignored when the building was planned. As a whole the picture services of public libraries everywhere are still immature and far behind the needs of the public. This is due in part to the newness of techniques in the handling of pictorial information; to the fact that the photographic news magazine, the candid camera and the micro-film, the documentary film and the documentary still picture were all introduced and established successfully within the last fifteen years.
Undoubtedly, the use of the camera in the present war will hasten the recognition of documentary pictures as indispensable to every library, and will accelerate the founding of a national pictorial library with picture services in every community.
The use of the camera in pictorial recording and as an educational medium is still in its beginning stage; it is as revolutionary in effect as the invention of movable type in printing. We are only at the rim of a far-reaching extension of our visual knowledge, and it is impossible to envisage what this will do to books and libraries. Future pictorial libraries will probably include miniature positive prints of pictures as subject indices, documentary moving pictures such as instruction film and newsreels. Stroboscopic photographs and film in slow motion will be available for the public who will probably be able to study them in book-size individual projection devices. All kinds of pictures will be organized for research use, and for their fullest potentiality they will circulate, entering laboratories, homes, schools and studios.
Pictures organized as sources of information are as necessary to a library as dictionaries and encyclopedias. They enhance and amplify the content of the book stock, they serve the library as exhibit material with which to attract the public and stimulate interest in subjects of communal and universal importance. They help dispel the dimness of the past and animate the words of history. With pictorial data, the playwright recreates a period, an orthopedist traces the shape of hand supports on crutches; an anthropologist disproves false concepts of racial physical characteristics; a camouflage worker learns the appearance of factories from the sky; obscure scientific and technical writings are clarified for the general public.
The documentary picture collection in a library should be organized on a basis of comprehensiveness, with emphasis on the clear definition and visibility of a picture rather than its artistic content. Since these are documents, the selection by the librarian should be kept at minimum. In a library, the public selects and chooses; in a museum the staff sets up standards since it is the function of a museum to guide the public and set up what the public may see to improve their taste. The library has a different role. With the vigor of impartiality it marshals documentary pictures and through classification and editing, offers the public an impartial pictorial record of man's cultural heritage, his life and history which they may use as they see fit. […]
A picture that is a straightforward, simple statement of observation is an effective medium for the dissemination of ideas. It can be a dangerous and a benign influence; it can be the source of facts and of lies, it is an insidious source of propaganda. It is always useful for conveying messages to all of the people because it is the most specific, easily understood and cheaply available record of human living.
We can hardly comprehend the immenseness of this medium of words and pictures. The full effect of the constant infiltration of edited visual printed images is too frequently slighted by those who work with words. Pictures are an active force in education and should be harnessed to the highest purposes, to stimulate the present and succeeding generations. Pictures are essential to libraries where they should join books and serve as documents of man's own aspect and that of the changing times he has lived in.
We join with Philip Hofer 1 to say “I only believe that as illustration has been in the past, so it is, potentially in the future, a far greater means of conveying ideas, and so a greater force than the world at present conceives."
Visual records of our times seem more precious than ever before. So much of the world and its people is changing at a rapid pace, the land, the customs, and the rounds of domestic life. We look to the pictured image; it is only through this, whether by draughtsman or photographer, that the world of the future will see us, see the appearances of everything around us. Words alone are not enough, pictures visualize the form and shape of things destroyed, irrevocably altered—Wren’s towers and the streets of Madrid.
LC. Wroth, editor. History of the Printed Word (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1938): 389-446. ↩