Images of Images
This group of images is drawn from a large collection created by my mother, Cornelia Noland Reis. Her fascination with anonymous, vernacular photography was rooted in her 1930’s childhood, a time when photography proliferated widely and held a singular, dominant role in visual communication. Later in her life in the mid-1990s, with the advent of eBay, it became Cornelia’s obsession to patiently wade through hundreds and later thousands of vernacular photographs, many of them from the United States, selecting and purchasing (for extremely modest sums) a wide swath of formal and informal images.
Cornelia had collected photographs steadily before that, often visiting flea markets and antique shops, where her omnivorous eye for the bizarre and for the foibles of human behavior took center stage. She seemed to intuitively align with Roland Barthes’s notion of punctum, the “sensory, intensely subjective effect of a photograph on a viewer”, as the scholar Séamus Kealy put it. Barthes himself stated it this way: “The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
Cornelia was drawn to a wide array of images that delivered just such an effect. She became obsessive in her acquisitions, in large part because of the sheer volume of images on offer online, many of them selling for extremely small sums of money. Over time, her NYC apartment became crowded by her growing collection, with stacks of overstuffed notebooks and boxes teeming with images of the past. It wasn’t long before she began creating organized groupings of images. If they had their original frames, they often ended up hung on the wall in compelling pairings and groupings. Most, however, were unframed, and she began to organize curated groups of them in loosely themed three-ring binders. Over time, the binders most often ended up fat and overflowing, with juxtaposed images and splashy thematic chapters. Cornelia’s eye skewed heavily towards the bizarre and ironic, and she had an uncanny knack for finding images that were, in effect, x-rays of character: subjects who were flawed, eccentric, kinky and otherwise far from ordinary.
At some point in the early 2000s I began a project that singled out certain images from her collections. I carefully re-photographed them in natural light, most often cropping and reframing them in closer detail. Among her collections, these tended to be small prints, 8x10 and smaller, that had a history, often with creases, tears, scrawled inscriptions, and general wear and tear that spoke to their having been handled repeatedly by human hands. A significant subset of them bore the markings of having been edited, sometimes with crop marks or scrawled notations written directly on them; numerous others had clumsy splashes of color that had been added by the original owner. The images I took, therefore, not only carried forward the content and character of the portrait subjects represented, but were also, in their ready acceptance and embrace of the image’s history as a photographic object, the facture that chronicled the history of each print as an object circulating in the physical world.
With this series, I fully engage with photographic prints that have, over time, acquired a history as objects circulating in the world. I enlarge them and re-work them, freely and promiscuously subjecting them to various types of digital revision meant to further enhance and dramatize what it might have been that drew my Mother to them in the first place.