Greenfield-Sanders turned to a beautiful wooden 8” x 10” Deardorff view camera from the 1930s, fitted with a modern lens, which he used to shoot The Latino List.

In 1978, Greenfield-Sanders started shooting with an antique 11” x 14” view camera. Film for that format was discontinued around 2000 and Greenfield-Sanders turned to a beautiful wooden 8” x 10” Deardorff view camera from the 1930s, fitted with a modern lens, which he used to shoot The Latino List. The technical procedure, which weds vintage apparatus to modern technology, is relatively straightforward: first, he loads the camera with 8” x 10” color negative film—one plate at a time—and, from the only six or so shots captured in the sitting, he selects the negative he wants to print. Using a drum scanner, he generates a 600 MB scan file from the negative, which is digitally cleaned up only for dirt and spots. The scan is then printed on 44 inch wide Epson UltraSmooth paper, retaining the characteristic black borders and notches on the upper left edge that denote the 8” x 10” format.

Greenfield-Sanders on the Latino List set with Pitbull.

Greenfield-Sanders loves the look and feel of large-format photography, particularly how the technique’s typically shallow depth of field focuses attention on the sitter’s face, fostering a sense of stillness, as well as the directness and intimacy that he seeks to capture in his portraits. Apart from its technical capabilities, the physical camera itself plays an important role in Greenfield-Sanders’s work as a portraitist. Sitters are intrigued or amused by the imposing antique camera—some have asked if it belonged to (19th-century photographer) Matthew Brady! Greenfield-Sanders finds that this curiosity about the object, with its rich historical presence, goes a long way toward dissipating any tension even celebrities might feel while having their portrait taken.  So too does the fact that, unlike other photographers whose faces remain semi-hidden behind the camera, Greenfield-Sanders stands next to his.  Once the shot is framed, photographer and subject can talk face to face and develop a relaxed and personal connection, creating the mood for the right picture to happen.

iMac kiosks in The Latino List that record video reaction from visitors.

We are also super excited to see how visitors to The Latino List create their own “speaking portraits” at the exhibition’s community voice kiosk, an interactive that was such a successful part of The Black List exhibition that we knew we had to offer it again.  During The Black List visitors were invited to record on-the-spot videos of their response to the question: “How has race made an impact on your life and accomplishments?”  Videos were published to the museum’s YouTube channel and the best of them could also be viewed in the gallery during the course of the exhibition.  I was blown away by the candor, humor, pride, anger, and power in these videos.  One of the most fascinating things about the responses was their diversity and range.  Not only did each individual naturally have their own personal take on the question, but people reflected on how their own race is perceived and experienced as well as how they perceive and experience people of other races.

For The Latino List we wanted to elicit similarly inclusive and reciprocal responses, so the question we pose to visitors this time—in English and Spanish—is: “How has your culture shaped your life and accomplishments? (¿Qué impacto ha tenido su cultura en su vida y en sus logros?). The word “culture” conjures family and community traditions, and certainly one of the things that unite the stories shared by the Latino List participants is the impact and influences that family and tradition have had on their lives and identities.  The word evokes a range of concepts, from race to religion to heritage, without being  limiting or exclusionary: everyone comes from a culture of some kind, whether they abandon it or embrace it, and it shapes the way they experience the world and, to some extent, for better or worse, the way the world experiences them.

This time, we’re expanding the interactive to include not just visitors to the gallery, but anyone, anywhere, through a bilingual iPhone app.  You can record your video response directly on your iPhone, upload it to The Latino List YouTube channel, learn about the exhibition, and watch videos made by other people.

As always, we want to hear from you:  download the app, come to The Latino List, and make a video to share your thoughts about your culture and experiences.

Eugene Wemlinger. Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, ca. 1903-1910. Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.10-32.

This huge collection of more than 3500 glass and film negatives has had a pretty peripatetic life, even before its current digital excursions. So, here’s a little of the history behind this 21st century project.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 24, 1898

It seems likely that some parts of the collection are the remnants on the late 19th-century collections of the Department of Photography of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Museum’s parent organization. George Bradford Brainerd – one of the photographers represented in the glass negative collection — was a member of the Institute’s Photography Department. While the Museum itself didn’t appoint a Photography curator until 1982, we did have a photography studio charged with documenting the art collections as early as 1909. Museum photographer Herman de Wetter, hired in 1934, had curatorial aspirations and began collecting photographs, both historical and contemporary; cataloging the photograph collections already in the Museum; and organizing exhibitions. In 1953, Eye to Eye, the bulletin of the Graphic History Society of America, described nine historical photograph collections at the Brooklyn Museum.

Despite the popularity of the images – they may be seen in many mid-century publications on Brooklyn history – the Museum administration was dubious about committing to photography as part of the art collections. In 1955, shortly after the Director returned the Photography Studio to a service-only mission, the Brooklyn negatives were donated to the Brooklyn Public Library.

Negative collections, especially glass negative collections, are notoriously difficult to store, manage, and provide access to. The negatives are fragile and heavy. Without printing the negatives, it’s very difficult to actually view the images. Photographs are traditionally cataloged at the item level, a time-consuming process. Once BPL’s Brooklyn Collection had printed them (a project they took on in the 1980s), the glass negatives themselves became a burden to preserve.

Collection of glass plate negatives in Brooklyn Museum art storage area.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Photography Curator, Barbara Millstein, still saw them as a treasure, though, and instigated efforts to bring the negatives back under the Museum’s care. In 1996 this was accomplished: the negatives were trucked back up the hill, checked by Conservation staff, rehoused in archival boxes and sleeves, and catalog worksheets created.

The collection, with negatives at the Museum and reference prints at BPL, now has a joint credit line: Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection.

Prepping a negative for scanning (Lisa Adang, Digital Lab)

A recent IMLS grant allowed Digital Lab staff to convert the catalog sheets into database records in the Museum’s collections database and make a start at digitizing the images. Nearly 400 images are now on the Museum’s website and on Flickr, with more scanning underway. The beauty of the Digital Age is that it doesn’t really matter where the actual objects reside – they’re as easily accessible in Breukelen (NL) as in Brooklyn.

What now? Crowd sourcing the research needed to expand and correct the titles and place the images on the map. Bringing the data, tags, comments, and corrections full circle, back to the Museum’s collections pages. Members of the Flickr and Twitter community have been pitching in to geotag the images. People are talking, working together, and solving mysteries. Stay tuned! Research a few mysteries yourself!

Brooklyn, we can do better than that!

Historypin launches July 11 with our without Brooklyn. Let's rally BK pride to make sure the borough is well represented!

Historypin is a social sharing site meant to bridge the generation gap by encouraging its users to map historial images to modern day locations in order to show then and now comparisons and get people sharing more about history in the process.  The site has been in beta for a year or so and we’ve been interested in participating, but we didn’t have enough hands around here to take some of our most interesting materials and get them onto the map because while they have been digitized, they’ve not been geotagged.  That’s a major stumbling block and we need your help to get over this hump and ensure the borough of Brooklyn is well represented.

To get started we are going to begin a slow release of some amazing images of Brooklyn from the late 1800s to the Flickr Commons in the hopes that you can help us identify them and place them on a map.

In some cases, it will be very clear where these should be placed, but in others it will be a bit more of a mystery and require some sleuthing. Images that are geotagged by you will get placed on Historypin’s map for their launch on July 11 and we’ll be releasing more images every Tuesday and Thursday.

If you have a few minutes, help us out by mapping a few of these gems and you can continue to chart the project’s progress on our #mapBK leaderboard.  Let’s represent!

Something remarkable happens when O’Grady combines her own family portraits with ancient Egyptian imagery. Some of these juxtapositions are tender and intimate, with mood and gestures strikingly fusing family and family matters millennia apart. The work immediately became a favorite of our installation Extended Family and it merges the personal with the historic, relating beyond the Contemporary Galleries to the Museum’s world renowned collection of Egyptian Art.

Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Miscegenated Family Album, 1994. Silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) print, 32 prints each: 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Shelley and Philip E. Aarons, John and Barbara Vogelstein, and bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange, 2008.80. © Lorraine O’Grady

Miscegenated Family Album consists of sixteen pairs of black-and-white and color portraits. Each framed pair juxtaposes images of members of the artist’s family, often her sister Devonia, with images mostly portraying the Egyptian queen Nefertiti and her family. The work grew out of O’Grady’s 1980 performance, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, which took place in front of a larger series of projected images of a similar kind. Devonia died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-seven before the sisters had time to reconcile their troubled relationship. The performance was a way for the artist to mourn her dead sister, her only sibling, and work through their fraught and complex bond.

The use of Egyptian imagery came naturally to O’Grady who found a physical resemblance between her sister and the Egyptian family imagery she chose. In the same way, she found similarities in the family histories. Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjmet plays an important role in many of the pictures and the Egyptian queen disappeared from public life at an age close to Devonia’s at the time of her death. Egyptian art from this period around 1340 BC is known for its realistic and informal depictions of family life and its intimate portrayal of affection between family members. (The Brooklyn Museum has a wonderful collection of portrait reliefs from this period, including the piece called A Mother’s Kiss, which O’Grady used for her work—see below.)

Relief of Queen Nefertiti Kissing One of Her Daughters, ca. 1352-1336 B.C.E. Limestone, painted, 8 3/4 x 1 5/16 x 17 1/2 in. (22.2 x 3.4 x 44.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 60.197.8.

At the same time as the subject matter is deeply personal, through it O’Grady also addresses issues of class, racism, ethnography and African American art. The piece is also a commentary on hybridity. Born in Boston in 1934 to West Indian parents, O’Grady always approaches biculturalism in her art and acknowledges the importance of the diaspora experience for her life and work: the need to reconcile conflicting values and different backgrounds, and, as O’Grady writes, the necessity “to build a bridge to some other place.”

Miscegenated Family Album will remain on view until September 5.

Last year I blogged about a great new acquisition, Hank Willis Thomas’ “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” I am thrilled that we have now installed this series of 41 photographs on the Museum’s fifth floor. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking work and it looks spectacular in the space. It will be on view until next spring.

Hank Willis Thomas from Brooklyn Museum on Vimeo.

In this delicate group of black and white photographs, Dash Snow captures his family and extended family of friends in an intimate and unguarded fashion. In a diaristic snapshot of Chinatown at night, a young woman (Snow’s wife Jade) sits in a doorway with the stroller on the sidewalk close by. Despondent, head in hand, or just tired after a long night out (Dash forgetting the house keys, or so the story goes), the mundane snap shot is full of emotion. Another image shows the couple’s baby daughter in bed sound asleep, humorously juxtaposed with the child-unfriendly traces of a parent’s night out. The poetic rendering of Jade’s naked back bears trace of an intimate encounter and a street portrait of a friend hints at the androgynity of adolescence. A refashioned old portrait of the artist’s grandmother adds glamour to the group while an intense self-portrait shows the bearded artist in profile, the whites of his wildly gazing eyes glowing against his mud covered face. Best known for his often candid Polaroid snapshots, Dash Snow has received much attention over the past few years. An elusive graffiti tagger turned visual artist and Whitney Biennial participant, Snow is part of a tightly knit group of downtown artists who turn life into art in the manner of artists such as Nan Goldin, Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans.

Sarah Baley (American, born 1969).  Dug, 2005. From the series: Bois, 2009. Chromogenic print, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm).  Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2009.14.

Youth culture and sexuality have often influenced both fashion photography and contemporary art. The work of Sarah Baley, an emerging Brooklyn-based artist, is indebted to the confluence of interests and close dialogue between these worlds in the recent decade. Her series “Bois” is an exploration of a Brooklyn-based, lesbian community who identify as bois. Many in the group call themselves gender queer, which implies a rejection of the gender binary system and an embrace of sexuality as a sliding scale of possibilities. In Baley’s view, sexuality has become one of the few ways in which people can still express freedom. In this image, “Dug,” Baley placed her subject—staged her, dramatically lit—by the East River close to the Brooklyn Bridge. The evolving industrial urban landscape, reflected in the rapid development of Brooklyn’s waterfront, functions as a metaphor or mirror for the group’s fluid definition of sexuality and gender. This photograph will be included in an installation of contemporary art at the Museum this coming August and Sarah’s show is on view at Collette Blanchard Gallery through June 17, 2009.