Students Go to the Museum of City of New York

Advanced Photography Students Explore Photo Archives on the Museum of the City of New York

On Monday, January 12, the Advanced Photography Portfolio class, led by Upper School Visual Arts school Adina Scherer, visited the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). The tour provided college students an in depth have a look at a sampling of the museum’s 400,000 prints and negatives. Set in one of many museum’s giant classroom areas, college students met with curatorial workers to look at and be taught extra about its famend collections of images, from contact sheets, aged negatives, and small- and large-format prints, adopted by transient free time to view present exhibitions within the galleries. 

This area journey grew from a partnership with the museum, sparked by Jen Marrus’s management and private connection to it. Andrew Marrus, son of David Elias Marrus ’48, and his spouse Jen, generously funded the brand new Marrus Family Media Lab and Darkroom on our Dyker Heights campus. Their reward honors David’s lifelong love of images and gives Poly college students a good looking, state-of-the-art digital photograph lab and darkroom to encourage creativity for years to return.

MCNY’S Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs Offers a Closer Look at History

Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs Sean Corcoran led an oral historical past presentation to Poly college students, school, and workers. The curator shared a historic and technical view of the photographs: how the reproducibility of images after the Eighteen Nineties elevated demand for photographs in newspapers; how photographers documented poverty and concrete life and, in some instances, influenced requires public companies; how photojournalism emerged from these technological and social shifts; and the way photographers supported themselves by working for rich purchasers, newspapers, and civic initiatives. 

During the presentation, college students acquired pocket notebooks and pencils, taking notes on the curator’s walk-through of the a long time via varied assortment supplies. The group examined examples of portraiture, Harlem-era images from the Jazz Age, and documentary metropolis research that illustrated altering neighborhoods and social circumstances in NYC. Technical matters have been highlighted as properly—the look and scale of large-format contact prints, pre-flash lighting methods similar to magnesium illumination, and the distinction between early darkroom practices and later reproductions.

Sarai Dudley ’26 famous how the go to revealed the collaborative and deliberate work behind images and exhibitions. “Today we saw all the work that goes into an exhibit, not just taking a picture but the many people behind a production. We got to see how photographers used to plan everything: scouting locations, choosing the time of day, composing in-camera, instead of casually walking up and snapping a shot. Seeing that progression gave me a wider, deeper appreciation for photography.”

The go to wove immediately into the Advanced Photography course’s research. Seeing unique negatives and get in touch with sheets bolstered college students’ technical images expertise and in-class classes about movie publicity, composition, and the sequencing of photographs for a photograph essay. Large-format and get in touch with prints illustrated archival processes college students will emulate within the new darkroom when it totally opens later this yr. The curator’s dialogue of how images functioned as social proof and mass-reproducible paperwork deepened college students’ understanding of the varied journeys of photographers in NYC and their place within the altering panorama of the town’s socioeconomic and civil rights historical past. The museum go to due to this fact served each as a historic survey and as a sensible bridge between classroom instruction, darkroom apply, and the ultimate portfolio every scholar will produce.

The dialogue expanded to different influential figures together with Diane Arbus, Benedict Fernandez’s documentation of the civil rights motion and the general public response to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Danny Lyon’s activist images, and Garry Winogrand’s road work. Across these examples, curators emphasised technical decisions, similar to flattening house, framing, and scale, and the way these decisions form which means.

From Image-Making to Image Care: Photography Collection Preservation

The go to concluded with a remaining shift in focus from image-making to picture care. Students have been launched to the function of a collections supervisor and realized concerning the scope of MCNY’s holdings of roughly 750,000 objects, together with greater than 400,000 images, and the logistics of preserving such a group. Curators defined how images are organized, documented, and monitored over time, and the way conservators collaborate with collections workers when injury is recognized. Part of the dialogue highlighted the varied skilled alternatives obtainable to scholar artists, underscoring the numerous industries one could contribute to past merely working behind a digicam lens. Students requested detailed questions on documenting put on and restore, which led right into a hands-on exercise: working with duplicate images from the Words Brothers assortment, college students created mock situation stories, utilizing gentle at totally different angles to establish and document indicators of injury.

“Seeing the conservation work and the old contact prints today made me appreciate the photographs so much more,” stated Abigail Mangerson ’26. “At Poly, we scan film and can change things on a computer, but those photographers had to plan, scout, and get it right in-camera. Even the small prints show how much thought went into them; learning a photographer’s background makes even an ordinary picture feel meaningful.”

Throughout the go to, images college students linked historic practices to their very own work with large-format and born-digital prints, and to their lately accomplished large-scale collage photograph essays that mix a number of photographs and discover layered narratives of actuality and development. By partaking immediately with unique supplies and the techniques that help them, college students gained a fuller understanding of images as each a inventive apply and a disciplined craft—one which strikes from necessity to expression, from digicam to print, and in the end into the archive.