Creating Change from Within: Building & Discovering a Diverse Archive of Documentary Arts
Essay by Lisa McCarty (PDF available upon request) | Return to Selected Writings
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Photography & Culture, July 2020, DOI:10.1080/17514517.2020.1776583
Abstract: Using the Duke University’s Archive of Documentary Arts as a case study, this paper will examine acquisition and cataloging strategies that can be applied within the structure of an existing special collections library in order to develop diverse and inclusive photography collections.
This paper will focus on the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University and the work that I undertook as curator of the collection from 2014—2019. During my time as curator I focused on collection diversity and accessibility. Within five years I tripled the representation of women and artists of color in the collection using existing internal resources. To accomplish this change in representation I developed a variety of strategies to build and discover a more diverse collection from within my former institution. My aim now is to share these strategies and provide a possible blue print that can be applied within the structure of other existing archives. I also hope to spark an examination of the usually opaque acquisition and cataloging practices that are normalized within photography archives.
In order to demonstrate the changes I implemented in the Archive of Documentary Arts, and the significance of these changes, it is first necessary to discuss the landscape of photography collection building within libraries and archives broadly. I will then discuss the history and mission of the Archive at Duke before outlining six priorities I established in order to move toward a more accessible and diverse model of collection development.
I have served as a curator, librarian, or archivist in a variety of contexts since 2003. I’ve also been a practicing photographer for the same amount of time. There are manifold options to train formally as a photographer or as an art historian focusing on photography. There are also a range of options to train as an archivist or librarian. However, I am only aware of a handful of academic programs that focus on collection management for photography archives specifically. I have friends and colleagues that have traveled each of these different paths on the way to stewarding a photography collection. But despite the different letters on our degrees, or how institutions perceive them, what we all share in common is a lack of practical preparation for the administrative labor and constraints that such positions entail. That said, there is not a clear playbook that academic programs can teach either.
Once appointed, very few curators share, or are able to share, information about collection diversity, accessibility, acquisition budgets and negotiations, donor relationships, or internal resources. Many curators, librarians, and archivists arrive on the job without knowing if they will have an acquisitions budget or complete agency to select either acquisitions or exhibitions. Contrary to popular belief, some of the most well-respected libraries and archives in the United States do not have a consistent budget for acquisitions. Many rely on gifts or funding from donors, which typically come with specific directives. However, some institutions do have collection budgets in the millions of dollars. And on either side of the spectrum, acquisitions are often opportunistic. A library or archive may have a particular focus, but if a donor comes forward to purchase or donate materials that falls outside of it, the collection focus will often shift. While such practices are usually withheld from public view, there is a significant amount of information that can and should be shared explicitly. There is an assumed need for opacity around collection management practices that does not serve artists or collection staff and also perpetuates existing inequities within the field.
At this point in time, it should be no surprise that one of the prevailing inequities in photography collections relates to collection diversity. Historically, there has been a staggering lack of representation of women artists and artists of color in photography collections of every context, internationally. This existing bias is multifaceted and structural, and also endures in museum collections. A recent study by statisticians and art historians at Williams College found that, “85.4% of the works in the collections of all major US museums belong to white artists, and 87.4% are by men. African American artists have the lowest share with just 1.2% of the works; Asian artists total at 9%; and Hispanic and Latino artists constitute only 2.8% of the artists.”1 Unfortunately there has not yet been a comprehensive study of works held by libraries or archives in the United States, but I would expect similar results.
Another inequity in photography collections relates to age and professional standing at the time an artists’ work is acquired. As I will go on to discuss later in this paper, archives and libraries often acquire works by artists after their death, at the end of their career, or only after an artist has become established in the field or has received certain professional accolades. While I believe this practice is short-sided, such a collecting rationale is far from arbitrary. For example, if a library or archive has limited funds, they might choose to collect photographs that are already thought to have historical or cultural significance. Conversely, many libraries with large budgets tend to acquire, or at least publicly promote and announce, the acquisition of works by well-known photographers whose legacies have already been secured through various publications, exhibitions, and awards. I would argue this practice ultimately leads to a kind of echo chamber within the field. And since many systems of professional validation have historically failed to recognize women artists and artists of color, acquisitions based on professional standing tend to reinforce the overall lack of diversity in photography collections.
When I accepted the position of curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University in 2014 I was aware of many of these practices and inequities, and searched for existing solutions. One bright spot was the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The Museum administers the Snider Prize, an annual purchase award of $3000.00 to, “an emerging artist in their final year of graduate study.”2 The Snider Prize is an open call award program meaning that anyone that meets the eligibility criteria can submit during a fixed time period. Photographers do not have to be invited in order to participate and do not have to be nominated or recommended. Such open calls are common within the field of photography. Many exhibition spaces, non-profits, and private granting agencies run annual open calls to identify artists for a variety of opportunities. However, it is quite rare to find museums, libraries, or archives that administer open call awards programs that result in a permanent acquisition.
I also found solutions to collection inequities within Duke. The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University has administered multiple open call awards programs since 1990 that often resulted in acquisitions by the Archive of Documentary Arts including the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize and the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize. And within the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library where I worked, many of my former colleagues sought to address a lack of diversity in their collections through other means. For example, the Sallie Bingham Center for History & Culture has prioritized collecting zines, artists books, and vernacular photograph collections such as photo albums, in addition to career-length archives by established women artists and activists, for decades. All of the curators in the Rubenstein Library, including the head of the collection development department, worked to address existing inequalities within libraries and archives broadly and within our own institution. And so, when I sought out to create new collecting and cataloging practices within the Archive of Documentary Arts I encountered a largely supportive environment in which to do so.
With this broader context in mind I will now move on to discuss the history, strengths and weaknesses of the specific collection that I stewarded at Duke University and my approach to address the inequities discussed above in this specific collection. The Archive of Documentary Arts (ADA), is one of seven dedicated collecting areas within Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. These seven areas were created in order to address research interests at the University. In the case of the ADA, it emerged as a result of the founding of an academic research center called the Center for Documentary Studies. So my own work in the ADA, and the work of my predecessors from 1991 to 2014 was linked to that of the Center for Documentary Studies. The Center’s students, faculty, and staff were my primary constituents and utilized the archive as part of their research and classes. Since 1991 the ADA has amassed a collection of over one million items that document the history of photography, filmmaking, and audio recording processes. The photography collections alone represent over three hundred individual artists and includes a wide range of formats including photobooks, photo albums, portfolios of discrete bodies of work, and career-length archives with negatives, prints, and related ephemera. The ADA is vast in scope, partly due to the opportunistic nature of the Library’s collecting activities, but also because of the ways in which faculty, staff and students at Duke have chosen to define what is under the umbrella of “documentary.”
To fully define the manifold approaches to documentary, as well as the positive and negative connotations associated with the discipline, would exceed my allotted word count. However, I can succinctly share the Center for Documentary Studies’ approach to documentary practice. Since 1989 the Center has defined their mission in the following way:
The Center is dedicated to capturing the reality of people’s diverse experiences in our complex culture. It reflects a commitment to documenting people’s daily struggles and to using varied approaches to understand the human condition.3
Or, the recently revised mission statement from 2019 reads: The Center is dedicated to documentary expression and its role in creating a more just society.4 The ADA has historically sought to collect works that reflect the Center’s mission and approach. While I am about to define several weaknesses of the ADA collections, one of its strengths is how broadly it has defined documentary. For example, vernacular photograph collections are preserved alongside portfolios of photographs by established artists. Additionally, artists books, sculptural objects, and new media formats such as computer programs were also added to the collection during my tenure without internal hesitation. However, while the ADA has been successful in collecting a wide spectrum of materials in terms of formats, it has historically struggled to live up to CDS’ stated ideal of capturing diverse experiences.
When I was first appointed as curator in 2014, I conducted a collection survey in order to better understand the scope of the collection; both its strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, the results of my survey were not surprising. The ADA’s greatest weakness has been its historic lack of diversity in terms of the artists and makers represented in the collection. My collection survey revealed that 69% of the individual photographers represented in the collection were white men from the American South, and their work was collected when they were over the age of 40. This lack of representation of women and people of color runs counter to the Library’s mission and the mission of the Center for Documentary Studies. While the Library does have significant and deep collections that document civil rights movements, the photo collections don’t reflect the true diversity of the field in terms of representation of makers or subject matter. When I was appointed curator, I was told that the ADA should aspire to be among the top repositories for documentary work in the United States. Such a claim can never truly be made without reflecting the multitude of viewpoints and communities from which work is being made in documentary practice.
After concluding the 2014 collection survey my objective as curator became clear; my intent was to make the ADA live up to its stated ideals and those of the Center for Documentary Studies. While this objective was partially inspired by statistical findings, I would like to note that I never believed that collection equity could be fully achieved through a sheer increase in collection numbers alone. I should also say that prioritizing collection diversity was not a philosophical exercise either. As curator, students particularly would write to me to request research materials representing communities they were a part of and I often couldn’t meet their needs. And in that sense the ADA was failing in its primary mission to serve students and researchers on campus.
Today the ADA still lacks work in many important areas, especially projects documenting indigenous communities in the United States. There is much more still to be done within the ADA. However, during my tenure as curator I was able to make significant increases to the number of women and people of color represented in the collection. Over the course of five years I developed six priorities in order to accomplish this change in the collection:
· Update and publicly share the ADA’s Collection Policy
· Update and Publicly Share the ADA’s Acquisitions Process
· Create an Open Call Awards Program
· Focus on Collecting Contemporary Portfolios & Photobooks
· “Rediscover” Existing Works in the Collection
· Improve Collection Accessibility Online
I will go on now to discuss each of these priorities in further detail.
My first priority was to update the collection policy with the aim of being more transparent about the ADA’s mission and priorities. In 2013 the ADA had the following public facing collection policy:
The Archive of Documentary Arts (ADA) collects, preserves, promotes and provides access to audio, moving images, photography and text from around the world.
In 2014 policy I added the following text:
The ADA is committed to diversifying its collection in order to better reflect the multitude of viewpoints and communities from which work is being made in the documentary arts today. We seek documentary works that are inclusive of a multitude of voices, generated through collaborative partnerships and grounded in extended fieldwork in an effort to preserve experiences that are underrepresented in mass media and cultural institutions.
These additions were an important first step to my overall approach. Revising such policies are often internally perceived as a requisite bureaucratic duty. However, such revisions actually became an important means to communicate the ADA’s methodology publicly.
Separate but related to the collection policy is the overall acquisitions process, which also needed significant revisions. My second priority as curator was to update and publicly share our process for acquiring works for the collection. In 2014 our publicly facing acquisitions policy implied that the majority of ADA collections came from private benefactors:
The Archive of Documentary Arts depends upon the generosity of private benefactors. We have received most of our holdings through gifts or with the support of our donors. We welcome inquiries from individuals or organizations interested in contributing to our holdings and supporting our programs.
While the ADA did receive many donations of collection materials, as curator I was also able to make significant purchases. So, again, with the aim of transparency, I created two separate pages on the ADA website to share this information. One page expressly discussed donations, both financial donations and donations of collection material. I also created a second web page focused on acquisitions where I openly stated the ADA’s ability to purchase works directly from artists and described how photographers can submit their work. I also provided my contact information on both webpages. This is notable because the contact information for many curators is often withheld from the general public.
Prior to these changes in 2015 very few of our researchers or donors knew that the Archive considered proposals from artists and had the ability to make purchases. In the 2014-2015 academic year I received acquisition proposals from a very specific referral network that included tenured faculty, established artists already in the collection, private collectors, and private photography dealers. It is also noteworthy what photographers this network chose to endorse. Over 90% of the proposals from this network recommended or endorsed portfolios and career-length archives made by white male photographers who were over the age of 40. Utilizing a public facing website to describe the acquisition process in explicit terms served to open up what was previously an echo chamber. I also invited submissions from artists via this webpage which leads me to my next curatorial priority.
My third priority was to create an “Open Call” awards program to make purchases directly from artists. Beginning in 2015, photographers from around the world were invited to submit a portfolio of completed work that would be considered for the ADA’s permanent collection. Five portfolios in five different categories were selected annually from this open call for acquisitions. The call for entries mirrored our collection policy and states the purpose of the awards. This is an excerpt from the call for entries:
The ADA is committed to diversifying its collection in order to better reflect the multitude of viewpoints and communities from which work is being made in the documentary arts today. To this end, the ADA offers the following awards to acquire new work. Selected photographers receive a $4500.00 honorarium to print a body of work which will be acquired by the ADA and added to our permanent collection.
The call goes on to list the five award categories which changed over time. In 2018 Awards were offered in the following categories:
· Award for Documentarians of the American South
· Award for Documentarians of Environmental Change
· Award for Emerging Documentarians
· Award for Documentarians of Color
· Award for Women Documentarians
I created these categories specifically to build areas of the collection that were non-existent, underrepresented, or needed drastic updating, again in response to the results of my 2014 collection survey. As a result of this open call there was a major demographic shift in terms of artists that submitted their work to the ADA. The overall age range of artists applying via the online submission portal was significantly younger. Of the twenty-one artists who were granted awards, only three were over the age of forty. Prior to the Awards program, the majority of artists were over the age of fifty when their work was collected. Additionally, the bulk of the submissions across all the categories were from women. This increase in inquiries from women is especially important to note. Prior to establishing the open call Awards program, less than 10% of the acquisition inquiries I received were either from, or sent on the behalf of, women photographers. Over 70% of the portfolios submitted via the open call system were made by women. This significant increase in acquisition inquiries from women was generated through an explicit invitation to submit work.
These purchases via the open call awards program were made with existing collection budgets. As curator I had the ability to spend a fixed amount each year on contemporary works. In previous years the majority of these funds were spent on works by artists that were privately referred to the ADA. However, by creating a public call for work I was able to see and access a more representative sample of what was going on in documentary photography in the present moment. That said, the submission process for the open call was certainly not flawless. There were just under one hundred applications in the first year of the program. While the number of women applicants was quite strong from the beginning, in the first two years of the program especially the applicants and award winners were still predominantly white. However, each year the applicant pool increased and became more diverse. I sought out more forums to advertise the open call and the winning artists contributed greatly by sharing the call within their respective networks. Additionally, the submission system was only available online and in English, so the application privileged English speakers that were also comfortable working in a digital environment. A full list of ADA Collection Award Winners and their websites are available in Table 1 at the end of this text. And all of the photographs in this article are by ADA Collection Award Winners. Unfortunately, the Awards have been suspended since my departure from the Library in 2019. And as of May 2020, a new Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts has yet to be appointed.
The Awards program was a crucial development for the ADA in its own right, however it also served to support another purpose. My fourth priority as curator which was to focus on collecting contemporary portfolios and photobooks. As I previously stated, archives often wait to collect work directly from artists until the late stages of their career or via an estate after their death. However, this normalized approach has several drawbacks. First, institutions miss the opportunity to support artists when they need it most; when they are alive and at the beginning of their career. Second, waiting to collect a career-length archive at the end of an artist’s life can put the work itself at risk. Most of the single artist archives that I evaluated for Duke had languished, unorganized and in improper environmental conditions, for decades. While the prospect of collection depth and historic significance are desirable, such collections often require substantial conservation resources and often come with a high price tag, often over six-figures. However, when an archive acquires photographs within three to five years of production, the work is usually still in excellent condition and the artist can participate in the organization and contextualization of the work. Such a practice ultimately serves to reduce the labor of archivists and conservators, and also facilitates the transfer of more accurate metadata as well. But admittedly, despite my best efforts on this front, I have also encountered many artists who aren’t willing or able to use their time to prepare their work for an archive; they would rather make new work. So, there are concessions that need to be made by both the creator and the repository. Ideally the overall acquisition process can and should be collaborative.
In addition to purchasing original contemporary photographs for the ADA, I also focused on increasing our holdings of contemporary photobooks. I frequently pre-ordered and purchased books directly from artists. Most trade editions of contemporary photobooks cost under one hundred dollars if they are purchased before they are out of print or designated as rare. By making purchases early, I was often able to avoid the secondary market. This ultimately enabled me to buy more books from a wider spectrum of artists.
Overall, this focus on the acquisition of contemporary prints and photobooks greatly improved the diversity of the collection. A single career-length archive often takes five years to negotiate, organize, conserve, and pay for. By instead focusing on acquiring photobooks and individual portfolios through the open call awards program, I was able to support many more artists and grow the collections quite quickly. The support and validation offered by an institutional acquisition also enabled many artists to keep working at crucial stages of their careers.
My fifth priority as curator of the ADA was to “rediscover” existing works in the collection. Despite my collection survey, I knew that there were more photographs and books in the ADA than I was able to identify in the Library catalog. Eventually I found that genre and format headings weren’t always applied consistently during cataloging. This is a common problem in Libraries as cataloging practices and professional standards change over the years. However, these discrepancies often prevent collection material from being discovered by both curators and researchers. For example, when I searched “photograph” and “photographs” as individual keywords in the catalog, different results appeared. This essentially means that certain materials are never discoverable even when a researcher inputs a logical keyword. The stakes get even higher for errors related to individual artists names. For example, contemporary photographer and 2017 award winner Joshua Rashaad McFadden uses his entire name in a professional context. I submitted his full name for the catalog record, but it was truncated to just his first and last name. And so, when I search the catalog using the artists’ full name, the catalog reports that there are zero results. However, when I search just by his first and last name, one result appears. I sadly wasn’t able to resolve this particular problem, and unfortunately there are others errors like this that frequently prevent researchers from discovering work that the archive actually does hold.
My sixth and final priority as curator of the ADA was to improve collection accessibility online. Knowing that the catalog is not always accurate, I decided to build comprehensive guides on the ADA website. There are now pages that enable researchers to browse the collection by media type, by subject matter, and by artist name. Ensuring that the individual names of all the artists in the collection would be recorded and findable was incredibly important to my overall mission for the ADA. This list of names supported discoverability, but it also became important in terms of representation. Many collections list “collection highlights” or foreground names of artists in the photo history canon. Emerging artists, anonymous artists, and vernacular collections are then largely undiscoverable. This perpetuates a cycle whereby a small amount of collections created by established artists are used in research, and then subsequently published, exhibited, taught and promoted. If libraries and archives only list holdings by artists recorded in photo history books or deemed popular, the canon is just re-inscribed over and over again, and never expanded.
All of the aforementioned priorities were implemented using existing funding from within the Library. While the Library was in principle very supportive of my curatorial priorities, additional resources for these efforts were not made available. That said, I did have a consistent budget for acquisitions and not all Libraries or archives do. I was also personally quite privileged to be a full-time permanent staff member during my tenure as ADA curator. My employment status was stable. That stability gave me confidence to propose big changes and institutional buy-in to implement them. I also want to reiterate that collection equity in numbers alone was not the sole challenge facing the ADA. Collection surveys are just one measure of equity. Even if I had fully equalized the representation of artists in the collection, there is still much that can be done to make the collection accessible, welcoming, and transparent in its operating practices.
Finally, this critical analysis of the ADA that I have put forth is in no way meant to diminish the work of my predecessors or the Library’s rich collections. Nor is it my intention to be self-congratulatory. The work that I undertook as curator is really just the tip of the iceberg; there is still much more work that needs to be done to ensure collection diversity and accesibility. That said, I do believe that individuals can create change from within large and seemingly immovable bureaucratic systems. I hope this case study will spark dialogue around these issues and ultimately lead to more dramatic changes within photo archives internationally.
The text was originally developed for a presentation at the 2019 Fast Forward Women in Photography conference at the Tate Modern, London
Notes:
1. Bishara, Hakim, 2019. “Artists in 18 Major US Museums are 85% White and 87% Male, Study Says.” Hyperallergic June 3. https://hyperallergic.com/501999/artists-in-18-major-us-museums-are-85-white-and-87-male-study-says/
2. Museum of Contemporary Photography. 2020. “The Snider Prize.” Museum of Contemporary Photography. Accessed May 5 2020. https://www.mocp.org/about/snider-prize.php
3. Center for Documentary Studies. 2020. “About the Center for Documentary Studies.” Center for Documentary Studies. Accessed March 12 2020. https://documentarystudies.duke.edu/about
4. Center for Documentary Studies. 2020. “Mission.” Center for Documentary Studies. Accessed March 12 2020. https://documentarystudies.duke.edu/about/mission