Categories and collections

After I made my last post of the composite of some of the finished portraits, I was happy to find an email from Paho Mann, a talented photographer and friend of mine living in Denton, TX.

 It was no surprise that Paho liked my composite image, when you consider one of his images from a project he is finished on the recycling plant in Phoenix Arizona. You can see more of Paho Mann's work at www.pahomann.com

Paho has been making work about collections and taxonomy for many years. For me, searching through the photo archives at the Brooklyn Historical Society was one of the first times I began to consider collections as having identities greater than their individual items. Initially, I had imagined that I would search through the photographs at BHS to find a few that would intrigue me and those would become the basis of my project.  After awhile, I became more interested in the _collection_ of all these photographs. What did they say as an entirety that was different than what they communicated individually? 

 Julie May, the photo librarian, began to pull boxes containing folders of portraits from the archive for me. For instance; there are folder for portraits of identified people. These people are organized alphabetically by last name. Because these are known people, the majority of them are business men or headshots of actresses or actors. Then there are some families who have extensive albums and these are identified by the family name and contain portrait photos in photo albums. 

This experience reminded me of my favorite piece in the Whitney's 2008 Biennial. It is a film by Javier Téllez called "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See." What the film is 6 blind people speaking about their experience touching an elephant. The animal is so big that they can't comprehend it in its entirety. This is how I feel about knowing a collection. 

And now that I am no longer looking through the photographs collected at BHS, it is how I feel about sorting through the 300 portraits I made as I begin to edit them into a finished work.  

Composite

90 portraits from the roughly 242 finished portraits

In the mail

Yesterday, Helena returned to my studio after a very long and restful holiday in her home town of Miami. I caught her up with all the developments in that occurred on the project during her absence. There are about 200 4" x 6" version of the portraits I have arranged on the walls and tables in the studio. I have also created some large test prints. I explained to Helena, who was educated as a sculptor, about color balance and how I am unhappy with the color of these tests. I have days of calibrating my larger printer to try and get a more accurate and pleasing color.

Helena added portraits and notes to be mailed to Face of Brooklyn participants. She wondered if the addressed envelope looked official enough to entice people to open it right away and not discard it with the junk mail.

In the Studio

As the year has come to a close, the Face of Brooklyn project is also nearing completion.

The portraits have all been selected, adjusted, and uploaded to Flickr. Helena has emailed everyone who supplied us their email address their portrait . The final image files have been produced to meet digital archival standards and will soon be delivered to their final home at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Those of you who requested a physical copy of your portrait should expect an envelope in the mail this month.

What appears to be the ending of this project gives way to a new stage of work for me in the studio. During the last six months I have been acting as a demographer, of sorts; cataloging the people in the city parks of Brooklyn and carefully noting appropriate information about each participant. In doing so I have met the objective that spurred this project; to make a contribution to the Brooklyn Historical Society's portrait archive. In doing so, it was my intention to give pictorial representation to a larger spectrum of the borough's residents than what I original found when first combing the archive.

Now that this goal is met, I am anxious to re-assuming my role as artist by reacting to the 240 portraits that I made during this project. In a sense, the portraits I collected now serve as raw material for me to explore and react to.

2009 Update

As the year has come to a close, the Face of Brooklyn project is also nearing completion.

The portraits have all been selected, adjusted, and uploaded to Flickr. Helena has emailed everyone who supplied an email address their portrait . The final image files have been produced to meet digital archival standards and will soon be delivered to their final home at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Those of you who requested a physical copy of your portrait should expect an envelope in the mail this month.

Friends

Watching baseball game at Redhook ballfields

Friends

Ukrainian and Russian friends at Coney Island.

Friends

West Indie Day Carnival in Crown Heights

Friends

Crown Heights
These Rabbinical school students were on their way to the library.

Friends

Coney Island Bathers

Friends

Ghana On Tap, and exhibition by Nancy Borowick

Aside from helping me on Face of Brooklyn enter metadata, email participants their portraits, retouch images, and add fun and enthusiasm to the studio, Nancy Borowick has been mounting and exhibition of her photographs of Ghana to raise money to build a well in the village where she lived last fall.

The reception is tomorrow, Dec 13th from 3 to 7 PM
The exhibition is at Katonah Art and Frame Shop
188 Katonah Avenue
Katonah, new YOrk
10536

You can see more of Nancy's photographs, which burst with a touching sensitivity and joy, at her website 
Click here to donate to her charity, Ghana on Tap

Metadata

I am happy to report that each person who participated in Face of Brooklyn information supplied on the survey form has been carefully typed in, matched to their photo, and now sent to Julie May the Photography Librarian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Nancy and Helena, who have been both working as assistants,interns, and Excel mavens were instrumental in the un-ending work of carefully decoding curious handwriting,email addresses, searching for missing zipcodes, and catching my mistakes.

Julie May will translate the fields we created in excel for things like "Occupation", "How long you have lived in Brooklyn", "Age" so that each portrait file will be encoded with this information, photographers, archivist, and librarian's call this metadata.

Julie will also have to make some modifications to certain terms that people used on their forms, particularly in the free-form comment box. The Library of Congress has created a keyword thesaurus for metadata, to ensure consistency for researchers, and "Vocabulary control, identification of preferred terms, standardized spelling." You can read a bit about it here.

She will also add some more fields to include author(myself), year, location, and notes about the specifics of the Face of Brooklyn.

During the meeting I had with Julie May and Kate Fermoile last week, we discussed how the portraits collect during Face of Brooklyn would be treated and integrated into the larger collection at BHS. Thinking about the 280 (ish) portraits I took for this project filtering into the BHS collection was very exciting. The portraits will both exist as a distinct collection, "Nora Hertings' Face of Brooklyn" and seamlessly join the rest of BHS's collection. This way someone who comes to BHS to research "Coney Island", will also come across all of the portraits I made August 31st, 2008 at Coney Island. If someone is doing research about students and submits "students" into the database, the portraits of those who listed their occupation on my form as "student" will also be returned appear among the search hits.

Brooklynites: A Review in Miniature

Brooklyn is famous for lots of things, among my favorites is ADORABLE BABIES (or, "big kids" for those little ones who protest: "I'M NOT A BABY!"). As Nora's trusty apprentice, I had the glamorous job of sifting through, labeling and e-mailing thousands of photos. As I chipped away at my mountainous task I could not help but notice that every single baby I reviewed was probably the cutest baby I had ever seen. Don't believe me? Check out these Brooklyn bunnies. I will be posting new photos every couple of days, so be on the look-out! Mostly they will feature babies, but some are just kids who were way too cute to pass up. Just what is it that makes them so adorable? You tell me!

"a photo? yes, but quickly, please. i've much to do."

photoshopping around this baby's hair was quite the learning experience.

P.S.-how jealous are you of those chanel baby bunny slippers?

those hip sunglasses actually belong to the baby and were exchanged for the free ride.

"this is my new look."

--------------------------------------------

November 26th, 2008

NEW PHOTOS!

guys...

when's the last time you got to act this silly?

don't answer that.

"mom, you aren't focusing. check out that cute three year old in the pink floyd t-shirt."

Soccer at McCarren Park

This morning the official temperature in Central Park was "freezing", but looking at the final portraits from the shoot at McCarren Park on September 6ths reminds me of the sweltering humidity of an impending storm from hurricane Ike.

Brooklynites who were unphased by the weather included a number of young soccer players who had games on the field near Driggs and Lorimer.
Along with many players, was pleased to photograph Dewey and Katherine Thompson, who started the youth soccer league who were playing at the park.

Coney Island Highlights

I am happy to report that all 57 of Coney Island residents and patrons who had their portraits made have been uploaded to the Face of Brooklyn Flickr page account. To view individual pictures click here.

Appearances

I desperately wanted to take Louie's portrait as soon as I spotted him getting out of his black SUV, but I made the assumption that he wouldn't be approachable. In fact, Louie, whose car keys were attached to a "World's Greatest Dad" keychain was happy to stop and pose for me on his way to a baby shower in Prospect Park.

One for me and one for you

As an artist and photographer I am always fascinated by the impact the presence of a camera has on people. I opted not to pose or direct people for the hundreds of portraits I took for this project. Usually this was unnecessary, as we are conditioned at a very early age to behave in front of the camera a very specific way.

In early projects involving portraiture that called for me to direct my subjects much more I had a tactic for working with young subjects. I would promise them that if they let me take the picture I wanted to make I would also take a picture that they wanted to make. Usually this was called the "crazy" picture.

This group of kids, who are a some combination of siblings and cousin's and neighbors, took my description of a "serious picture" and a "crazy" picture to heart.

Crazy Picture

Crown Heights November 2, 2008

The portraits from the final Face of Brooklyn shoot at Crown Heights on November 2 are now posted to Flickr, as well as in this slideshow below.