^B00:00:00 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> Andrew Robb: Hi, I'm Andrew Robb. I'm section head for special format conservation here at the library and I'm filling in for Archie Felmer Useman [assumed spelling] who couldn't be here this afternoon; he sends his regrets. But let me introduce our speaker for the 79th lecture in our topics in preservation series. Paul Messier is our speaker and his innovations in the field of conservation are noteworthy: the formation of a reference collection of photographic papers and related project regarding the development of the texture scope, topics that Paul discussed here in 2010 and are available on our series of webcasts on the preservation website. Along with these accomplishments, for many years Paul was principle of the successful photograph conservation practice Paul Messier LLC specializing in the treatment and characterization of 19th and 20th century photography especially the characterization of the photographs of Louis Hein and Menrey. I'd also say that along with his work in that practice he's trained a number of people many of whom are here and on the webcast and I know they're all appreciative of his efforts in that regard too. Well, this practice is still strong and on-going. In 2015, Paul was appointed head of the Lens Media Lab, a start up to this part of the Institute for the preservation of cultural heritage at Yale University. His talk today, Expressive Dimensions Of Photographic Papers is another chapter of Paul's work to better understand the materials used by photographers so that we can better interpret them and care for them. Paul Messier. ^M00:01:53 [ Audience Clapping ] ^M00:01:59 >> Paul Messier: Thanks Andrew and thanks to everybody for showing up. It's really nice to see somebody familiar faces, it's great, great to be here. So let's get started, okay. Without any fooling around, this is one of my favorite things in the world. This is a gaverit sample book of photographic papers from the mid-1930s. I'm just going to play around these a little bit and you get the sense of why this is just so cool. You know, and when you look at this, is just like unnecessary greatness. I mean how many surfaces is that 38, 36. No, well I can't count right now, somebody can do 4 times 9 minus 2. >> Thirty seven. >> Paul Messier: Thirty seven, no, it is not an odd number. ^M00:02:56 [ Laughter and background discussion ] ^M00:02:59 >> Thirty four. >> Paul Messier: Thirty four, okay, class dismissed, let's go, let's, I'm done. Yeah, okay, that is very good Andrew. So, yeah, I mean why does any company need so many surfaces of black and white paper? What's going on here? And I think, you know, we, the black and white medium that we have received in the 21st century, what's left of it is this kind of dim echo of this amazing diversity that was, that existed for much of the century and you know, this is sort of a microcosm of what was available. This is one company's paper selection for one year, if you multiply this by five or eight, you know, international companies, big corporations like Kodak and Ilford and Agfa and many other smaller companies, you get a sense of how rich the medium of black-and-white silver gelatin whatever you want to call photography is, and it became important to me to try to catalog, to try to understand this diversity and try to understand what was going on, what was promoting this, why did they need so many surfaces, what did that represent? And one of the ways that I settled on in terms of trying to get a handle on all of this is just really looking closely at a package of paper and on the package of paper is pretty much all you really need to know about one aspect of characterization, one aspect of how to characterize a photographic paper and let's see if I can get this to work yeah, okay. So what we're looking at here is basically four dimensions that the manufacturers were trying to convey to photographers and that photographers were fluent in at the time. So here are the four dimensions. What's the base color? What color is the base? In this instance it's ivory white. What's the texture and what's the gloss? Here we have one word per color which refers to both texture and gloss, if you know per color is a fabric, it's a tightly woven I think cotton fabric with the satiny lustery finish so both a texture and a gloss. And then what's the base, what's the support, how fit is it really? I mean that's basically all that is. How much of an assertive physical presence does the material have and so this is, you know, this is a kind of carton, it is, you know, it's a thicker support. So here we have the four dimensions that as I say there was a real fluency in these four dimensions that I think, you know, we don't actually perceive so much anymore in terms of contemporary black and white papers. I did a project in 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art. My research was really focused on well can I make, can make those four dimensions relevant in a contemporary context where they are useful for anything when it comes to classification, characterization of photographic materials. And so, you know, this is one of the prints that I was looking at was this Helmar Lerski in the MOMA collection. And so here are the four dimensions and then the first three are actually really pretty easy to measure. Thickness, well, you just get a micrometer, gloss, you get a gloss meter and this is all pretty conventional stuff. Color spectrophotometer and what I'm measuring or what I'm representing here is just how yellow it is, how far along on this B axis in the LAP color space is it. So it's 5.7 okay, great. Texture was a problem and we convened a group of signal processing engineers and we asked them to look at texture images to try to back out some numbers to help us classify paper texture. So we settled on a method that kind of centered on a two-dimensional raking light image of the surface of a photographic paper. Represented here is about six and half millimetre square and so we took images like this and we had four different signal processing teams and they came up with four different algorithms for classifying these kinds of images. One of them does what I would do if I knew anything about signal processing, I mean the difference is, mine is in my head and there's actually works. It's based on using the brightness of the pixels as a proxy for height. So the brighter the pixel the higher the surface, the darker the pixel the lower the surface and when you do that you can conceive of an image, a two-dimensional image in a really a three-dimensional way. And this is all false and rendered but you see what's going on here. So you can take that pseudo-topography let's call it and then you can start breaking it down and backing out some numbers and, you know, now we have these fractals. We basically cast the net over our surface and we have different mesh dimensions. We can cast a really wide net or really narrow net and that becomes a classification scheme, so we can back out some numbers now. So this is amazing, just wait for it texture, okay? Yes, I mean 4.9 scale one pseudo-area scale fractal analysis, okay, I know what a millimeter is, you know, and I kind of can see what a gloss unit is, although that's pretty abstract but I'm not, you know, so these numbers, well, they're are important. They're almost, they're non-nutritive, it doesn't convey the information that I really needed to convey. So I started to think about how we can make put those numbers into context and as some you may know I've, you know, I've been obsessively collecting photographic papers for a long time. And I have like around 6000 and I was so glad to see Laurene [assumed spelling] here because Laurene Vargo [assumed spelling] was in my studio at the start of this collecting and she did a lot of the initial cataloging on this collection. ^M00:10:07 And this collection is come with me to Yale and it's really the foundation of the work at least in the initial phases of the Lens Media Lab. So let's just call this the genome and so let's put those numbers into context of the genome. How can we, you know, what do we learn when we compare the numbers for a particular print to, you know, 6000 or so photographic papers, that gives us the context that we need. And so we can take this or here's an example of that. This is like a really easy example to understand I think. There's a few thousand thickness measurements here from the collection and you can see, you know, it's intrinsically valuable information. I mean you can see, you know, there's breakout of single weight papers as single weight was actually thinner before 1930 and then it got a little thicker after 1930. Double weight, you know, you can see the range of double weight, you can see after 1980, you know, when the industry is sort of beginning to collapse and consolidate. You see a collapsing consolidation of single and double weight into this sort of mushy medium way kind of thing. Okay, that's interesting in and of itself but if you put the Lerski in here which measures at one, you know, about 0.17 or so millimeters thick. You can see it's right in the heart of single weight papers but you can also kind of intuitively see that, you know, there is about fifteen percent papers that are thinner and about eighty five percent papers that are thicker. And so using that, you know, as a strategy we can put these numbers into a better context, we can replace all of that with just really kind of simple visualizations and that's just based on a percentile. So for the Lerski, you know, like I said about fifteen percent of papers are thinner so that's the fifteen percent about eighty five are thicker. Gloss it's a pretty matte paper, is a lot of papers that are glossier. Color is right in the middle between kind of neutral like bluish white and warm white with stripes it splits the difference in texture it's got a lot of texture. Alright, well, that's great. So, you know, how can we really use this information? How can we better use this information? I'm all about, you know, trying to, you know; visualize these things into as intuitively as possible. And So this is a step in the direction. If you've got any great ideas about how to visualize this data and make it more accessible I would love to here it. So I arrange those four axes like this and I put kind of the more expressive dimensions, the rougher papers, the thicker papers, the more matte papers, the more warm papers. I've oriented them to the outside of this kind of but going to become this glyph. Here's the Lerski data plotted and I want to clean it up a little bit and that. So that is my, well, it's a glyph; it's a thumbprint that stands in for the material characteristics of this photographic paper. And so it gives me a really quick visual reference of what, not what this image is but what this material is so, okay. So how do you use that? How can that be useful to us? I think we're going to go back to my favorite thing and we're going to look at two papers. This is called Large X [assumed spelling]; I think that's right and this is called Doug Divalux Velore [assumed spelling]. And so Large X on the left and Divalux Velore on the right and you can see Doug Divalux is plotted in the sort of glyph right at the edges of the universe of expressive possibilities. It's got more texture, it's thicker, it's more matte, it's warmer than any of the papers, most of the papers by far most of the papers in the collection that I've measured. And this was a deluxe paper, this was a paper designed for highly expressive self-realized photographic artists, it was incredibly expensive, it was the most and they were proud of it. It's the most expensive photographic paper of the time. They called it the most beautiful photographic paper, no; they called it the most beautiful paper ever manufactured. Didn't call it the most beautiful photographic paper; the most beautiful paper ever manufactured. It was sold in very few contrast grades, you had to know what you're doing, you had to have a good negative to print with this. On the other hand large X [assumed spelling] which occupies the sort of inside of this universe of possibilities, this is, you know, the faster they come to better you'll like it. What they're talking about is photofinishing, this is a paper made for commercial photo finishers. It's the ideal rapid photofinishing paper, this was sold, yes, you could buy sheets but more commonly you would buy roles of this stuff. It was about five times less expensive than Divalux and so what you have here is this the two ends of the spectrum for that particular year of Divalux paper... of gaveric papers, you know. This for one segment of the market and for one very specific sort of expressive intent and this on the opposite. And you know, I like to think about numbers I guess but I also like to think about words and semantic meaning. And so here are the two paper side-by-side, two advertisements from the period and I'm just overlay some words and in these words I think convey the meaning of the, you know, the inside of that glyph, the small one is when that glyph is really small and tight and centered in the focus. You're talking about an object that speaks objectively, it's a document, it's real and you can compare like this list of words, you know, I like some of these things, it's cerebral, you know, to and I made all this up by the way. This is not like, you know, any sort of orthodoxy here, I mean, you can make up your own. So for objective purposes, to convey information versus subjective, to convey a high level of discernment, this is for straight photography, this is more skewed, this is functionalist, this indulgent, this is utilitarian, this is art. You know, you can kind of actually when you think about expressive dimensions of photographic paper, you can actually think about expressive dimensions of like a chair, you know. I think, you know, I could go to work for IKEA now with this and put like this into their catalog like, where do you fall on the expressive versus functional dimension, you know, for this chair or this picture whatever. This is very functional, utilitarian, it's straight, it's not skewed, it's utilitarian, it's not art; I don't know about cerebral, anyway. So you get the point, right? I just happened to be running around yesterday and came upon Kathy Mitty's project here and she's got this great project and she's working with Adrian Lundgren on it to look at technical manuals and catalog photographs, you know. Actual photographs to get put into these manuals and it's an amazing project and it's just, you know, explodes the idea of, well, it explodes, it really renders very clear how diverse the medium is and how, you know, you think of these categories of prints, an albumin print, platinum printing and yes that's really a good basis for understanding the medium but you don't know anything until you've seen this amazing, you know, real-time invention of these different processes, anyway. So this caught my eye and, you know, what textured thin textured surface combination do you prefer and so it's, you know, I kind of did make some other stuff up, but a lot of it really comes right straight out of the vocabulary, the language of the medium and I love this, you know. At different times with different jobs your preference may run to this base, that base, this texture, that texture, that gloss, this gloss. Shuffle and reshuffle these characteristics into every desirable combination [inaudible] you know, first okay blah blah, you know, okay and then it's really great, you know, range. So, you know, these things worked in combination for very specific purposes and intentions that photographers were trying to convey and the manufacturers knew it and the photographer's knew it. ^M00:20:15 Just back to this project at MOMA for a second. How can we, you know, the idea here is to characterize papers, yes, but to what end and I'm always trying to think of, well, you know, what is sort of utilitarian end of this kind of this work. And so this was one proof of concept that we were working on. Here are MOMA prints on the left column. So these are MOMA prints and they're both to scale. On the right is our prints at the Museum of fine arts in Houston. And what we're doing is, what I was doing is comparing across these collections the materials of the photographer across these two different collections and the prints were never side-by-side. We just went and we measured the four expressive dimensions to see if we could get some information out. And so here's the Lerski again on the left and here is its glyph, it's thumbprint and on the right is the MFA Lerski and we see based on the measurements that, you know, it's very similar in terms of gloss for sure and it's similar in terms of base color but it's got a much smoother texture and is actually really a thick paper. So who knows? We don't know if this may be, you know, they were made at different times but what we do know is that the materials are fundamentally different across these two identical looking images. Same with this, I mean it's very different conception from that negative, very different composition from that negative and fundamentally a very different paper. And this one is kind of the opposite case, it's very different in terms of its composition, its conception but on an identical photographic paper so maybe these two share a provenance. So again if you know the provenance of one of these maybe you can actually when it was made, how it was made, why it was made, maybe you can actually apply it to this object as well. So this starts to open up, you know, some other avenues of scholarship when it comes to understanding and contextualizing photographic papers or photographs not just photographic papers, photographs that's what I'm talking about. We're doing a great project now on Moholy photograms with my friends and colleagues at the Art Institute - Silvi Penichau and Christel Low. And so we're looking at about 250 photograms in different collections. I think that's the right number and, you know, it's really fascinating in terms of potential. When you go from this to this, these are all the different glyphs for the collection and you know, if you're like me, you want to start sorting these right away. Let's figure out what's the same ones, what's the different ones, what's going on and so that's the next, you know, when I come back here in four years. The last talk I gave you was four years ago I think, you know, I'll have some statistical methods and some visualization tools to actually sort this out. In fact, I hope to have the statistics, you know, the ways to model this statistically figured out really soon, that's kind of the next step on this work is how does these things cluster, and what is that tell us about Moholy's approach at different time periods of his career if anything, I think it will actually reveal a lot. And so the expressive dimensions are, you know, I'm talking about these four expressive dimensions and I think of course there are many more. You can add different axes to that glyph depending on what you need. Here's a proposed, you know, additional axis perhaps. We went back, this was work that Jennifer McGlychi [assumed spelling] who was in my studio for a number years did and she just went back to the collection and a lot of manufacturer sample books and price lists and encyclopedias and just pulled out what dimensions photographic paper was sold in and it's a huge diversity of dimensions, big, small all over the place. But if you boil it all down it comes out I think this adds up to what is a set up to fifty back to Math, Andrew [inaudible]. Fifty, what is this, thirty nine plus fifty is eighty nine, okay. Almost ninety percent of the things that we looked at boiled down to these five different aspect ratios which I think, this is fascinating and I don't know what this tells us about humans and aesthetics and all of that. But it's amazing that the four, three ratio was used as a whole plate daguerreotype but also for the iPad, I mean Steve Jobs could make the iPad any dimensions he wanted to but why did he do four, three and you know, how did that work? Maybe because he watched a lot of TV or something I don't know, you know, because it was LA TV as well was the four, three dimension. Who knows, but we can put this information to work as well in terms of interpreting photography or photographs or photographers. Here's an example, on the left again these are to scale, on the left is the Man Ray, Ray graph from 1924; on the right, a Moholy from around the same period. Just measure it and I measured a bunch, I probably measured, not sure now, maybe forty, thirty Man Ray, Ray graphs and about forty four percent come out to the standard sizes, okay, you know, whatever. But if you look at Moholy, about ninty percent are these standard sizes and so the bookmaking photograms around the same period but right away we can see instantly from this very simple metric their methodologies and their intentions were incredibly different. Moholy is composing to the sheet, you know, photograms are really a performance piece right, there you placing objects, you putting on the [inaudible] and it's a record of that performance. From Moholy, the performance is finished when it goes into the developer and the printers' drive, that's it. For Man Ray, most of the time, the final part of the performance is he's trimming the print and we know this because they're nonstandard sizes, they don't fit into these standard sizes, the standard aspect ratios. And so Man Ray is trimming, he's refining that vision, he's making a refinement to that performance as his last before he it's finished. I get some criticism, you know, well, I don't no maybe it's just all in my head, sometimes, I have a lot of things that way, you know, somewhat paranoid. I have some trouble talking to curators about this at times because they think, I don't know, maybe I'm misreading the situation but they thinking that this is just really a formalist exercise where it's devoid of context and what I'm trying to say here is it's all about context. If I don't have the universe to compare the measurements to, then the measurements mean very little. It's always, the measurements are always in comparison to a larger body of numbers that represent the media. So to me it's all about context but I think I can maybe make that point better talking about a project that I'm working on at the Guggenheim right now looking at Mapplethorpe prints and we're specifically looking at the prints, the platinum palladium prints made in the later years of his life. This is one of those prints made in 1988. Mapplethorpe dies in 89, he's diagnosed with AIDS in 86 and if you didn't know that contexts you could perceive something is up just by looking at this data, okay? And so here's that Mapplethorpe print and all this really is is every print that we've looked at going horizontally and then the same prints going vertically and so we're comparing each, the texture of each print to each other and that's what this little chart is all about. We don't need to know exactly what's going on here except what you do need to notice or what I would like you to notice is we've got two really distinct clusters and so the prints themselves are giving you context. ^M00:30:11 The measurements made from the prints themselves suffice something is going on in 1986, this breakpoint here. And, you know, what's happening and I've got the data to support it and make him, I can talk more about it, you know, question answer but you know. He's making actually substantially more expressive photographs after 1986 and so the interpretation, I think many interpretations could be supported here, but of course if you combine that with the image and the fact that as platinum and palladium very permanent noble metals. You know, he's thinking about legacy, you know, the formal frontal composition but yeah but look at the paper with this wild ductile edge. The paper I'm sure Mapplethorpe had no idea but the paper is about if I get it right it's like eighty five percent cotton and about fifteen percent linen. It's made by the Ashes Mill; one of the oldest mills founded in 1492 as a matter of fact, funny how I can remember that. It's incredibly traditional paper; it's got this amazing texture. Back to the fibers for a second, I didn't finish that point. That fiber composition is more of a traditional fiber composition from it of a sheet made in the 18th, 17th century, you know, I think it's got more of this print has probably more in common with, you know, a Dürer Van Stieglitz and it goes beyond the possibilities of silver gelatin, it's way beyond. So he's pushing past all of that and to me I think that's profound. I think that's incredibly useful information to be able to document that and to actually be able to effectively communicate that and to share that which is what this characterization agenda is really all about. It's giving us tools to communicate the intrinsic value of the materials of the photographer. And so that's all I have and I would love to take some questions and thanks for your attention. ^M00:33:02 [ Audience Clapping ] ^M00:33:12 Yeah. Please. >> [Inaudible] terminology and tone, paper tones [inaudible] give that a lot and how you describe paper tone and how you measure paper tone and I'm curious about your idea [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Yeah >> [Inaudible] influences. >> Paul Messier: Great. >> [Inaudible] that affect your classification [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: So, yeah, okay, so I am repeating the question for because it is webcast, right? Yeah, okay. ^M00:33:47:12 So let me see if I got the summary right. So when paper ages it yellows. And so how does that impact the classification scheme and that's a really good question and, you know, that questions like that used to bother me a lot because it's like "Ugh, that wrecks everything", you know, because we never know like what it was originally and now it's this but now I just feel go with it because this was A, there's nothing I can do about it but be I think it's information and I think it's fascinating to think about photographs and we all know this, we all know this becoming more expressive as they age. I mean sometimes they don't age in an expressive way but as, you know, as a Stieglitz, as a Madadi gains tone, gains some paper tone, it becomes this more expressive object. And so I just don't, I just try not to get in the way of that and I just try to document that but yeah I mean it's, I could really dwell on that and it could be a real conceptual flaw. If you think about gloss, gloss is also one of those dimensions that can change fora photographic paper specially depending on treatment. Treatment completely alters the color as well but, you know, texture we've done some experiments in texture really seems to hold up and is pretty robust. And thickness really holds up too over time, that's pretty robust and so when it comes to this sort of the statistical analysis of all of these glyphs, I'm thinking of making kind of set points for things that don't tend to move. So in giving them additional weight in the statistic in any sort of future statistical model, does that makes sense? Those becomes sort of the, you know, keystones when it comes to, that are first considered for clustering, yeah. Please. >> You talk about looking at paper in a photographic context in comparison say [inaudible] and other kind of print making. Are there similar analysis or descriptions [inaudible] out there. >> Paul Messier: So the question is are there similar characterization model set up for other printmaking media like [inaudible] prints, lithographs and all of that. I mean not that I know of but I mean after today, I'm inviting everyone up there to like go back and think about, you know, your media and maybe think about it in terms of expressive dimensions. I think that model could work, I gave this talk or a version of this talk at the Reichs Museum last year and a painting's conservator came up to me afterwards and said panel paintings I think this will work great on panel paintings. And frankly I have no idea how you would make that work on panel paintings but she did and I think that's awesome like I said I think you could do it for, you know, IKEA chairs, I think you could do it for all kinds of stuff. So yeah, it would make a lot of sense to start looking at printmaking, traditional printmaking media and actually that's kind of something that is very interesting to me. Is putting photography in a larger context of, you know, photography didn't come out of the ether. Photography is a graphic arts medium and putting it into context with more traditional printmaking media is a very appealing notion. Please, yeah. >> I really appreciate how you've applied this system thinking to analysis of the characteristics [inaudible] photographs. I actually have come up with the characterisation scheme for [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Oh fantastic, okay. >> I can [inaudible] and [inaudible]. My question is so when you have characterized these artists' print, do you find in their writings that their writings actually corroborates your aesthetics interpretation on the data you have been able to derive from your analysis? >> Paul Messier: Okay, so the question is, is there documentary evidence within an artist journals or writings that, tell me if I'm right here, that will correlate. >> Yeah. >> Paul Messier: With the interpretation or the characterization scheme that I'm coming up with and the short answer to that is I don't know. I've not really gone down that road and I think that's actually a really important, a really important thing to do actually, you know, yeah. It gives me some ideas actually, yeah, that would be a valuable thing. Is that something that you've been able to do like compare what an artist is, you know, saying about their work in what you're finding? >> With regards to the printmakers who made wood cuts, they didn't really write about their aesthetics. They are a couple of sources that talk about how to make wood cuts but in terms of the final characteristics and differentiation of specific workshops and your outputs [inaudible] at that time [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, is not a lot of. ^M00:40:12 >> Paul Messier: They weren't writing. >> About their aesthetic [inaudible] >> Paul Messier: Yeah. >> In that way. >> Paul Messier: Can I? >> Unfortunately, no. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. >> But I was just wondering if there is a line between your [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: I'm sure there is a line, well, lines up in some instances and supports everything I'm doing and I'm sure that there is like a lot that contradict it entirely, you know, if I started looking. I am sure it doesn't, it's probably not as tidy a scenario, you know. I mean it's funny and I mean I don't know if this goes to your point but, you know, I'm talking about papers here and I'm not really and I'm. So I just want, let's see, what am I trying to say? Hmm, I mean you can make an expressive photograph on a non-expressive paper, you know what I mean? And so that can be part of the artistic intent as well. So I'm thinking like a Bressei a [inaudible]. I saw a beautiful Bressei at the Art Institute last week. It's, you know, you can lose yourself in the deep inky amazing blacks of a Bressei, and he's photographing Paris at night primarily and he's using a very non-expressive paper in a very expressive way and it's highly ferrotyped. The optical saturation of those blacks is amazing, they're thin, you know, it's and it's almost, it kind of reveals the conceit of a surrealist or a dotteist or a surrealist primarily photograph is the conceit is they're using up a non-expressive paper to convey information. But it's of a skewed reality and if they used expressive paper would be too interpretive and it would be useless but what's communicated by the paper is this is information, subliminal, you know, this is what, this is information, this is real world and it's the dream work. So, you know, I think a lot about that those kinds of things and I probably should start integrating more to round that out, starting integrating more about what photographers are thinking and saying and talking about their work. >> I think it would be again a fascinating branch of your study but your work is just absolute [inaudible] classifications for all kinds of graphic work and analyzing all kinds of graphic work. >> Paul Messier: Great and not just IKEA chairs. Yeah. >> Andrew Robb: Just want to come in to follow up on [inaudible] Okay. >> Andrew Robb: This is to say, I think photographers are often describing papers that they like, or they're sad, if they don't have that paper anymore, you know, often in their writing but. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, yeah. >> Andrew Robb: Oh I really like the paper but they can't get in anymore and what you're doing in a way is figuring out a way to objectify that description so when they say that. >> Paul Messier: Yeah >> Andrew Robb: that what they need >> Paul Messier: Yeah, yeah. >> Andrew Robb: and they say that this is the model to say well there sad about this kind of paper which is very hard to know exactly what they're talking about, you kind of know little bit but this is a way to make that put it in context to say what do you, like why are they sad like you, they like that. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. >> Andrew Robb: So that. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. >> Andrew Robb: The time back, that's the way that often they are viewing that doing that in many cases, it's an aside, it's not, you know, a tome. But this is the way to unravel what they're getting at. And I think that would be, you'll find examples of that, you know, in a way [inaudible] doctors had in articles they write but it might be in a more shorthand way. It might not be in the using that terminology that will exist. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, so please, we will go left to right, okay? ^M00:44:21:27 Well, my left. >> This is a followup to Andrew's question so about your paper library. Have you been, you know, collecting, I know that a lot of papers recently have just did start up in the last, you know, five to ten years. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. Yeah. >> [Inaudible] papers are no longer available so have you been kind of collecting samples of this at your library so that you have that as, you know, a dictionary for [inaudible]the lack of a better word. >> Catalog or pictures [inaudible] artists you know, practicing now or within the last twenty years, in fifty years when we go back and look at their work so that we have a standard to compare them. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, so the question to summarize is in my collecting contemporary black and white materials within the context of the gradual disappearance of the medium, I guess instead of. >> Yeah. >> Paul Messier: Fair summary something like that. You know and the answer is yes but I'm, you know, it's really, yeah, I mean the answer is yes but as I'm not getting everything and it's kind of frustrating, and one of the projects that I would really like to do is to to figure out a way to make the catalog and the collection much more accessible in hopes of bringing out, surfacing other collections. And maybe giving sending the message out that hey, you know, there's a crazy guy up at Yale who will take this stuff, don't throw it away, you know, when you're going. So, yeah, I mean it's kind of frustrating because it is just slipping through our fingers but I mean, you know, the fundamental purpose of the collection always was, yes, to make a data set. I have never had like sort of antiquarian sort of interests, but then it started to grow on me and so then. So now it's, you know, I really do feel like maybe in the end my biggest contribution is not any of this stuff. It's just buying a lot of stuff on eBay and cataloging it and sticking it in cold storage at a major research university, you know, yeah. >> It's kind of seems like a natural match with, you know, archivist and librarians to kind of maybe reach out to some of them and say, hey, you know, you work with the department, and you know, your school or your university or you work with yjos group of artists as you see them transition more and more deep, you know. Do you have this and to figure out someway in collaborating on that. I don't know what it will be your, how that will work but it seems like that will be your [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. And so it's just to summarize that comment. I think that's an important one is, well, I don't know I'm not summarizing you comment. I'm making a comment to your comment, which is, you know, absolutely building a network to collaborate and share this kind of information. I may think about it, you know, that's kind of one of my visions and one of my ambitions for the Lens Media Lab is to make not just these glyphs available or these statistical methods. To make really an interface, you know, to put it all online and to link different collections together. And so when you do, when you have a print that you want to know more about that you can at least make a query about what other materials are out there like this across different artists within different time periods. Imagine what amazing and fairly simple tool to enhance existing scholarship that would be and what's great about that for me as a conservator is it really pushes forward the relevance of materials. You know, which sometimes get lost in the mix when it comes to interpreting photographs. Sorry, yeah. >> To follow, I'm amplifying what Andres is bring up as well, I was reading about just recently is about the Art of the book in Europe in 1939 [inaudible] 49, published in 1951 but the sentiment in it is still very real about the politics of choice and reviewing what was able to done in the face of incredible destruction available in terms of machines and [inaudible] destroy it. So I think for, you know, another useful layer, it's just my comments and not really a question but another useful layer is the transition of the person, the maker and where they were in time what they could do, you know, what they [inaudible], what they are sending. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. >> Materials to some where they can be retrieve it. I am always impressed you always state negatively. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Because we have to take that out. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I mean it is, oh sorry Mary. Oh I can go, I can talk more. >> Did you want to keep some of the point? >> Paul Messier: I can. So context, I think was the underlying point there and understanding context, historical context in this instance. And we're talking about, you know, the incredible destruction about to be unleashed on Europe in the 30s and how that influenced choice. ^M00:50:10 And, you know, you see that very clearly if you look at Man Ray. I think, you know, in the teens, you know, he, I think he was a brilliant artist but he couldn't make a pictorialist photograph to save his life and he didn't want to because it was irrelevant to him, you know. After World War I in Dada, you know, as a Dadaist. You couldn't make a beautiful, it didn't seem relevant, that didn't seem, it had to be manufactured, it had to look objective, it had to, you know, back to my synonyms and antonyms. It had to be real, it couldn't be arty or interpreted, it didn't make sense in that context anymore after the First World War. So, you know, it's all in there, right? >> There's a question. >> Paul Messier: There is a question. >> Yeah. >> Paul Messier: From online? >> Yeah. >> Paul Messier: Oh fantastic. >> Have you considered how image material affects texture with platinum prints? >> Paul Messier: Have I considered whether image material impacts texture when it comes to platinum prints? So image material I'm guessing would be the platinum or the palladium, that's the stuff that's making the image and how that impacts texture. I think the fair answer is, no, I think this person has something in mind that I don't have in mind and I probably should have in mind to be honest. Because, yeah, I mean all these things combine right, to take, to look at something in exclusion is probably a little artificial on my part. Is it a follow-up like you missed the point. >> No [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Right. >> [Inaudible] there is another question [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Yeah, sure another, sure. >> Could you speak a bit more about process for measuring each algorithm? Are texture measurement taken from [inaudible] given that image could mute texture. >> Paul Messier: Ah, image can mute texture. Okay so, yeah, I mean, okay. So what I've presented is kind of a condensed version of what I'm often doing. And so I do make texture measurements from recto and verso often when I can get access to the verso, often you cannot. Again, I'm thinking about statistics-based classification schemes even though it doesn't exist right now and hopefully it will. Hopefully, I'll be able to build it, more information for the statistical models to chew on is probably is better right now. But, you know, what I'm really thinking about mostly and what I'm really focused on mostly is artistic intention and I'm really thinking about characteristics that artists and we all in this room can see and perceive. ^M00:53:27:18 So, you know, or having more information is always better, I'm really focused on perceptual qualities if that makes any sense at all. Okay, well I have just broken the Internet and so any other questions? Okay. >> I think going back to what you were talking about perceptual qualities, I was thinking about all these [inaudible] very useful especially when you're looking at online. >> Paul Messier: Yeah. Absolutely. >> You can actually either see these kinds of textural characteristics. >> Paul Messier: Absolutely. >> You know, now, [inaudible] a lot of research that way but you can't immedoiately have access to the original [inaudible]. >> Paul Messier: Absolutely. >> It's extremely invaluable. ^M00:54:21:12 >> Paul Messier: Yeah, I hope Google is listening because yeah, I mean that's actually I mean so the question the comment was how if you're doing online access, online research, you're doing research online you're presented with an image but you have almost no information about the material and how these little glyphs if it became kind of a convention would really help tremendously and very simply communicate some essential physical properties. Yeah, absolutely and that's a big part of the agenda is to kind of get maybe try to, you know, develop this so it becomes really conventional. And so when you're cataloging a collection and by the way the other part when it comes to like, are you doing the back, are you doing the front, are you doing image, are you doing all of that? Yes, and I understand in many instances why that's valuable but to be honest really I'm all about high levels of throughput. I want a lot of data; I want a lot of photographs to be characterized at this level. So if before, you know, to get that kind of buy-in, you can't say we'll do the XRF of the highlights that, that's really important to do on a case-by-case basis. But I think these statistical modeling in these glyphs and all of that, what that can do is help surface issues that may be do merit this really tightly focused narrow throw the kitchen sink at it research agenda like, wait, this is an anomaly. We need to figure out what's going on here and so that's when you do the XRF in the [inaudible] and the fiber analysis and all of that, or here's a big band of things that are of the same and we know nothing about it. So let's take us a few samples from within that band of sameness so we understand what's going on, what's going on there. So it's a little bit of the kind of this data-driven approach to understand where analysis might be better focused. Sorry I was adrift a big drift from your initial comment, sorry, Okay, I think I have officially used up all the oxygen in the room and it's getting to dangerous levels now. Again, thanks very, very much. ^M00:57:01 [ Audience Clapping ] ^M00:57:03 This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov ^E00:57:11