Facing Black Star

Abstract

"In 2005, Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) acquired nearly 292,000 black-and-white photographic prints from Black Star, the renowned New York-based photo agency founded in 1935. Preserved at The Image Centre, the Black Star Collection includes images by over 6,000 photographers who worked for the agency, recording news events and personalities from the 1910s through the 1980s. The collection's displacement from a corporate press agency to a public cultural institution created extraordinary research opportunities; but it also presented challenges for scholars, who must face the collection's size, its structural organization, the materiality of the prints, and the lack of contextual ephemera. In Facing Black Star, co-editors Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie gather essays by established historians, curators, and graduate students who fruitfully highlight the tensions between their expectations and the difficulties of conducting research in the Black Star Collection-thus illuminating the methodological, epistemological, and political issues inherent to studying in photographic archives."-- On back of cover.