The University of Arizona’s Center
for Creative Photography has nearly 5,000 prints and negatives by John Gutmann,
4798 of which appear digitally on the CCP website. The description of the collection is not a
finding aid, but a collection of documents linked together from a starting page: a single representative photograph and a biographical note with links to
the artist’s website, the CCP digital gallery, a pdf statement of conditionsfor publication, and a pdf inventory of the collection.
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Two Midget Clowns Backstage
1940
John Gutmann Archive
© 1998 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
2000.112.32
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The
pdf inventory is divided by folder according to subjects (“Automobiles,
Cityscapes, Waterfront, Oredocks”), artistic themes (“Beyond Reality”), formats
(“Portraits – children, 1930s”), events (“Circus, Leap Year Parade”), and
places (“China 1943-1945”), though many folders have confusing and inconsistent
names like “Circus & Carnival, Swimming, Fiestas, 1930s ”, “M1s after 1940,
WWII-45, Irene-42, CA-45” or “Latest”.
These might be listed in some kind of order, perhaps Gutmann’s original
order, but it was not a pattern that I could recognize, even over 125
pages. The format of this inventory is
the opposite of user-friendly—it lacks even a table of contents. I originally assumed that the inventory was
just a supplemental listing of physical copies included with a collection
organized for online viewing, but the online collection is even less
user-friendly.
The
online gallery includes all 4798 images in a single category listed in
alphabetical order by the title Gutmann had given it. There is a search function, but it is for all
of CCP’s online images not for a single collection. The search can be filtered by artist and
keyword once the initial query is made, but it’s an ineffective system for all
but the most specific searches. For
example, it is easy to find Gutmann’s photos of midget clowns (his
terminology), but harder to single out his photos of Asian-Americans in the
1930’s. Individual photographs are
described with the artist’s name and his title for the photo as well as the
date, format, dimensions and negative location.
There are no descriptions of the people, places or events in the images
other than the titles and only a few photos have vague subject headings.
The
information they give about John Gutmann’s life and work is overly-flowery in
places—calling him “one of America’s most distinctive photographers” who “has
left us with the task of pursuing the rich knots, braids, tangles and threads
in his complex life and work that unfolded over a most tumultuous and provocative
century of modernity”—but it does provide useful information about his life and
historical context. That, combined with
the enormous digital gallery, establishes this collection as a huge and
fascinating resource, even if it is difficult to use.
The
Center for Creative Photography also has online finding aids for some of their
collections, those deemed “Archives and Manuscripts” rather than “Fine Art
Photographs”. I wanted to compare these
finding aids to the Gutmann inventory to see if they were any easier to
navigate, but the links were broken. I’m
unsure what makes these collections more “archival” than the fine art
collections that leads to their having finding aids rather than
inventories—especially when a list of archival collections has names from both
categories, including John Gutmann.
Perhaps those collections with the presumably traditional finding aids
are those deemed most historically significant, while the rest were categorized
as fine art and stuck up with minimum description.
Overall,
this method of description (inventory listing by category and semi-searchable
digital gallery) is immensely frustrating.
It is wonderful that they have digitized these thousands of images, not
just for John Gutmann, but for all of their artists, but what good are these
galleries if there is not a good way to learn what they contain or to search
them for those contents? I think a
simple improvement would be to change the inventory from a static, pdf list to
something with clickable links, even if those links just go from a table of
contents to each individual folder’s contents.
Another vast improvement could be made by adding searchable subject
headings to more of the digital gallery images.
The lack of description in this collection is probably what allowed for
all 4800 images to be digitized and the collection probably would not benefit
sufficiently to merit making a full traditional finding aid, but somewhere in
between that level of description and the current lack would make this diverse
collection of images, largely of under-documented groups, more accessible to
researchers and the public.
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