[Summer 2024]

by Fanny Bieth

291,049: that’s how many prints are in the collection of the Black Star photo agency, acquired by Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in 2005. The Image Centre, a museum dedicated more broadly to the photographic image, was created to receive, conserve, and promote this immense collection. For anyone with a healthy interest in photography, the arrival of such a fonds at a public institution offers a wealth of research possibilities, and a large number of specialists have worked in the collection since it was acquired.

The book Facing Black Star, edited by Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie, comprises eighteen contributions each of which is the result of individual experience with the Black Star Collection, whether as an occasional researcher or invited curator or through a permanent job in the institution. The volume highlights the collection, the archival questions that a grouping of this size poses, and the methodological, epistemological, and political issues encountered by the people who immerse themselves in it. More broadly, Facing Black Star offers key insights into the substantial role that archives and collections play in the way that photography is approached and understood.

The book opens with a preface by Doina Popescu, founding director of the Image Centre, followed by an introduction by Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie, then a detailed chronology developed by Alexandra Gooding and Valérie Matteau. These contributions give a well-defined view of what the agency was and what the Black Star Collection is, providing essential context for a full understanding of the questions raised in the essays.

The Black Star photo agency was founded in New York in December 1935 by three Germans who had fled the Nazi regime in the preceding months: Ernest Mayer, Kurt Safranski, and Kurt Kornfeld. For almost half a century, Black Star acted as a major intermediary between photographers and the illustrated press, and between Europe and the United States, working with magazines such as Life, Time, and Look. Its roster included six thousand photographers. The black-and-white prints now conserved at the Image Centre date from the 1910s to the 1980s and are stored in 2,600 boxes. They include pictures of the great events of the twentieth century, as well as unspectacular images – of landscapes and crowds, for example – similar to those found in image banks. The fonds is organized following the method of the researchers who worked at the agency to serve commercial needs, which differ from the uses to which it would be put by a scholarly and cultural institution: the categories and subcategories retained, whose biases are described by several authors in the book, do not facilitate navigation.

The size and structure of the fonds, its materiality, and the lack of contextual elements both complicate and enhance work in the archive. “Whoever confronts this collection,” write Gervais and Lavoie, “is called upon to revise their methodological preconceptions, to rethink their investigative protocols, to re-evaluate the prism of their reading, and to question the informative content and the political charge of photographic archives.” It was from this observation that the idea for the book emerged, and it is around this fertile tension that the contributions are articulated.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, “Questioning the Origins of the Black Star Collection,” is about the agency’s early days. Nadya Bair analyzes photographs that portray the Nazi government, highlighting the agency’s ambiguous stance. She explores the provenance of these images by examining clues found on the backs of the prints, and she discovers how they were disseminated by tracing the publications in which they were reproduced. In the same German context, Christian Joschke analyzes Max Pohly’s photographs. Joschke’s investigation within the collection, supported by secondary sources, shakes up the notion of the author, revealing the confusion that may arise due to the paucity of information regarding the provenance of the prints, but also how it is possible to shed light on some of these dead ends. Zainub Verjee and Emily McKibbon close this part with a detailed description of the political and economic issues involved in transitioning the collection from a commercial entity to a cultural fonds.

The second part, “Generating Visibilities in the Black Star Collection,” addresses the ways in which the collection reproduces – through the images it contains, how they are organized, and the sparse writings that accompany them – an unbalanced view of the world in the twentieth century. The five contributions in this second part both uncover and undermine these ideological and political prejudices through transversal work within the archives, bringing to light other realities. Sophie Hackett underlines the presence of the queer community, and Reilley Bishop-Stall problematizes the incoherence and stereotypes conveyed by the indexing procedure used for photographs portraying Indigenous people. Alexandra Gooding undertakes to counter the collection’s Western- centric perspective on the Caribbean by rearranging the iconographic material from a Caribbean perspective. Drew Thompson looks back at the career of Griffith Davis, an African American photojournalist who worked with Black Star. Finally, Vanessa Fleet Lakewood directs our attention to the presence of graffiti – elements that often seem like details on the margins of the photographs.

In the last part, “Curating with the Black Star Collection,” curatorial experiences to which the collection has given rise are featured. Denise Birkhofer, the collection’s curator, discusses how she interacts with it. In an interview with the curator Taous Dahmani, Mark Sealy looks back at the exhibition Human Rights Human Wrongs (2013): what he plucked from the collection’s boxes were images of black bodies, many of them having been assaulted, in order to question the presence and purpose of such portrayals. Bénédicte Ramade concludes this part by presenting the role played by Black Star images in her exhibition The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video (2016), in which she put them in dialogue with contemporary artworks, bringing out the historical depth behind certain visual strategies aiming to represent the climate crisis.

Each contribution to Facing Black Star highlights its author’s study area, methodology, and path through the collection – exposing the risks, obstacles, and quirks inherent to working in photographic archives and showing how this affects our apprehension of the medium. The hundred or so illustrations that accompany the essays showcase the material qualities of the prints; here, photographs are understood as objects loaded with bias and history, rather than as transparent representations of the world. Through the essays, we are invited to appreciate diverse approaches: specialists address the fonds with distinct lived experiences and methods of interpretation, questioning unique aspects of the collection and, in turn, allowing its questions to permeate them. Facing Black Star thus reminds us that the relationship with photography is above all a subjective experience and that delving into such archives is also “an emotional journey,” as Mark Sealy notes. Translated by Käthe Roth

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Fanny Bieth is an author and a doctoral
student in art history, specializing in photographic studies, at UQAM. In her research, she looks at the relations between psychiatry and the media of photography and film.
She is the publishing coordinator for the magazine Captures.

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Facing Black Star — Fanny Bieth
]