"When the prints arrived at Ryerson University in Toronto, what had been working stock, an agency's living inventory, became at that moment finite. It became a 'collection' - gelatin-silver relics of a technological past, markers of a medium's genesis, touchstones of an agency's narrative, and most abundantly, a window on the history of the twentieth century - boxes upon boxes of messages from yesterday."
Each photograph has been reproduced uncropped to preserve its essence as an historical object. As author Michael Torosian writes, "the deterioration provides an emotive timbre, a form of sympathetic fallacy, as though the pathos of an image of a fallen soldier and his wizened horse could be embedded in the paper's very fibres."
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