Every photograph in your collection has infinite relationships with things outside the collection. However there is a magic circle around the collection. The outside things can be other photographs that you see in books, museums, other collections. There are relationships with “real” things such as places, historical events, people who once existed or still do.
However inside the collection, there is a special connection between the photographs. The collections I’m concerned with are not just put away. The photographs are alive with relationships with each other and with you, your eyes, your ongoing life. Whether on walls or on shelves or in boxes (hopefully archival), your relationship to them longs to be refreshed and renewed.
Their relationship to each other also needs to be refreshed and renewed. A wonderful thing about a collection that you own is that you can enter this magic circle and play with the photographs in your imagination like you once played with your toys. If your collection is on your walls, you can try to break the familiarity of seeing them every day, and try to look at them anew, finding things to be surprised about. You can take out your collection or parts of it and put the photographs around you, or place some things next to other things that haven’t been together before.
Additions to the collection
One of the happiest times for a collector is when there is something newly acquired that can be taken from the outside world of the gallery, the auction, the show, and placed within the magic circle. It can look at its new companions with excited anticipation, and they can look at their new fellow lodger with initial anxiety until they adjust to the new relationships it engenders.
The longing to acquire something new can be intense if you feel it will radiate throughout the collection. It will make some things come forward with new importance, however it might also make other things lose some of their luster. You can find clever ways to make money from photography, both as a collector or a photographer. A musician must practice, practice, practice. So must the collector. The collector must keep learning by looking at photographs outside the collection, however also give probing attention to those inside the circle.
The collector should not always see the same thing when looking at a photograph in the collection. That would be like having the photograph pinned, like a specimen, with a label that draws attention to important things, however can also stand in the way of fresh insights. There should be a constant search for the “extra.” The “extra” is something that excites you according to your current expectations, interests, fascinations. Some photographs might no longer supply it.
History and reminders
For example, a photograph that was considered important according to received opinion when you acquired it, and may still be, may not thrill you as it once did. Your eagerness to acquire it was influenced by the sense of its importance according to the books, the auction records, and the atmosphere in the auction room. However now, seeing it freshly within the magic circle, it no longer holds that original fascination.
Are you influenced by the sales records, that may be rising, or by your own pleasure in having it around you? Condition is a relative thing, not only against an absolute standard, however also in connections with other objects within the circle or to something outside. A photograph that seemed to you to be an outstanding example may lose its stellar fascination because you have seen, or acquired, an example that is even more wondrous.
Something that once seemed a rare prize turns out to be more common than you thought. On the other hand, depending on the nature of the collection, something that might look weak, damaged, without interest to another collector, elevates your pleasure in the collection because it holds a key place in terms of subject or some other respect.
Specific focus in collections
Museums like MoMA are sometimes restrained from deaccessioning material. Collectors are subject to no such prohibition. Sometimes “thinning” a collection makes it stronger, for the collector as well as for others. Sheer quantity can be tiresome. Some collections, by their nature, authentically strive for quantity. These are primarily historically oriented, or deal with a geographic or ethnographic subject area. These are the cases where every image is capable of providing important information.
Collections with a focus on art or artistry, whether it be daguerreotypes or the works of a certain photographer or group of photographers, are more variable. Most of the material offered at auction nowadays comes from somebody’s collection, maybe they are decluttering their home or it is a deceased estate. Ideally, a photograph that no longer radiates within one collection can radiate in another, because of the different focus of that collection. However some photographs are just lackluster, and are not likely to ignite the passion of other collectors, even at a modest price.
Many collectors, when thinning their collection by selling the weakest examples, often have unrealistically high-priced ideas that conform to their desire, rather than what might attract others to buy it.
