Overview of Workshop
Sessions will concentrate on learning about different graphic processes; examining the social and cultural history of popular art genres; and the interpretation and incorporation of graphics, including ephemera, with urban subject matter to be used as examples and models in teaching.
Schedule
Day One: Photographic Philadelphia
9:00AM-10:30AM
Welcome, Introduction, Goals of workshop
Backgrounds of participants and instructors
Visual Culture Program
Online tools for close looking of graphics; evaluating condition issues
Q & A
10:30AM-10:45AM
Break
10:45AM-12:30PM
Graphics collections at Library Company of Philadelphia
Participants describe why they selected particular graphic item for research
12:30PM-1:45PM
Lunch on Own
1:45PM-3:00 PM
Intro to history of photography in Philadelphia
Daguerreotypes/Ambrotypes/Tintypes
- Case Study: Collins Daguerreotype Studio
Q & A
Albumen/ Gelatin silver/Photo-mechanical
- Case Studies: John Moran; John Frank Keith; postcards
Q & A
3:00PM-3:15PM
Break
3:15PM-4:30PM
The Halide Project Presentation:
Wet collodion process talk and demonstration by Lisa Elmaleh
Q & A
Day Two: Philadelphia in Print and “Urban World in the Parlor”
9:00AM-10:30AM
Introduction to Day Two schedule
History of printing processes in Philadelphia
Wood engraving/relief
- Case study:18th- and 19th-century periodical illustrations
Q & A
Intaglio
- Case study: James Barton Longacre
Q & A
10:30AM-10:45AM
Break
10:45AM-12:30 PM
Lithography
- Case study: P. S. Duval, lithographic printer
- Case study: James S. Earle/William Smith as printsellers
Models and tools for content research
Q & A
12:30PM-2:00PM
Lunch on Own
2:00PM-3:00PM
Triangulations, and Viewing the Urban World in the Parlor
Dr. Wendy Woloson, guest lecturer
This session will focus on the “triangulation” process of bringing together visual culture, material culture, and textual sources to help us understand various pasts, and particularly pasts of the subaltern. While the underclass tended to escape documentation in mainstream source material, their history can still be recovered if we take a more expansive view of the archives and utilize more creative interpretive approaches. Using her 2012 Library Company exhibition Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th-Century America as a case study, Dr. Woloson will discuss how, by putting various historical sources in conversation with each other and reading those sources against the grain, we can recover the lives of those who otherwise might escape the historical record. The session will illustrate how visual culture – bolstered by other primary sources – can be leveraged to help us better understand how gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, counterfeiters, the impoverished, and their ilk lived their lives. Children’s book illustrations, trade cards, caricatures, police manuals, portrayals in reform literature, graphic exposés, and other contemporary works will be considered.
3:00PM-3:15PM
Break
3:15PM-5:00PM
Optional tutorial time (Individual 15 minute meetings)
Scheduled one-on-one time with workshop leader to suggest further research possibilities and further build on close-looking skills for selected graphic item to help prepare for a five minute presentation on Day Three.
6:00PM-6:45PM
Social “Hour”
Join us for relaxed conversation. Feel free to snack and drink as we talk.
Days Three: “Urban In-Site”: The Physical and Vernacular City
10:00AM-12:30 PM
Introduction to Day Three schedule
Maps
Birds eye views (prints and photographs)
Q &A
Seeing the 19th-Century City, on Paper
Dr. Jeff Cohen, guest lecturer
Philadelphia has been blessed with an extraordinarily rich body of images recording old landmarks and transformed settings, pieces of a lost landscape captured in drawings, prints, and photographs. A few 19th-century artists were especially prolific, notably David J. Kennedy, Benjamin R. Evans, and Frank H. Taylor. Each of them produced hundreds of views, sometimes with the active patronage of collectors whose interest substantially amplified this iconographic legacy. Digital images and detailed cataloguing have now made these items much more discoverable than ever.
These individual drawings are joined by a special type of long, flat-on print that tracks whole blocks, often in series, through the central business districts – the parts of the city most susceptible to the greatly enlarged building scales of the 20th century. Usually published as wide lithographs, these long views showing mid- and late-19th century streetscapes appeared from Boston to New Orleans, Manhattan to San Francisco, and, of course, Philadelphia, most often as a form of collective advertising.
This session will explore both of these graphic realms that vividly recall lost pieces of the city.
Advertising prints and photographs
Q & A
11:30AM-11:45AM
Break
Urban Portrait Choices
Q & A
12:30PM-1:30PM
Lunch on Own
1:30PM-3:00PM
Attendee presentations
3:00PM-3:30PM
Wrap up and surveys