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Podcast: New Books in Communications
Episode: Diana Kamin, "Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy" (MIT Press, 2023)
Description: How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photograph...