It makes sense to start with the definition  of picture-work, before spelling out some of the important consequences of this notion which refers less to an abstract concept than to a set of concrete practices: “Picture-work is, simply put, work with pictures. More specifically, it is the work that pictures require in order to circulate. By looking to labor practices, I turn to a group that, as I have noted, I call picture-workers. Picture-workers, including librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and curators, are a professionalized group who actively reflect upon their practice and often serve communities of users and producers with whom they might overlap.” (p. 18). Although picture-work is a vital and universal part of almost any kind of relationship with photography, it also involves a way of both doing and thinking in the field of photography studies and photographic practices. More particularly:

1) Picture-work signifies a move away from the idea that a picture is a “fixed” object, whose meaning cannot be separated from the “maker” of the image, even if in the case of photography most people accept the limits of traditional, that is individual authorship. We have learnt to envisage the maker as a plural agent, taking into account that technology as well as institutions play a central role too. More radically speaking, picture-work defines pictures as “alienable” and “non-medium specific” content, which can thus be dissociated from its original materialization, provided there exists something like such an “origin”, but this is exactly the type of question Kamin’s study, after a longtime fascination with the index and authorship, achieves to avoid.

2) Picture-work stresses not only the prominence of users and user groups, it also emphasizes the various relationships between picture-workers and various types of audiences, including what is called the “general audience”. Even if commercial elements are never totally absent from picture-work (in certain cases they even represent the core business of picture-workers), the democratizing tactics and strategy are the driving force of this type of physically  circulating photographs that is neither that of the art gallery nor that of academic theory, for instance, even if it cannot be denied that both theory and art can take democratization as the alpha and omega of their endeavor.

3) Picture-work blurs the boundaries between textual and visual collections, between repositories of pictures (ambiguously called picture libraries) and repositories of verbal documents (traditional libraries or archives), the latter still struggling with the technical description and practical handling of the former. Contrary to books, whose description can rely on universally accepted standards and which are often allowed to leave the library, the description of pictures remains hampered by varying medium-specific criteria and their circulation outside the picture library is far from easy for conservation and insurance reasons, among others. Yet rather than merely insisting on the need of establishing new metadata criteria and standards, Diana Kamin foregrounds the time, energy, creativity, and political, institutional and social commitment of all picture-workers to solve metadata problems in order to facilitate and foster the circulation of images –an “outbound” objective very different from the “inbound” aims and horizons of documentation science.

4) Finally, picture-work equally challenges our traditional views of photography as a medium whose internal structure and historical transformations can be designated in terms of binary oppositions such as artistic versus documentary pictures or professional versus vernacular images, and paradigm shifts, such as the clash between Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” process and the French daguerreotype process, or the transition from analog to digital picture-making. Picture-work starts from a completely different agenda, where issues of optics, chemistry, and more generally medium-specificity are not fundamental (which does not mean that they are discarded as irrelevant).

This general framework is not presented in polemical terms. The author’s ambition is not to frontally criticize our hegemonic views on photography but to open our eyes to a continent that has longtime been hidden and that to a large extent still goes unnoticed. Kamin’s book, which ends with a reflection on the place of picture-work in contemporary digital culture, more precisely on digital culture as picture-work, foregrounds three institutions, each of them representative of a specific domain: the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library (NYPL), representative of the world of public libraries; the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, representative of the art world; and the H. Armstrong Roberts company, representative of the stock photography agencies built for commercial purposes (all three collections “founded in New York City and Philadelphia between 1915 and 1929 and [still] circulating pictures today”, p. 3). In all three cases, Diana Kamin close-reads the structure, history, and internal logic of these (large) institutions. Public libraries aim at putting the material in the hands of their users (pictures are then “documents” which users can consult, borrow and appropriate for private purposes). Museums tend to give a special place to photography in their curatorial policy (with for instance special emphasis on the photographic representation of material in touring exhibitions). Commercial visual databases do not separate word and image, since most images will have to perform in intermedial or multimedia contexts, for instance as illustration of magazine or newspaper articles or building blocks of a publicity campaign (in many cases, they will even have to perform simultaneously in very different media configurations).

Yet Kamin does not only highlights the differences and analogies between these institutions, she also gives a prominent role to those who actually “made” the collection while at the same time defining, fine-tuning and changing more general protocols of image circulation in their specific context. Picture-work may seem anonymous and dull office work, yet by unpacking the stories behind it, Kamin discloses essential people and the ground-breaking work they have performed: Romana Javitz, head of the NYPL Picture Collection from 1929–1968, whose may publications, both internal reports and professional journal articles, have proven key to the recognition of images in the archive and library world; Elodie Carter, head of the circulating exhibitions department, and Pearl Moeller, first director of the rights and reproductions department, both at MOMA; and the founder and heirs of the H. Armstrong Roberts Company, still a family business (which started as a chicken farm, a perhaps bizarre origin that eventually proves to be extremely useful for the building of a stock photography agency). Each time, Kamin starts with defining specific “picture-problems” of these people and institutions (how to acquire, classify, store, and circulate pictures), before analyzing the tensions between the management of their picture collections within library and archive systems often designed for the management of textual documents.

The close but strongly contextualized reading of the picture-workers’ philosophy as well as achievements is an important contribution to our thinking on photography. Pictures are defined as inherently mobile, their meaning is determined by uses that are distinct from those studies in art history, photography theory, or media studies. They become part of a both radically democratic and highly commodified culture. Picture-Work also brings to the fore the importance of bureaucracy and paperwork and puts a name on the faces behind this type of labor. Finally, this outstandingly well written book –a real page-turner! –  challenges the idea that digital culture is an absolute novelty: many problems, procedures, obstacles, achievements of the digital circulation of pictures were already known and addressed by picture-workers during the analog era. Diana Kamin describes and analyzes with a perfect mix of scholarly precision and heart-warming empathy for the hidden picture-workers. Reading this book helps pay a tribute to their commitment, while giving us the opportunity to fundamentally rethink what we think of photography.