For the past year and a half I’ve worked on and off as intern at the Maryland Historical Society’s Imaging Services Department (which is led by a graduate of the UMBC’s Public History program!). I’ve had the chance to do a lot of interesting things during my time there, but I’ve mostly worked on one collection in particular: the photographs and other materials of Joseph Kohl, a Baltimore photographer who was active in the 1980s, 90s, and first years of the 00s.
It’s been fascinating to work on the Kohl collection for a lot of reasons. The Historical Society doesn’t really have any other collections like it (I mean, some of the photos in it are of people wearing gimp suits for crying out loud), and it documents an entire era of the city’s history that hasn’t been examined very much by historians or even by photographers whose work from that time has been published. A number of large-format photo books of Baltimore were published during the 1990s, but pretty much all of them feature the kind of stock images we’re used to seeing of the Inner Harbor, the skyline, steamed crabs on a newspaper, etc. Much of Kohl’s work -- his photos of queer nightlife and anti-war rallies, for example -- tells a different story about the city. What makes the collection as a whole so interesting is the mix of his commercial work as a professional freelance photographer (corporate headshots, youth sports games, etc.) and this other, wilder side of Baltimore that he pursued on his own time. He had access into a lot of different rooms, in other words, and so from a historical point of view the Kohl collection seems indispensable for anyone trying to understand what was really going on here at the end of the 20th century.
Another enriching aspect of working with the collection has been the chance to learn about the actual materials of photography themselves. Handling the negatives, the model-release waivers, the little boxes of slides, Kohl’s Zip drive from the early days of digital -- this stuff gives off a special resonance for me since my own father was a photojournalist and then became a professional freelance photographer in Maryland just like Kohl did and at pretty much same time. I have much greater appreciation now for what my father was up to all those evenings in the darkroom in our basement! Working on the collection really forces you to think a lot about the technology of photography -- the fact that photography was so much more of a specialized craft in the era of film (not that it’s not now, but you know what I mean). I know that at the point we’re able to put an exhibit together around Kohl’s work, we want to foreground those ideas in our interpretation of Kohl as part of the generation of photographers, like my father, whose careers spanned the gulf from film to digital.
In my next posts I’ll go into more detail about certain aspects of what’s involved in managing a collection like this, but the big news this week is that the Finding Aid has finally gone live! I wrote some of the introduction and much of the actual finding aid itself. So check it out!
