Kim Beil is the associate director of ITALIC, the first-year residential arts program based in the Burbank dormitory. She is the author of two books on photography, Good Pictures (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Anonymous Objects (SPBH Editions & MACK, 2023). I recently spoke with Kim about her research and writing.
Alexander Greenhough: Can you tell us about your beginnings as a scholar of photography?
Kim Beil: I did my undergrad studies in comparative literature, and then a grad degree in visual culture. I didn’t really describe myself as a historian of photography until I wrote Good Pictures, although I had studied the practice of photography, and thought I wanted to be a photographer, and worked as a curator in an art museum in its department of photography. But initially I didn’t know what else I could contribute to the history of photography. It didn’t feel like there was anything new there, either to catch my interest or catch the interest of a younger generation of readers.
I think what really happened when I started working on Good Pictures was that I realized that there were many untold histories of photography, particularly around normal, everyday pictures. Initially those were things that weren’t made by everyday people, because photography had very limited access in its first fifty years, at least. But they were the kinds of pictures people would ask photographers to make for them, or the kinds of pictures that we didn’t necessarily see in art museums. Things like advertising, or scientific illustration, and then, eventually, snapshots and private pictures.
I realized that was the bulk of photography; it’s this incredibly capacious medium that’s accessible to many different genres and disciplines and people. And yet what I had seen and learned about when I learned about photography was a few famous photographers. So my interest really expanded when I started to recognize that there was a history of all these other kinds of pictures. And in fact, that that history went all the way back to the very beginning.
AG: With reference to the “very beginning,” one thing that’s striking about Good Pictures is the panoramic scope, historically – it traverses three centuries. What shaped your image selection, and how did that shape the structure of the book?
KB: It goes from 1839 until 2019. The first couple of chapters are where I realized there was a book in this material. I think one of the earliest chapters came out of the 1930s to the 1950s. Photographers were starting to use blur in interesting ways. Suddenly, when you have the introduction of the electronic flash – which enabled photographers to still very rapid motion, such as sports players, or cars, or racehorses, easily – instead, photographers began introducing what had formerly been considered a failure, and that was motion blur. All these aesthetic practices emerged around that time that bring back this failure. I thought, “if there’s something like that, in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, there must be other evidence of trends that looked backwards throughout the history of photography.
I looked back at a trend I’d never seen addressed, and that was vignetting. It was popular, and I wanted to know why, and where it was coming from. And there were many other trends. When you look at nineteenth-century portraits, they all tend to look the same: there are tones for brown and gray and white, there are headshots and full-body portraits. But when you look granularly, all these trends have a specific basis in aesthetic desires. There were things about these pictures which make them different that I couldn’t see initially. So I looked at this timeline in terms of what was popular when, and where it was drawing its influences from.
AG: With these influences, there’s an insightful examination of what I’d term the “instructive impulse” on the part of film and camera manufacturers.
KB: The problem I immediately faced in looking at pictures that hadn’t been collected by art museums was that I couldn’t find them all. There’s no way you could ever see all the pictures that have ever been made. And if I wanted to see the things on the edges – outside of these public collections – I needed some other way to understand what people were doing. I realized that the how-to manuals were the way into that. Sometimes the manuals were “correcting” what they saw as mistakes; so I could either understand the mistakes as the dominant practice, or I could understand the manuals as enforcing the dominant practice. Sometimes it goes both ways. The book is based on trends as described by written sources; I’m working from words, as opposed to working from images.
AG: What’s a good example, for you, of a practice or trend that’s going “both ways”?
KB: There are “accidents” like chopping off heads or feet. Sometimes that’s a function of a viewfinder that doesn’t accurately mimic the area of film that will be exposed. With the introduction of the Kodak Brownie, that’s not a through-the-lens viewfinder. You’d get a sense of where the image might be. There’s a lot of material in the how-to manuals about careful composition. That accidental cutting off later becomes an avant-garde mode of representation. It probably borrows something from cinema. In photography, I think that started as an accident, but by the 1940s and 50s photographers were coming in really close to their subjects. So it’s not necessarily working both ways, but it is an example of a trend that emerges in response to what had formerly been understood as a failure.
AG: There seems to be a parallel between what you term “the edges” of photography’s history, as social practice, and how framing itself delimits and cuts things off. That’s a key insight of yours in Anonymous Objects. What’s the relationship between Good Pictures and Anonymous Objects? They seem like different kinds of projects.
KB: Anonymous Objects is an extended essay, published in book form. It was inspired by a number of things. Chief among them was boredom during the pandemic. Instagram, and places I had turned to for things that were new, only presented me with things that I expected. I wanted to have some surprise. I had been working with artist Brea Souders, and she and I had done a collaborative project during the pandemic where we sent each other links to images in the New York Public Library’s picture collection, which we used to structure a conversation about her work. I was so delighted by the images she chose.
That began a practice of mine: if I felt the urge to do some mindless scrolling, I would go to a library or archive website and look through their strange images. The way to find mysterious things, or unrecognizable things, was by looking at interiors. When I look at an old room, or machine shop, there’s lots of stuff that I don’t recognize. This might be connected to Good Pictures; there’s something in the past that’s initially unrecognizable, to me, that remains a mystery, but always gives me space to investigate. There’s room to know, but also something beyond that, where it’s not possible to know.
AG: As an essay, it’s asking epistemological questions. The photographs are themselves “anonymous objects,” as are the things in them, which can’t necessarily be identified. Art history as a university discipline began, in part, with identification and attribution; the discovery of provenance. How do you think about the essay in relation to your work as an historian of photography?
One of the other experiences that Anonymous Objects came out of was a project on Ansel Adams. A fellow at the Cantor, Josie Johnson, invited me to write an essay on a photograph by Adams that’s in the collection. Immediately, I felt overwhelmed by the fact that I didn’t know enough about this image, and I felt very much like a novice art historian because I hadn’t studied Adams before.
I wanted to say the most cursory things about the picture – where is it, and when was it made? None of that was in the title. It looks like a lunar landscape, but it’s apparently in the high mountains in Kings Canyon of the Sierras. I’m an avid backpacker, and I figured “I ought to be able to figure out what this is.” I posted the picture on high country and climber online forums and eventually found someone who could confirm the location. Because the image includes the moon I realized I could ask astronomers to help me figure out what the exact date of it was. It was only circa 1936. The astronomers said yes, of course we can do this, but we need you to take a contemporary image at that location. That led to a fifty-mile backpacking trip on which I covered ten thousand feet to go and create that image. They then created the measurement that told us exactly what day and time Adams made the image.
On the one hand, that was a traditional art history project, but also not at all, because no other historian had ever done that. It is very surprising to me the number of images that we know so little about; even the supposed experts. There are probably historians who’d say it doesn’t really matter exactly what it is, or exactly where it is, that Adams is trying to create “a feeling,” rather than a simple documentary image. But I think it was that tension between the promise that photography will tell you everything (and tell it truthfully), and the fact that that rarely happens. Photographs don’t carry information with them, other than what’s in the image. The title doesn’t have to travel with the image when it shows up on Pinterest, for example; and the colors of the image can change. Anonymous Objects is motivated by that tension between what we can know and where that stops.
AG: There’s a range of photographs in the book. Some are iconic, and some aren’t. You apply the same interpretive lens to familiar images by Alexander Gardner and Walker Evans as you do to images by unidentified, presumably amateur, photographers. How do you relate them?
Evans is an interesting example. He was also very drawn to vernacular images and scenes. The book reproduces my way of thinking. And as much as possible, I am walking through a development of that understanding; I wouldn’t say “argument.” It’s how I come to understand each of these images. I think it’s how anyone who has any familiarity with any images thinks and comes to understand what we see around us: we see something and it reminds us of something else. When those images live in your mind, they’re not really that much different than our remembered experience of those places. If you have a visual experience, or you have a visual experience of an image, they end up being flattened out and becoming something very similar in your memory. So I put those things alongside each other, because the proliferation of stuff in a Walker Evans image of a general store can remind me of lots of other things; indeed, he was reminded of a lot of other things when he was making images like that, too. If there’s a singular mode of interpretation it’s that I prize connection above all, so looking at one photograph is never enough. You always have to look at it in connection to others. It’s impossible to think about one kind of photographer as different from another one because all of these images live in my mind. I’ve already made the connections by being the person who saw them.
