The streets of San Francisco: encounters with the Selle collection of street vendor photographs.

As mentioned, Eskind's eye was immediately struck by the digitization-ready disposition of the archive: 35mm film that could be run through a standard high-resolution scanner. He received funding from the late Irv Shankman of St. Louis that enabled him to send twelve rolls to Postworks in New York City. Finding a day that the technicians could work on such a special project, Eskind hand-delivered the material and came back to Rochester with a 80 GB firewire drive full of just under 18,000 tiff and jpeg digital image files.

These digitized images unleashed the fury of the archive's numbers and established the basis of creative projects that were to follow. Initially, it was a matter of taming the raw image data on the large drives by image processing: converting them into more manageable grayscale jpegs, renaming and ordering them into directories. Processing the image data evolved into discovering ways to view the images either singly or in groups through lists and grids. Brief sequences of images set the single images in motion in looped animations and anticipated future experimental work.

This early stage of collection assessment, research, and digitization culminated in the first public exhibition at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, organized by Eskind and curator Renny Pritikin. Titled "Joseph Selle's Fox Movie Flash: Mid-Century Street Vendor Photography," the exhibition assembled and exposed the tensions between varying uses and interpretations of this numerous material. (4) On one hand, the show opened a window on the collection with a unique view of vernacular visual history. Like a time machine it sampled fleeting moments of San Francisco street life with pedestrians caught in passing on the sidewalk. Collectively, the show offered a compressed view of the changing times of urban life through changing fashions and guises of the decades following World World II, suggesting questions about the social functions of street vendor photography itself and its operators. Were Selle and his associate photographers like the "public characters" defined by urbanologist Jane Jacobs as regulars of the street who in various ways both stabilized street life and revitalized it? (5) Such questions of social position remain an open part of the Selle Collection's story. On the other hand, the show grappled with the aesthetic similarities between the Fox Movie Flash images and the modernist street photography of Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and others. Both Eskind and Pritikin eloquently pinpointed their attraction to the material through these modernist canons, yet openly questioned their own aesthetic responses and curatorial decisions in view of other options for apprehending the archive as visual culture.

For both organizers, the underlying reality of large numbers disturbed the matter and prevented the collection from settling into an established pattern of use and interpretation as social history or aesthetic experience. From the onset, Eskind's questions and sense of dilemma revolved around the numbers involved. "How long does it take to look at a million photographs? Is it even possible?" As if trying to fathom such numbers, he goes on to speculate on the number of images we are exposed to each day in a media saturated society (He mentions 1,500 images today, which is entirely credible given the factoid that 2,700 photographs are taken every second worldwide (6)). Eskind closes this meditation on numbers with the further speculation that the "conceptual conundrum" posed by the inconceivable scale was the daunting factor that deterred researchers from previously using the collection and that kept it dormant for so long. Yet, paradoxically, rather than a determent, the power of large numbers seems to be the very element of fascination that draws his continued interest and drives the inquiry to other levels of cultural and aesthetic meaning.

Seeing the large numbers as some kind of unbounded possibility space, Eskind wondered what other "imagined points of interest" might be dormant in this "vast documentary record" and how other selections would compare to the curatorial decisions made by Pritikin. Pritikin admitted his unease in selecting some images for release, "like genies in a bottle," and leaving others to "recede back into obscurity forever." But, as we shall see, the show indeed released genies from the multitudes that would not be put back into the bottle.

17523 PICTURES

Another consequential force released by the UC Davis exhibition was an experimental video animation by Mount that opened up the next phase of creative work with the collection. Then a graduate student in the MFA program at VSW, Mount was introduced to the Selle project through Eskind's course, Working with Visual Information. Mount was immediately enthralled by the project and continued work as Eskind's assistant throughout the year, absorbing much of his expertise and method of inquiry into archives. Mount certainly developed his own individual perspectives on the elusive meanings of these numerous pictures along the way. At the culminating point of the UC Davis show, Mount had completed his unique video work 17523 Pictures, which captured and distilled the most radical elements of the show. The piece is the result of a deceptively simple procedure with far-reaching conceptual and perceptual consequences. After a painstaking adjustment of each and every frame of the digitized image base, Mount compiled and edited the entire set into an animated video running for ten minutes at thirty frames per second. Its visual effect is explosive as the mind reels to assimilate the racing medley of street figures and images. Along with the perceptual impact, the conceptual dissonance with other guiding assumptions of the show stands in high relief. Much of Eskind's and Pritikin's wonderment revolved round questions of selectivity, but 17523 Pictures works with the entire digitized set excluding nothing except the header frames and the occasional blank shot. Dispensing with the intentionality and aesthetics of selection altogether, Mount made the more radical decision "to run with the numbers."

The consequences spilled over into a new basis for seeing pictures and visualizing large number picture archives, marking a juncture where Mount's work departs from Eskind and Pritikin's gallery-based framework of investigation. Eskind, too, was absorbed by the potential of the randomly running numbers but sought aesthetic salvation in the occasional singular image that stood out from the rest by some special signifying feature. Eskind, borrowing a phrase from a UC Davis professor, Jay Mechling, labeled the phenomenon "intermittent reward" to explain how one could spend minutes looking through many reels of unedited dross as long as one gained an occasional prize, a pleasing surprise in the midst of predicable banality. As valid as this principle of discovery might be for working with archives, Mount's 17535 Pictures unleashes the perceptual fury of the entire set rather than the individual that surprises us. It is the paradoxically "untotalizable" pattern of the whole that emerges as the intermittent reward of the piece, whereby scores of "unsynched" images are run through the projector and are melded together provisionally by a strained persistence of vision. The jumping images collide with each other according to their differences, yet they are similar enough that patterns of movement, time, and space appear in glimmers that are their own reward. The sight of the frames running can conjure a time machine compressing days and months of times into a flash of recognition. Emphatically, these patterns are tenuous visualizations of the very large numbers involved--the archive itself--and not an artifact of any singular frame.

Leading up to and following the UC Davis show, Mount's piece has provoked an interesting range of viewer responses that suggest how powerful the visualization of a large image base might be. Before exhibiting the work, Mount "preflighted" it during the semester-end graduate critiques. After minutes of astonishment in the group, one graduate student raised a telling concern that he was "worried about what such films might do to us." The student seemed to be pointing to the cumulative effect of faster and faster configurations of animated imagery that strained the perceptual capacity to make sense of experience. The worry connects to well-known developments in media culture concerning the speeding up of editing clips, the shortening of "sound bites," the growing deficit of attention in the swirl of accelerating stimuli. 17523 Pictures does indeed encapsulate the changing nature of visual experience, but for Mount the project possess internal psychological consequences as well.