Renée Brown

Librarian Paul Vanderbilt is an unsung pioneer of cataloging systems that respond to the specific medium of photography rather than text-based taxonomies. My dissertation explores the innovative methods of photographic cataloging Vanderbilt developed over the course of his career at the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI), the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress (LOC), and the Iconographic Collections at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW). In his first major commission for the FSA/OWI (1940–1944), Vanderbilt introduced a subject-searchable filing system that centered the cultural content of the photographs rather than following the arbitrary logic of state boundaries and the alphabet. This new organization adapted the file to the practical and political needs of the OWI, while improving its functionality as a survey of American life. Vanderbilt expanded his work on subject-based classification systems during his tenure at the Library of Congress (1944–1954), by developing subject-specific collections of photographs he termed “iconographies.” These iconographies fostered new practices of looking at photographs comparatively, as opposed to individually, and put these practices in service to Cold War government initiatives. The political and bureaucratic constraints of working at the LOC ultimately motivated Vanderbilt to take a new job as Curator of Iconographic Collections at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, a position he held from 1954 until his retirement in 1972. This final appointment offered Vanderbilt the freedom to experiment with new strategies for organizing photographs spatially, according to emotional, associative, and intuitive connections instead of rational subject classifications. Interpreting Vanderbilt’s career through the frameworks of cultural and intellectual history, I consider how his work reflects the rise of an information society and offers new ways of thinking about photographic communication. Through this study, my dissertation recovers a key figure in the history of twentieth-century photography and adds to the scholarship on photographic archives by focusing on their cataloging systems and the people who designed them.