You did it. You finished processing that collection. Hooray! Look at all those beautiful archival containers, lined up, labelled, and ready for research. It took a lot of time and work for you to get the collection’s materials to this point. 

Most folks (even some librarians) do not really understand that. We call archival work ‘processing’ for a reason: producing archival holdings is a process--a complex physical and intellectual one. Yet, archival processing represents only one phase of a much longer process that the materials go through: a continuum of movement, both physical and contextual--what anthropologist Igor Kopytoff calls the “cultural biography of things.”

Kopytoff argues that just as biographies of people are culturally informed, so are the biographies of objects (collections or items in a collection, to archivists). Tracing the “social life” of these materials--looking closely at each phase they have moved through in their existence to date: locations, physical states, functions, uses, values, and context--reveals more about them, their meaning, and their potential research value, than would simply studying their creation or intended function. As Kopytoff puts it: “Biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure.” (Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things, 67.) Collections do not have to be full of problematic anthropological objects for their “lives” to yield significant historical or cultural insights: the seemingly most boring collection can become interesting when thinking about what it has been through physically and contextually over its “life” so far. Previously devalued and underused collections (or parts of collections) may turn out to be rich in evidence to future researchers. Assigning value scores to collections becomes a trickier business!

Kopytoff presented his theoretical framework over thirty years ago, but it still informs how I think about archives and make archival processing decisions. It has been in the front of my mind throughout the past year as that I process have been processing the visual materials in the Barbara and Willard Morgan papers at the UCLA Library Special Collections (LSC). Barbara’s artwork itself echoes this theme of movement. When she was only five or six, Barbara’s father taught her that “everything in the world is made of atoms and all the atoms are dancing... .. imagine everything dancing.” From then on, she “always felt motion in everything,” and this deeply influenced her art. For her, in all of her work, “the one thing that must be present is Rhythmic Vitality… There always has to be the presence of energy.” (Morgan, Barbara Morgan, 1972; Morgan, UCLA Oral History interview transcript, 40-41; and, Carter and Agee, Barbara Morgan, 1988.)

Barbara Morgan, Valerie Bettis - Desperate Heart (double exposure), 1944. Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Barbara began her art career in drawing, painting, and printmaking (returning to those media later in life), but she is best known for her photography--especially her 1930s and 1940s images of modern dancers such as Martha Graham. Her most famous photograph, “The Kick,” shows Graham in her dance about the American poet Emily Dickinson, Letter to the World. Barbara, in her dance photography, sought to translate dynamic three-dimensions into still two-dimensions through depicting “the dance at its visual peak.” (Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, 11.) In the process, her methods of capturing dancers’ movements in her studio became its own kind of choreography. Using special lighting and multiple assistants, she had dancers execute movements over and over to get the image just right. She described her process regarding her photographs of Graham: “I wanted to show that Martha had her own vision...that what she was conveying was deeper than ego, deeper than baloney… I was trying to connect her spirit with the viewer--to show pictures of spiritual energy.” To Graham, however, as she recalled years later: Barbara “was a terror.” (Quoted in Joan Acocella, “An Unforgettable Photo of Martha Graham,” Smithsonian Magazine)

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham - Letter to the World (The Kick), 1940. Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 

Barbara Morgan on the quad at UCLA’s new Westwood campus, ca. 1929. Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

The movement theme in the content of the visual materials in the Barbara and Willard Morgan papers is just one part of the collection’s continuum of movement. Its “cultural biography” has been literally and figuratively moving in many ways—--from its creation to acquisition to processing to what follows--and each phase has affected the next.

The Morgan papers actually began where they have now returned—UCLA, and not coincidentally. Barbara studied art at UCLA from 1919-1923, as a member of the school’s first graduating class as a UC—then called the Southern Branch of the University of California and located in East Hollywood on Vermont Avenue. She returned to teach art from 1925-1930, during which time the campus relocated to Westwood. She and her photographer/writer husband Willard moved to New York in the 1930s and lived there for the rest of their lives (Willard died in 1967, Barbara in 1992). Throughout Barbara’s later years, and after she passed, her children and grandchildren increasingly took care of her and Willard’s materials, handling research and image requests for many years. By the time UCLA acquired them, they had been stored in several locations on the east coast. Barbara and the family all wanted the collection to be stewarded by the UCLA Library, and in December 2014, they packed and loaded it onto a truck bound for Los Angeles. The very space in which I am processing the collection is just steps away from where Barbara taught over 90 years ago!  

As the collection materials have moved from their creators to family members to a major research university to be processed by archivists and then used by researchers, the materials’ context has shifted, as well as its arrangement and condition. This shift in context has influenced the meaning and value of the materials over time (both its research and monetary values). Although one could do a deep analytical dive into U.S. cultural history from 1920 onward, I will be overly-simplistic for the sake of brevity: Barbara was able to create and teach art in the 1920s because her California family and the university she attended culturally valued art as an endeavor. Barbara chose to make modern art (including modern photography of modern dancers) because she, and increasingly American culture, valued modernism. She, the dancers she photographed, and other modern artists also helped propel modernism forward. Willard too, in various professional arenas, helped popularize photography and legitimize it as a modern art form. American culture’s dominant, optimistic view of the benefits of technology, such as photography and other increasingly affordable innovations) helped as well.

Barbara Morgan, Merce Cunningham - Totem Ancestor, 1942. Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Barbara and Willard made their livings from, and developed their reputations on, being at the cultural forefront. Their work shaped their reputation, and they considered their work worth keeping, and taking care of, as part of perpetuating that living and reputation. Barbara’s records include her research material documenting the methods she studied and used for archivally printing and storing her photography. The collection also shows extensive evidence of her putting her research into practice! After Barbara passed, the family maintained and promoted her archive. But to do so involved many hands managing the materials over time, and resulting in the disruption of much of the collection’s original order. This has challenged as well as freed the archivists processing it, but I sometimes wonder what contextual information has been lost through the changing arrangement.

Eventually for the family, Barbara’s archive and legacy (with the aid of the continuing high cultural and market value of modernism) became an inheritance to be appraised, sold, and legally transferred. LSC acquired the collection in part because of Barbara and Willard Morgan’s roles in the history of modern art and photography, and because of their Southern California, and particularly their UCLA connection. The UCLA campus, and the Charles E. Young Research Library, are historically and intrinsically aligned with modernism in Southern California, which is reflected in its collecting areas. Also, LSC collects and provides access to distinctive collections, such as the Morgan papers, to further its mission within a research university. We process materials, preserve them, and provide access to them because they represent our respect for culture, history, and evidence. The value of the Morgan collection also benefits from the increasing study of female artists and the persistent cultural dominance of modernism internationally. Indeed, LSC has received several requests to exhibit or publish Barbara’s photography outside of the United States since the collection’s acquisition.

Elsa Neumann, Portrait of Barbara Morgan, 1940. Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Aside from the ways I’ve already described in which pre-acquisition phases of the Morgan collection’s “life” have affected its archival processing, other aspects of my experience in working with the material have been dominated by the theme of movement. There have been logistical shifts, such as receiving the project reins from the previous Morgan contract archivist, Kelly Kress, and working with a new supervisor three months into my contract. There has also been constant physical movement--a major part of any archival processing project (especially for visual materials-heavy collections). This may seem to be a mundane or insignificant aspect of the process to non-archivists and, therefore, tends to be underappreciated in terms of the significant time and physical problem-solving skills required. I am fortunate to be able to process in a large workspace in Powell Library, but it took a while to be able to move myself, my work station, and the material from LSC in Young Research Library, as well as from offsite storage (and sometimes back again). During processing, the oversized material continuously shifts, like one of those plastic sliding square number puzzles.

Morgan processing HQ at UCLA.

The Barbara and Willard Morgan papers (Collection 2278) will be fully available for research in fall 2019.

For more information on the Morgans and the collection, see curator Genie Guerard and archivist Kelly Kress’ 2017 article in SAA’s Performing Arts Section newsletter, Winter 2017 (pages 24-35).

See the Morgan family’s video farewell to the collection.

Lauren McDaniel is the temporary Visual Materials Processing Archivist in Library Special Collections. She has held previous temporary appointments at LSC, including as archivist of the Susan Sontag papers. She earned an MLIS from UCLA, an MA in Design History from the Bard Graduate Center, and an MA in History from the University of Delaware.