Bill Jay

Bill Jay as seen by Burke Uzzle, 2002

Bill Jay has been involved with photography for many years as a writer, editor and photographer: He's the author of many books on the minutiae of photographic history; founder and editor of the short-lived magazine Album; essayist on the subjects of the why, where and how of being a photographer; and as a photographer himself, has compiled an impressive portfolio of images of photographers from the early 1960s to the present.

And a man after my own heart when it comes to what to do with the flotsam and jetsam of one's life. From the intro to his site:

"Looking up from my desk I see a long row of fat ring-binders containing hundreds of my published articles...several unpublished book manuscripts...a row of authored books...and scores of boxes containing thousands of photographs. This detritus of a life in photography has always posed storage problems and a sense of pointlessness if no one had access to it. However, I always harbored the fond hope that, one day, there would miraculously appear a means by which all this stuff could be freely available to anyone interested in the history and current practice of the medium. That day is now, thanks to the ubiquity of the worldwide web."

And sure enough you can find the entire run of Album in pdf form, hundreds of photogaphs, all his articles (again, in pdf form), his bibliography and more. It's a fantastic repository of not just the "detritus of a life in photography" but the evidence of a passionate and obsessive engagement with the medium. And to our benefit. Here 'tis.

I came to a similar conclusion recently: that my accumulation of ephemera from the history of photography was nothing but a Collyer brothers pile of useless trash unless it was somehow shared with others. (Then, hopefully, it will be seen as an "academic project" available for "research" to further our understanding of the medium.) So I have started mounting the material accumulation of some 30 years of collecting photography-related items.

The latest post is on Harry Callahan and can be found here.