The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection

The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection – Held by the Public Library in New York, the Picture Collection is a unique image bank and precursor to the Internet, made up of more than one million photographs, prints, posters, postcards, illustrations from books, magazines and newspapers, classified by subject. Since its creation in 1915, it has been frequented and used as a resource by the greatest writers, filmmakers and artists, including Diego Rivera for his large murals or by Andy Warhol who used his images for advertisements. It is now the artist Taryn Simon, familiar with working with archives, who is turning this database into artistic material for a large-scale iconographic project by proposing a journey through this corpus of images that also reveals the meaning of our filing systems. Produced in conjunction with the artist, this luxurious book contains 57 images hand-pasted into the book, numerous fold-out pages, and several different papers.