2. Lens Media Lab Background, Collection, Research, Paul Messier

Founded at Yale in 2015, the Lens Media Lab was conceived as a basic research lab dedicated to the material history of photography. A sweeping vision in need of focus, the foundation of the lab was a mix of ideas emanating from conservation practice, the marketplace, as well as scholarly and artistic attentiveness to materiality at a time of momentous change in the technology and practice of photography. Among these cascading strands, the lab’s collection of photographic papers, thought to be the largest of its kind in the world, was and remains the foundational tether both tangible and specific. The lab’s principal asset, the collection instantiates and preserves the expressive language of the black and white print. With the collection at its core, the lab’s identity and purpose solidified around empirical methods to characterize this language and make it accessible. Darkroom to Data describes our tools and inventions but is mainly a platform to consider the knowledge embodied in collections of photographs. These latent patterns, evincing ingenuity, creativity, and relationships across makers and time, are our preoccupation and purpose.