The accumulation and subsequent circulation of images from vast collections is a defining mode of contemporary visual culture. This dissertation project historicizes the circulating image collection, offering detailed media histories of image management practices at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and stock photography agency H. Armstrong Roberts, from their founding at the turn of the twentieth century through their digitization at the turn of the twenty-first century. This dissertation examines techniques of acquisition, classification, cataloguing, storage, and search, and their continuity over time, in the context of labor, law, and technological change. In turn, this project highlights the conceptual overlaps between these technical processes and the theoretical discourses of art production and the cultural politics of the image. It emphasizes the theoretical work done in everyday practice and provides essential analysis of the systems that undergird the circulation of images throughout 20th century and today.

This interdisciplinary project draws on frameworks from the fields of art history, visual culture, Science and Technology Studies (STS), library and information science, and media history. Archival research and interviews with current administrators, archivists and programmers provide thick description that captures the everyday life of images in circulation. Ultimately, this project reframes ontological questions as epistemological ones. How are values or expectations about what constitutes an image and what it means to use an image encoded by information structures, and how are these influenced by technology change? What are the shifts in power relations that result from attention to everyday practice, specifically with regard to gender and labor? How has the history of circulating visual material contributed to the development of digital media? This dissertation argues that these three circulating image collections defined distinct genres of the image, established aesthetic and commoditized values for photography, and created logics of circulation and distribution that form the basis for digital platforms for image sharing.