CDS exhibit offers new look at everyday objects

Spending the afternoon in front of The Collector: Joseph Mitchell’s Quotidian Quest, an exhibition of photography at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, is like spending a long afternoon rummaging through boxes in an eccentric old man’s attic or emptying the pockets of a little boy’s shorts. Someone else singled out these objects, and though the reason behind their selection is a mystery, you’re glad that you looked.    

The show, photographed by Steve Featherstone, features the collected objects of Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell was a writer and journalist for The New Yorker, a list-maker and a careful cataloguer of everyday things. He grew up in North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until the age of 21, when he dropped out to write for the local newspaper. He moved to New York—arriving the day after the stock market crashed in 1929—and traveled between homes in New York and North Carolina for the rest of his life. The eccentrics he wrote about, like the objects he collected, might have disappeared if not for his record of them.

Among the curiousities candidly presented are peapods in jars, broken bottlenecks, old red fire alarms and an image of an intricate, brass doorknob. Beside the doorknob is a photograph of a halved screw attached to a piece of New Yorker letterhead that reads, “mutilated screw that came out of the MUNICIPAL BUILDING doorknob­—see if I can find one to replace it.”

Featherstone photographs the objects with little shadow or reflection, centering them on unobtrusive, white backgrounds. It looks, in some cases, like you could actually pull the object from the wall. His straightforward approach is a fair homage to Mitchell’s journalism. Mitchell immersed himself fully in the lives of his subjects, often studying them for five or 10 years before writing about them. He began writing before the invention of recording devices, so his approach to storytelling was to listen to the stories of his characters until he could accurately speak for them. These oft-neglected personalities included Russian gypsies, a wise homeless man, bartenders and the owner of a flea circus. He allowed the facts of their lives to speak for themselves, without tying them to a greater analysis, context or issue.

The photographs in the exhibition, like the objects in Mitchell’s collection and the characters in his stories, capture the ethos at the heart of effective art­. In the accurate and careful detail of Mitchell and Featherstone, facts speak their own authentic truth.

The Collector is on display at the Center for Documentary Studies until Oct. 24, with an artists’ talk on Oct. 8. For more information, visit cds.aas.duke.edu.