Protest Grim Reapers
Archival Press Photos from Public Collectors
On view Jan 19 – Feb 28, 2023
Reception Jan 19, 6-8pm
Paper Nautilus Books, Wayland Square
19 South Angell Street, Providence, RI, 02906
The Public Collectors project Protest Grim Reapers is a dive into the world of discarded and resold press photo archives. This exhibit reproduces details from 27 press photos of the famed Pale Horse rider, spanning from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Across six of New England’s coldest weeks, we’ll get cozy with the documented personification of death in a neighborhood bookshop.
From the back cover of the book that accompanies this collection:
The grim reaper is an enduring figure at demonstrations. The reaper—or sometimes simply an angel of death—appears at protests for any cause where the gravity of a death figure feels appropriate. The reaper traditionally carries a scythe and wears a black hood and a skull mask or skull face paint, but sometimes the scythe is replaced with a different symbolic object.
For the past four years I have been collecting press photos of grim reapers at protests against hunger, radioactive waste, animal abuse, the death penalty, the Vietnam war, the closing of a Chrysler plant, demands for clean air and water, restrictions on abortion and more. These older press photos are routinely sold on the secondary market by dealers that acquire the archives of newspapers, or others that have purged their file copies. The dates of these photos reflect the availability of darkroom prints and wirephotos, taken before digital photography became dominant at most news outlets.
In recent years, the grim reaper has been in the news when people wearing this costume attended protests against keeping beaches and schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic. In general, the reaper tells spectators: ‘I am here because this is a matter or life or death for someone or something. I don’t want to be here, but because of you, your corporation, your politicians, or your crimes against humanity, my presence is justified. If this wasn’t deadly serious, I would have stayed at home or worn something else.’
— Marc Fischer / Public Collectors
*
Marc Fischer is the administrator of Public Collectors, an initiative he formed in 2007. Public Collectors aims to encourage greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, particularly those that museums ignore. Public Collectors’ work includes the Library Excavations publication series and web project, Quaranzine—which produced 100 single page publications with over 75 collaborators at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Malachi Ritscher—a project about the late Chicago music documentarian and activist, produced for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In addition to Public Collectors, Fischer is also a member of the group Temporary Services (founded in 1998) and a partner in its publishing imprint Half Letter Press (ongoing since 2008). He is based in Chicago. www.publiccollectors.org
Permanent Collection is a series of exhibits about things found, how they were found, and how what was found is shared.
Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.
Thank you to our partners:
Paper Nautilus Books
Gallery Night Providence
The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities
Dye House
The Classic
Hudson Street Deli