Virtual resistance.

The exhibition "Anxious Libraries: Photography and the Fate of Reading" offers a complex account of the place of photographic imagery in the ongoing proliferation of digital technologies. The photographic work exhibited employs a variety of formats, ranging from installation to painting to silver-halide based imagery. The. imaginative approach of "Anxious Libraries" is to link books and photographic prints together as "endangered" artifacts, both facing an uncertain future of digital transformations. In the face of this challenge, the exhibition fashions a common past for books and photographs as means of transmission of knowledge and as capable of registering traces of use and physical change. By framing the impact of digital technologies upon photography in relation to the library - rather than the art museum - "Anxious Libraries" extends reflection on the impact of digitizing upon photography by enlarging photography's historical and artistic roles to encompass the library's role as a repository of verbal and visual forms.

What does it mean for contemporary art that photographers are thinking about these issues in relation to the library? Does this exhibition elicit a nostalgia for the past or provoke critical examination of our present state? Among the earliest works in the exhibition are Emmet Gowin's formal studies, dating from the 1970s, of books in different states of natural and man-made decay, brought on by fire, water and mildew. Gowin's metaphors for change, decay and the passage of time sets an elegiac tone for the exhibition. The beauty and order of the prints makes the deterioration of the books as objects more deeply felt. Other artists elaborate upon this theme of the passage of time registered on the pages of books and the survival of images. Gillian Brown's large works are palimpsests of photographic images - primarily school children from different historical periods and of different races - overlaid with printed words from elementary school primers and chalk board writing from math, music and penmanship lessons. Brown's use and reuse of black and white photographs and texts, particularly those evoking the style of earlier time periods, seems, perhaps, too deliberate an aesthetic of nostalgia, yet encourages the viewer to reflect upon memory, knowledge and continuity. In contrast, Clarissa Sligh's well-known photo book, Reading Dick and Jane With Me (1989), undercuts nostalgic reflection upon photographic representations of childhood, but the placement of the work in a small room adjacent to the main gallery muted its contribution to the exhibition as a whole.

Ron DiRito's work shares Brown's sense of historical loss and makes concerns over changes looming in a future digital age more explicit. DiRito's installation "Internal Difference (version two)" places a battered metal desk, probably a veteran of years in some institutional setting, in the center of a small room lined with framed, enlarged quotations in French and English from the writings of philosophers Maurice Blanchot and Gaston Bachelard. However, the computer has malfunctioned and the printout of the repeating words are physically and metaphorically illegible. DiRito privileges the physicality of the traditional writing process made palpable through the evidence of piles of pencil shavings and stacks of paper with curling edges piled on the desk. Yet this desire is not without an element of self-consciousness and, perhaps, criticism, for the installation is intentionally stage-like and the viewers watch themselves on a video monitor placed on the desk as they rifle through and touch the items in the open top drawer.

Another aspect of the exhibition is Abelardo Morell's compelling photographs of the open pages, covers and bindings of a myriad of rare and old books. Morell's photographs declare his fascination with reading, with historical processes of engraving and printing and with the book as an artifact. Confounding conventional expectations of the scale of books and pictorial space, detail and light of the photographic image, his works in this series invent a new context for looking at books and the printed page as spaces for the imagination. Rick McKee Hock presents a tour of the specifically photographic archive, collaging a narrative from images derived from a variety of past and present popular culture sources. He blurs some of his appropriated images, while others are cropped or oddly lighted, and all are woven together into an exercise of looking at photographs. Michael Spano also uses the aesthetics of collage to comment upon the interlocking readings of words and photographs. Spano's subject matter derives from the contemporary mass media, including the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

Though some of the artists in "Anxious Libraries" use, as does Mark Alice Durant in "Encomter/Encuentro" (excerpted from "Treasures from the Potato Famine"), contemporary subjects and new technologies to critically examine the process of reading as we know it, none of the artists in the exhibit seem to fear the future or approach it with naive optimism. The exhibition usefully confounds distinctions between photography's roles as historical document, form of artistic expression and vehicle for mass media circulation. It implies that the impact of digitizing on these different uses cannot be unilateral nor deterministic. While the artists in "Anxious Libraries" accept that the new technologies are unavoidable and question the impact they will have, they also insist in different ways upon the continuing value of print and photographic media as an important part of our culture.

PATRICIA JOHNSTON is Associate Professor of Art History at Salem State College and is on the board of directors of the Photographic Resource Center. JOANNE LUKITSH teaches courses in modern art and history of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.