Books exhibit sparks nostalgic response

Books hold a special place on and off the shelf. Whether they’re printed on toothy stacks of…

Nishant Singh | Staff Photographer

Karen Kaighin’s exhibit in Barco Law Library portrays the simplistic nature of a popular item.

Books hold a special place on and off the shelf. Whether they’re printed on toothy stacks of paper and frail pages or viewed on a touch-screen pad, these seldom predictable encounters tend to show up in all aspects of life.

In the exhibit appropriately titled “Books,” now on display in the Barco Law Library Gallery, local artist and photographer Karen Kaighin captures the simplistic beauty of books in a series of images. The pictures represent the book as a physical entity that holds not only compilations and information, but also the stories of the people who once held it and made it part of their lives.

Taken in homey lighting, some of the pictures have slanted shadows that caress the book edges, almost enticing the viewer to pick up the book and see what mysteries it has to hold.

Associate director of the gallery Marc Silverman coordinated this exhibition and began the process of inviting Kaighin to display her art more than a year ago.

“In creating exhibits, there are a lot of little things such as press releases, insurance for the art, et cetera, and the gallery itself is usually booked one to two years in advance,” Silverman said about the curating process.

Kaighin is a local artist whose work and alternative methods of photography are well-known in the Pittsburgh area.

“Karen works with alternative processes in photography,” Silverman said.

Most of her photos are taken using nontraditional cameras, and Kaighin emphasized her love of using film to shoot her photos. Describing her photographic process, Kaighin said that after she took the initial film photos, she then “scanned the negatives of the photos and made digital prints for the finished products.”

This method seems to be dying out in today’s modern digital realm. “I like the look of film and feel a kind of nostalgia for it,” Kaighin said. Her method of photography helps to draw a different relationship between the process and the images.

For the Barco exhibit, Kaighin primarily took photos of reader’s encyclopedias and a few mystery novels. The close-up photographs portray an arrangement of stacked books, their perspective largely focused on the rigid lines of pages compressed together.

The images of worn, well-used books seem to parallel the traditional methods in which the images were taken. Kaighin explained her inspiration behind the exhibition, stating that many books “just sit on the shelf.” But in generations past, these encyclopedic books were what was used to conduct research.

Many of the books she photographed were from her mother, and the photographs exhibit the wear and tear associated with their use. The exhibit revels in a topic apart from today’s online cataloging, which allows us to read texts on a computer, iPad or other electronic screen. This exhibit shows the discrepancy between the past, the present and the future of books.

“There are always going to be people who cannot afford to buy eBook readers,” said bibliographer and public services librarian Ray Anne Lockard of the Frick Fine Arts Library. “Those people need access to information, including recreational reading, just as much as people who have electronic devices. There appears to be a growing divide between the information haves and have-nots,” she said.

Kaighin’s art shows the necessity  of the physical book and also demonstrates that a book is in itself a work of art, a kind of portable sculpture that has value and use — spine and all.