Almost News” is an exhibition at KS Art of some 300 press photos and their original captions dating from the 1930s through the 1960s. They are from the collection of Jocko Weyland, an artist and writer. In an interview with the Trib, Weyland talked about the pictures.

I got into collecting press photos in the early 1990s, when I was in my mid-twenties. I found most of the pictures in flea markets. But a lot of these prints ended up floating around out in people’s garages. They were just throwing the stuff away. I felt like I was reclaiming these amazing images that nobody thought were valuable.

I collected for about 10 years. At the end I had around 2,000 pictures. I never counted them. I put them in boxes in categories, like people with animals, swimming, close-ups of faces. It was kind of neurotic.

Part of the reason I started collecting  was because I thought the pictures were really visually arresting. There was something so different-looking about them. So mundane and unadorned, yet they were amazing.

And they were kind of coming out of nowhere. I had never seen them in photo books or galleries. They weren’t great photography with a capital ‘G.’ In fact, most of the time you don’t know who took the picture. There were no credits.

Collecting these photos also became a kind of education for me, like instead of going to grad school. In this weird way I learned about the world through them.

When you’re in school, you get this very formulaic version of history. These photos gave me a much more layered version. It wasn’t just the famous Hiroshima photo or the Russian troops in Berlin. It was like seeing all the “little things” that happened, instead of just the “big things.”

It’s history around the margins. I think that’s what appealed to me.
I would see a picture and say, “Wow! I never heard about any of this.” I think this was kind of a way for me to grasp the infinity of our past.

Most of the pictures in the show are  from the ’40s and ’50s. I didn’t collect anything from after the mid-’70s. I was born in 1967. That decade was too much a part of my own time.

Also, in the ’70s, photographers started using motor drives. That was a lot  less interesting for me.

Most of these guys who took the press pictures in the show used 4x5 Speed Graphic cameras, and they took only two or three frames. But there’s something so real about what they captured. These images don’t need to be explained. They’re not over anyone’s head. Not hifalutin. Somebody is holding square watermelons or a guy is carrying his goldfish on a bicycle or a woman is standing next to a 50-foot-high American flag made out of 1,000 red, white and blue fox skins.

Some of my favorite images are the ones of someone’s dream, an invention that didn’t catch on, of something that came and went. Like the four guitars attached to an amplifier called a Hawaiian guitar. I’ve always been into the things that didn’t quite make it. I always liked the B-team better than the A-team.  

I had originally wanted to show the pictures without the captions but Kerry [the owner of KS Art] convinced me, and I now totally agree that you can’t really separate the two. The captions give the photos a much fuller dimension. They bring you into the period.

There’s a 1943 picture of a Japanese bomber crashing, for example, and in the first sentence it says a “Nip” plane exploded and the second sentence says “Jap.” They managed to get both words in one caption. So when you read these captions, you get the real feel for the time and the language of the times.

If these photographers could see their photos on the wall now, I would hope they would see it as not just something goofy or kitschy, but as a celebration of their work and that they have not been forgotten.

“Almost News: Press photos from the collection of Jocko Weyland” is at KS Art, 73 Leonard St. through Sat., April