Between the Bylines is a new exhibit at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery that explores the disappearance of newspapers alongside the people who have been left out of their pages. The show runs through December 10.

Arts & Culture

Extra, Extra: New Exhibit at Stone Gallery Finds Inspiration in Fading Presence of Newspapers

Between the Bylines explores the physical media, stories, and people who have been left by the wayside

The thing Susan Bright misses most about newspapers is the smell.

In an age where physical news sources have largely been replaced by their online counterparts and social media, Bright mourns the loss of the tactile, sensory experience of flipping through the pages of the paper—and all the memories she formed around it.

“With it goes not only a history but a way of being as well,” Bright says. “We’d get the paper, read it as a family, we’d all take our [pieces], and then we’d talk about it… That’s what’s lost: a sense of physical community and physical family.”

That sensation, that something is missing or disappearing, led to Between the Bylines, a new exhibit that Bright curated at Boston University’s Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery. With the show, which runs until December 10, Bright and the 14 artists she’s selected, use the fading presence of newspapers as a jumping-off point to explore the people and stories that have historically been left out of the media. 

The artists featured in Between the Bylines obscure, redact, manipulate, and fracture physical news media, encouraging the audience to think about issues of subjectivity and control in the press. According to Bright, it’s not just a look back at the historic value, and failings, of the media but a way of interpreting the current “crisis of information.”

“There’s been sensationalism and lies in the paper for as long as there have been papers,” Bright says. “It’s just accelerated and sped up now. Between the Bylines is actually thinking about where we are now and how we understand [information] now…It’s there to remind us.”

Some artists focused on the written word to provoke the audience.

For A Teenager with Promise, Alexandra Bell took pages from the New York Times and edited them with annotations and redactions of certain sections or words that highlight moments where the paper had misrepresented or ignored people of color. Another artist, Anne Eastman, placed scraps from newspaper photos and text between glass and mirrors, placing old forms of media into a visual experience that aligns more with the verticality of modern social media usage.

Other artists used press photographs to explore the lives of people who have been historically marginalized in media coverage. With Cropping Us In, Odette England superimposed photos of female farmers over press photos of male farmers from the 1940s to 1980s to highlight how women have been erased in media depictions of that industry.

Micky Smith turned her eye to another form of physical news media that has almost completely disappeared: microfilm. These flat sheets of transparent film include transposed, scaled-down versions of documents and newspapers and were a pre-internet way of accessing archival materials. 

While exploring microfiche issues of decades-old papers, Smith was struck by how horrific images captured by photojournalists, such as the famous 1972 photo of “Napalm girl” taken during the Vietnam War, were nestled among ads for everyday household items. The end result is The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, a piece that Bright commissioned from Smith specifically for the exhibit. Smith filmed microfiche of 1972 issues from the Boston Globe and transformed them into a four-screen digital piece that captures how the medium and memory shape culture and perception of historical moments.

Throughout the exhibit, artists explore the idea that information can transform between when a story is reported or a photograph is taken and when readers get hold of and interpret it. By placing press photographs under a pendulum that gradually scrapes away at them,

Clare Strand makes that literal in Entropy Pendulum. This piece evolves over the course of the exhibit: After a few days, each press print gets framed and displayed on the gallery walls.

“It draws on this concept of exploring information and surprise and uncertainty and the circulation and transformation of images as they’re delivered,” Bright says.

From a faded photo to a newspaper front page disappearing under the harsh black lines of redaction, each piece in Between the Bylines manages to underscore that the medium itself is disappearing as the media landscape undergoes a radical transformation. 

There are already generations of people who will never know the smell of a printed newspaper or the joy of a Sunday morning spent reading the paper with family, Bright says. Those experiences have been replaced with new ways of getting and sharing information. Bright hopes that highlighting the absence of newspapers, and certain narratives within them, will ring true at a time when, between social media, online citizen journalists, and AI, the press is yet again transforming.

“This exhibition is really about what’s going or what’s absent or in transition at the moment,” Bright says. “Although it’s disappearing, it’s still really powerful.”

Between the Bylines is on view at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through December 10. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 am to 5 pm, and entry is free and open to the public.