Research is at the heart of Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon’s design studio Alexis & Ginger. The two regularly spend hours browsing the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection — a small room brimming with brown folders holding over 150,000 images and photographs that librarians have been compiling since 1915 — to find visual references for their furniture and lighting. Among their recent finds? Brancusi sculptures, Baroque cathedrals, and ancient symbols, which are tacked up on the walls of their Sunset Park, Brooklyn, studio.
'We are so inundated with imagery, but it's fed to us,' Gordon says. 'An important thing about the Picture Collection is randomness. It's not an algorithm showing us what we’re already seeing or what it thinks we would be interested in. There’s freedom to it.'
