[AMIA-L] John Johnson

[Linda Tadic <Linda.Tadic@HBO.COM>]

John Johnson was the kindest, most generous person I’ve ever known. He was truly without guile.  

He had total devotion to film, dating back to his work with Jay Leyda as a grad student at NYU. John was a principled man, and was a leader in unionizing MOMA’s staff. His development of MOMA’s cataloging database in the early 1990s was unique in that he involved the preservation staff in adding detailed preservation activities to the full record. Because of his diligence and the cooperation he secured between cataloging and preservation, those detailed records will provide a partciular film's intellectual and physical history to MOMA archivists when we are all long gone.

But when I think of John’s contribution to the field of moving image archiving, I can pinpoint one extraordinarily special occasion. At the very first AMIA conference, held in New York in 1991, MOMA hosted a reception at John’s one room (but a large room) apartment in Greenwich Village. John was the kind of person whose door was always open to his friends, and that night he had at least 200 of them squeezed into his apartment, flowing up the stairs to the roof garden, laughing through his front door bearing bottles of wine. To me, that evening was the real birth of the “modern” archival moving image profession in the US, and of AMIA as an organization. Not the bylaws, articles of incorporation, or election of officers--all of course very important--but the comradeship displayed that night in John’s apartment. John’s generosity and humanity embodies what makes the archival audiovisual field a true community in the best sense of the word, as well as a profession.

I will sorely miss my dear friend. 
 
Linda Tadic
HBO
Linda.Tadic@hbo.com
(212) 512-5902