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What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures
A collective case study of photographic culture through the lens of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A massive quantity of museums’ photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.
A massive quantity of museums’ photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.
354 pages, Hardcover
Published April 3, 2023
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November 26, 2022
In and of itself this book was OK, but it has failings of omission: Only one brief footnote mentions Wikipedia, and there is no discussion whatsoever of the vast amount of good work done in the field, on the inter-related projects of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata around museum images (including many from the V&A) [disclosure; I work on that]; no meaningful discussion and barely a reference to the crucial issues of open licensing and copyright expiry; nor Andrea Wallace's recent (2022) and excellent paper "A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK" and related discussion; and no mention of Verwayen, Arnoldus & Kaufman's seminal 2011 paper on image metadata, "The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid".
The paper itself includes the V&A's and others' copyright claims, over images whose copyright has in fact long expired.
On the positive side, the PDF is free to read, via https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/1... - albeit not open licensed.
The paper itself includes the V&A's and others' copyright claims, over images whose copyright has in fact long expired.
On the positive side, the PDF is free to read, via https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/1... - albeit not open licensed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review