curator

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Mark Haworth-Booth, Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), London

This essay is written from the point of view of a museum curator with responsibilities for photography as an art medium. It is necessarily coloured by 25 years spent looking after the national collection of the art of photography at Britain's national museum of art and design.

Curators serve the practitioners in their field, but they also serve the public at large. In this way, curators are like publishers. They must look both ways, be sympathetic in two directions, be loyal to the artist but also to the visitor. A curator will often be required to perform as an editor, aspiring to refine an exhibition or book to the benefit of artist and audience. Installing exhibitions is itself a minor art form.

Curators must also serve the past and the future as well as the present. And they must attempt to be fair to all comers and not succumb to prejudice or parti pris. They may wish to lead public taste but can only do so by selecting those artists who seem to bear the creative flame. Curators cannot simultaneously work in the public domain and collect privately, or work as artists: these roles could be fatal to the requirement that the curator aspires, like an independent critic, to objectivity, impartiality, and, in the end, justice. If that seems overweening, let us temper it by recalling that the mission statements of most museums usually include the word ‘enjoyment’ as well as ‘understanding’.

Curators of photography need a practical working knowledge of the medium. Most have photographed with some seriousness and learned how to print. Failing direct experience of cameras and darkrooms, curators need regular access to knowledgeable professional photographers, such as the staff of the V&A's photographic studio. They also need a good grounding in the histories of art and of photography, two separate but slowly converging disciplines. They need to see as much historical and contemporary photography as possible. Curators' judgements are necessarily subjective, but their subjectivity must be based on the broadest acquaintance with what has been and is being produced. They need to know who originated ideas or styles and who has copied them, which is the great print, which the work print. They must visit the great collections in Europe and the USA, but also meet their colleagues both from other museums and from universities and art colleges, networking as globally as possible. A photography collection needs a library containing not only the standard histories and monographs but also the major periodicals, such as History of Photography. These should be augmented by information files on photographers and topics which will—if fed over the years—become a unique and valuable resource.

A collection needs a conservator, or access to one, in order to plan storage and procedures for showing the collection safely in the museum's study rooms and exhibition galleries, as well as dealing with any damage and advising on loans to and from other institutions. In order to deliver the artist to the audience, the curator will work with colleagues of all kinds, including accountants, archivists, auctioneers, designers, documentation experts, donors, educators, fund-raisers, gallerists, interns, journalists, librarians, lighting consultants, marketing and press officers, printers, publishers, registrars, security staff, sponsors, technicians, and trustees. Sometimes, in cases where there is a conflict of interest, the curator will need to refer to the Museums Association's Code of Ethics for Museums. However, although always part of a team, it is the curator who champions the medium, with the role of driving forward the programme of acquisition, preservation, information provision, and public access. Curators must be sensitive to change and be willing to make up for the limits of their own expertise by bringing in specialist consultants.

The point of the job is to share the intense visual experiences available from photography. Such experiences are the reason why people become curators in the first place. To share those experiences with as broad a public as possible—primarily in exhibition galleries and study rooms, but also in slide lectures, books, television programmes, and websites—this is the great satisfaction curatorship can bring. Those intense experiences, residing in the photographs, will happily outlast us.Mark Haworth-BoothFern, A., ‘Remarks toward an Ideal Museum of Photography’, in V. D. Coke (ed.), One Hundred Years of Photographic History: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall (1975). Haworth-Booth, M., Photography: An Independent Art. Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum 1839-1996 (1997).

Elizabeth Edwards, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Curatorship of ‘functional’ collections or archives of photographs shares many of its concerns with curatorship of art collections. Although premissed on different assumptions about ‘value’ or ‘importance’, all are concerned with issues of access, preservation, research, and public service, among others. ‘Functional’ collections are those that developed initially as image banks, assembled not for their aesthetic interest but for their informational content, although these categories are far from mutually exclusive.

Such collections can be found in almost every discipline, e.g. anthropology (the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC), medicine (the Wellcome Institute, London), archaeology and ancient monuments (the Palestine Exploration Fund, London), exploration (the Royal Geographical Society, London), engineering, government, regional studies, religious missions, or war (the Imperial War Museum, London). While many such collections still fulfil their original informational roles, they have increasingly been recognized as important cultural artefacts in their own right. The images that comprise them have historical and documentary value in and of themselves, whether the subject matter be water management in the Netherlands or boundary surveys between India and Burma. In addition, the shape of collections—the way in which photographs were acquired, arranged, filed, captioned, and catalogued—provides evidence of the intellectual history or development of a discipline and its use of images. Curators must develop strategies that allow multiple approaches, although in doing so a balance may need to be struck between the preservation of historical photographic documents and the requirements of a picture library.

As the function, meaning, and value of such collections has changed over time, museums have sometimes adopted approaches from art photography curatorship, with its focus on the unique historical object. This shift can create tensions, as the conservation, access, storage, and ethical needs of the collections may be at variance with the institutional structures in which they have developed. Moreover, unlike even major ‘art’ collections, which number perhaps a few thousand or tens of thousands of images, it is not unusual for functional collections (e.g. the Imperial War Museum) to be many times larger. And here, the emphasis is not solely on the single image, as it might be in the case of an art photographer's vintage print, but on the narratives established by series or whole collections. Furthermore, the ‘functional’ aspects of photographs are often manifested through different uses and formats. So it is not unusual for collections to hold a photograph in a number of formats: for instance, negative, contact print, enlargement, cropped publication print. Curators must have specialist knowledge of both their discipline and the history of photography in order to establish informed priorities in managing and presenting these large, complex, multi-layered collections.

Access to such collections is usually through the subject matter of the photograph, the photographer, or the photograph as a physical object, often being of secondary interest. Again, curators require specialist knowledge to manage large data systems organized in this way. Increasingly, functional collections are being digitized. This has advantages for access to and dissemination of photographs in collections, but creates tensions as resources are focused on making content-orientated digital copies rather than preserving the original object with its associated information, such as inscriptions on the mount. Finally, access itself is not always unproblematic. Many functional collections hold images of a sensitive nature which are not necessarily appropriate for general access, whether of war wounds, atrocities, or secret aboriginal religious ceremonies. Curators have to make difficult and informed ethical decisions about the use and treatment of such images, balanced against a commitment to make collections available.

Curators, therefore, like their colleagues in fine art, establish international networks to discuss common concerns, do research on collections, and interpret those collections in exhibitions and publications. There are various specialist groups across the world (e.g. in Britain the Religious Archives Group) interested in the potential and problems of photograph collections within their discipline, and the curatorial standards applying to them. There is also increasing interest amongst historians in the production, consumption, and institutional practices relating to collections. New ways of thinking about functional photographs, beyond the content of the image, demonstrate the interconnectedness of photographic practices and the increasingly blurred boundaries between curatorial practices in different kinds of institutions caring for photographs.Elizabeth Edwards

Featured article: John Szarkowski.

For a list of words related to curator, see:

• Occupations and Job Titles
• Display of Art - curator: person in charge of a museum and the objects in it

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - museumsdirektør, museumsinspektør, kustode

Nederlands (Dutch)
conservator

Français (French)
n. - conservateur (musée, galerie)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kurator

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - έφορος (μουσείου)

Italiano (Italian)
conservatore

Português (Portuguese)
n. - curador (m), conservador (m)

Русский (Russian)
хранитель

Español (Spanish)
n. - director de museo, curador

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - intendent, avdelningschef, tillsyningsman, vaktmästare, förmyndare (skotsk.), medlem av ett förvaltningsråd (univ.)

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
馆长, 评议员, 管理者, 监护人

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 館長, 評議員, 管理者, 監護人

한국어 (Korean)
n. - (박물관 등의) 관리자, 감독, 후견인

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 管理者, 保護者

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أمين, وصي (على متحف مثلا), مراقب‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אוצר במוזיאון, מפקח, מנהל, ממונה‬

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