Museums have used photography routinely since the 1850s, when its inventorial and reproductive potential became clear. By the late 19th century many museums had photographic studios, producing a wide range of images, both recording their own collections and gathering comparative material from other institutions. By the early 21st century, institutions such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, the Imperial War Museum, London, and Imperial War Museum North, Salford, were making imaginative use of large-scale installations of mounted or projected photographs as an integral part of their displays.
Photographs, made at many points in an object's ‘museum life’, e.g. on acquisition or when being loaned to another institution, are used to record, classify, and investigate objects. Infrared (IR) and X-ray photographs are also used extensively in research and conservation to reveal both the inner structure of artefacts and how they have been made. Complex and sensitive computer-based techniques such as solid-state IR imaging and reflectography are used on paintings to reveal changes, underdrawing, or later restorations. In conservation, pictures are taken before, during, and after intervention to record procedures. There is a sense that a museum object becomes the sum of its photographs.
While often seen as neutral and objective, recording styles have shifted markedly over the last 100 years, reflecting changes in interpretative approaches to objects. To a degree, photographs endow museum objects with certain meanings. For instance, they might be photographed as ‘scientific specimens’ with even lighting and neutral background, or with different coloured backgrounds and lighting to enhance different features of the object. Some museum photographs have been recategorized over the years. For example, Roger Fenton's 1850s photographs of classical statuary in the British Museum, taken largely for inventory purposes, are now seen as ‘art photography’, as are Walker Evans's 1935 images of African art made for MoMA, New York.
Many museums have kept photographic records of their displays which have become important historical documents for understanding the changing presentation of objects. Museum exhibition catalogues have used photographs in an increasingly sophisticated way as a form of ‘take-home’ exhibition. With installation or performance art, catalogue photographs remain the only record.
Since the late 20th century photographs have contributed to the corporate identity of museums. Photographs of objects, including photographs themselves, appear on countless gift items, now major revenue earners for museums, from Julia Margaret Cameron Christmas cards to Muybridge T-shirts. Postcards are important expressions of the identity of an institution and its holdings. These are no longer only ‘scientific’ in style; many objects are represented only through their details, like products in lifestyle magazines—a segment of embroidery, the background of a painting, or close-ups bled off the edges of a card accentuating, perhaps, the exoticism of an African mask.
Apart from the procedures already described, museums seldom make systematic use of photography to record their everyday practices, processes, and hierarchies. However, there is an increasing body of work by art photographers that explores the nature of museums, their work, and their underlying ideologies, for instance that of Thomas Struth, Karen Knorr, and Rosamund Purcell. The Tate Gallery, London, has published a set of documentary-style photographic postcards by Nicholas Turpin presenting a witty and ironic view of the relationship between people and objects in the museum.
— Elizabeth Edwards
Bibliography
- Haworth-Booth, M., and MacCauley, E. A., The Museum and the Photograph: Collecting Photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum 1853-1900 (1998).
- Borne, G., ‘Public Museums, Museum Photography and the Limits of Reflexivity’,
Journal of Material Culture , 392 (1998). - Barker, E. (ed.), Contemporary Cultures of Display (1999).
- Edwards, E., Raw Histories (2001)
