Still Searching…

<p>A few years ago I was talking to a curator of social history in a major British public museum service which I knew held substantial collections of photographs of the local region going back to the 1850s. I asked him how he thought about these photographs in his care, and how they related to the museum’s ethos and activities. To this he responded “well I don’t really – they are just there”. I have been thinking about the ‘just there’ quality of photographic collections ever since. How is it that a body of material, maybe 35,000 glass plates, of substantial importance in regional history can be ‘just there’? How are the tensions of specialness and ubiquity negotiated through institutional practices?</p>

<p>I recently attended a leaving party for a museum photographer of some 30 years service. The usual orations were accompanied by a digital slide show of his work over those last 30 years during which he had excelled in a range of museum demands. He made bundles of sticks look exciting and provided photographs of masks, chests or totem of such technical precision and virtuosic lighting that First Nations carvers in Canada could reconstitute the haptics of their traditional carving practices – retracing chisel marks. It was also a slide show of how a museum sees itself and how it performs its objects. Yet these photographs were, until that moment, invisible as a photographic practice, and above all, they are not understood as part of the photograph collection at that institution. They are non-collections, ‘just there’, everywhere and nowhere.</p>

<div>There is less and less photography (and photographers) in contemporary art exhibitions, but more and more photographs. The photograph is a lens through which we see the contemporary world, which comes to us always already reproduced. Almost every static image we see these days is technically a photograph, since even art critics rarely cross paths with original paintings. <br><br></div>

<div>Edouard Manet’s <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manet,_Edouard_-_Portrait_of_Emile_Zola.jpg"><em>Portrait of Emile Zola</em></a>, from 1868, currently on view at the Royal Academy in London in the <a href="http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/manet/"><em>Manet: Portraying Life</em></a> exhibition is usually interpreted as a testimony of the friendship between the artist and a writer who was one of his strongest supporters in those years. <br><br></div>

<div>“In history everything begins with the gesture of <em>setting aside</em>, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’ This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in <em>producing</em> such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status.” <br><br></div>