تصاویر نامطمئن: موزه‌ها و کار عکاسان

Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of ’difficult histories’. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 List of Figures......Page 8 Notes on Contributors......Page 12 Acknowledgements......Page 16 Introduction......Page 18 1 Museums and the Work of Photographs......Page 20 The Affective Photograph......Page 36 2 Museums and the Emotional Afterlife of Colonial Photography ......Page 38 3 ‘I Know These Streets’: Photographs, Affective Environments, and the Display of the Conflict in Northern Ireland ......Page 60 Curatorial Strategies 1: Working Images ......Page 70 4 Photography and the Crisis of Ethnographic Display ......Page 72 5 Negative Space: Tracing Absent Images in the National Museums Scotland’s Collections ......Page 90 Curatorial Strategies 2: Photographic Art Works ......Page 110 6 The Aesthetics of the Bear Hunt: Contemporary Photography in the Ecology of a Sámi Museum ......Page 112 7 Haunted Topographies: Landscape Photography as an Act of Remembrance in the Neues Museum, Berlin ......Page 130 Curatorial Strategies 3: Contested Stories ......Page 148 8 The Story of the Netherlands-Indies: The Use of Photographs in the Centre of Indies Remembrance ......Page 150 9 Heroic Stories or Indigenous Perspectives? Polar Expedition Photographs in Norwegian Museum Exhibitions ......Page 166 Working in the Real World......Page 180 10 Curating ‘A Good Type’: Japanese ‘Art’ Photographs in an Anthropological Archive......Page 182 11 Military Matters: Approaches to the Photographic Collection of the Dutch Army Museum ......Page 198 12 Looking at Culture: Visualizing Anthropology at a University Museum......Page 218 Digital Environments and Photograph Collections......Page 238 13 Digital Dilemmas: The Impact of Digital Tools on Photograph Collections......Page 240 14 Observations from the Interface: Photography, Ethnography, and Digital Projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum......Page 260 Index......Page 278

Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums.

This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise.

After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of "Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums."--Page 4 de la couverture