Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

I Came to the Museum…

by Vid Ingelevics

January 12, 2024

Introduction

This essay attempts to bring together artistic and academic concerns as related to a series of hybrid artist’s projects carried out by this author in the 1990s and early 2000s that engaged with the museum and its use of photography. This set of related projects is being offered for consideration as a precedent (recalling what has gone before) for the idea of “museum-ing” as defined by the Stedelijk Studies Journal as “a strategy to examine, prod, and speculate on the historical, present and future interstices of knowledges and methodologies.” They are meant to offer potential artistic and curatorial strategies aimed at critically expanding the visibility of the museum’s history through researching, critiquing and disseminating its photographic documentation within potentially new contexts.

“I Came to the Museum” discusses three art projects that were part of a particular social and cultural shift in the art world of the 1990s often referred to as “the archival turn”. As Cheryl Simon notes in her introduction to a 2002 Visual Resources issue dedicated to this observation, “First and foremost, the idea of an ‘archival turn’ makes reference to the increased appearance of historical and archival photographs and artifacts, and the approximation of archival forms, in the art and photography practices of the 1990s.” ^[1] The archival turn itself comes out of postmodern theory, more specifically institutional critique, and is heavily influenced by the seminal writings of Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin on the archive and photography.^[2] Curator Okwui Enwezor, speaking specifically to artists’ engagement with the archive in his introduction to the book accompanying the 2008 exhibition, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, ^[3] wrote that:

“Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against the grain. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional principles underlying the use of the archival document, or it may result in the creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archeological relationship to history, evidence, information, and data that will give rise to its own interpretive categories.”

The projects under discussion here resonate with Enwezor’s observations, especially the refusal to accept the “self-evidentiary claims of the archive” (expanded upon later in this essay). The explorations these works undertook originated in an initial more general curiosity regarding the curious discrepancy between the relative invisibility of the museum’s visual history and the museum’s extensive production of institutional photographic archives. The projects built upon one another as a result of observations drawn from first-hand research in the archives. They evolved from a broader consideration of the relatively unexplored use of photography within a range of museums (aimed initially at pointing to the absence of this history and the potential for the archive to situate the museum itself as artifact), to the ambiguity and complexity of the role of the museum photographer within the institution and, in the final project, to reflect upon the unstable nature of the museum’s photographic documentation as a result of inadequate contextualization by museums and photographers themselves (i.e., treating images as “self-evident”.) These art-based projects were, to my knowledge, amongst the first to draw attention to the instrumental use of photography by museums.

Today, as the Stedelijk Studies Journal’s call for critical engagement with the museum itself attests, the interest in museums and their representational practices seems more pressing than ever. Many museums are attempting to come to grips with their colonial pasts even as they explore potentially more inclusive modes of being for the future. As this essay’s conclusion maintains, examining the museum’s past through its own archival documentation can more firmly situate museums and their authority as historically and ideologically determined through revealing the nature of the activities, labour and labourers (including photography and photographers) involved in constructing and maintaining that authority. Who and what was elevated; who and what was forgotten? Why? Such deeper historical knowledge, whether acquired through the interventions of independent artists or through the research work of engaged members of the museum sector itself, can only contribute positively to the development of a more self-reflexive, transparent position on the part of museums regarding their collections and programming and, thus, their relevance to a broader range of communities.

Coming to the museum

Figure 1 – Installation view, The Centenary of Photography, 1839-1939, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1939. Museum reference #F440. Photographer: Not recorded.

“The lack of scholarly curiosity in how the museum, Art’s ideal home since the Enlightenment, has been photographed is particularly strange given the museum’s recent acknowledgement of photography as an art form.”^[4]
Reesa Greenberg, 1992

In the summer of 1992 I visited the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle hoping to see the central, cathedral-like space of this 19th century museum with its vaulted ironwork and surreal parade of taxidermied animals. I had only seen this space in photos so found it ironic to be informed by the guard that the museum was closed for extended renovations but I could see photographs in the museum archives. A few binders of images were brought out and what they contained became the catalyst for a long-term consideration of the institutional photographic archives of public museums and the photographers who produced their content. The black and white images were of high quality, clearly shot with large format view cameras. They revealed a museum in flux. Dating back to the late 19th century, one could see how display methodologies had changed, how the subject matter ranged from the epic – architectural overviews and exhibits – to the everyday – museum guards’ uniforms, the washing of floors by custodians, the arrival of new modern display cases, an unassuming loading dock.

The images, taken by the museum’s own photographers who often entered this field from commercial photography backgrounds (and, on occasion, the military) ^[5], historicized these authoritative sites of the representation of history in ways that museums themselves rarely acknowledged. The foregrounding by the photographers of human labour over time, including sometimes their own, revealed how museums strained to construct an impression of objectivity in their displays (dioramas, period rooms, etc.) In Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”,^[6] she astutely observes that the same photograph can inhabit “separate domains of culture” and “assume different expectations in the user of the image.” The relativity of photographic meaning Krauss infers here can also be considered in temporal terms. What appears to a critical viewer today as a reflection of the museum’s embeddedness in specific values and ideologies of the past was almost certainly seen by the institution as a simple, objective museological record ^[7] and filed away.

Figure 2 – Copy of c.1880 photograph of the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Le Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Museum reference #P22732459. Photographer: Pierre Petit.

Emergent postmodern movements of the late 1980s and early 90s led by art historians such as John Tagg and Abigail Solomon-Godeau rejected conventional histories of photography in favour of examining the broader uses of the medium.^[8] In light of these developments I wondered why these kinds of images of museums were so rarely seen and whether photo studios and archives might also be found in other major public museums? The idea that pursuing such research might begin to illuminate a blind spot concerning the place of photography within these institutions began to form.

This initial experience led to an exploration that intermittently lasted almost two decades (1992-2009). The three related art and research-based projects completed during that time to be discussed are: Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum (to my knowledge the first exhibition to exhibit and critically consider material from the institutional photographic archives of museums); The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla; and, Between art & Art. These exist to varying degrees – depending upon the project – in a space between the practices of artist, photo historian and curator with the goal of producing productive tensions. By this it is meant that the artist’s reluctance to provide easy resolutions in order to draw the viewer more deeply into the subject met with the historian’s rationally-driven need to produce elucidatory, research-based accounts of the past. Meanwhile the curator, struggling with these potentially conflicting impulses, attempted to arrive at an exhibition form that constructively embodied those contradictions.

Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum

Figure 3 – Installation view, Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum, Gallery TPW, Toronto, 1998. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics.

‘Camera Obscured’ is a curatorial anomaly: an exhibition of historical artifacts and didactic panels that is not an objective, comprehensive museological examination; and an artist’s investigation into historical imagery that does not result in appropriation. For these reasons, Ingelevics’ hybrid show falls through the cracks even as it tells us where those cracks are. ^[9]
Lisa Gabrielle Mark, 1999

As noted, my initial interest was in both the nature of the photographs produced by museums of their own activities and in the photographers who took them. What was the status of museum photographers within their respective institutions? What value did the museums place on the visual histories of their institutions that their photographers were creating?

In terms of critical awareness of the existence of these images outside of the museum in the early 1990s Reesa Greenberg’s essay, “Objects of Curiosity: Photographs of Museums”, was one of the only texts that directly addressed museums’ use of photography.^[10] It proposed the study of a then unrecognized usage of photography – ironic, as she pointed out, given museums’ influence on defining histories of photography.^[11] Greenberg took special note of what she identified as the generic images produced by most museums: exteriors and “quintessential interior views” ^[12] – installation shots and details of exhibits.

Figure 4 – London and North Eastern Railway container being loaded, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1939. Museum reference #80565. Photographer: not recorded.

She also noted the mounting interest at the time by postmodern artists in making their own photographs of the museum’s banal spaces – its “loading docks, storerooms, ceilings, stairs, signs, guards, views from the museum.”^[13] For example, photographer Richard Ross produced images of the storage areas and displays in (mostly) natural history museums, published in his book, Museology, in 1989^.[14] While the types of images produced by these artists – positioned as art – helped to make the museum more “visible” they could not offer the same sustained, in-depth views of the museum and its workers over time as those found in the museums’ own institutional archives. Canadian cultural critic and art historian Dot Tuer touched upon this point in writing about the Camera Obscured exhibition when it toured Canada:

“It is one thing for a contemporary photographer, schooled in postmodernism, to expose the mechanisms of representation, but quite another for a staff photographer to do so (whether self-consciously or not) in an era when the photograph, like the museum, was assumed to be a purveyor of objectivity and truth.” ^[15]

Eventually, research visits were made to a range of major museums in North America and Europe between 1992-96.^[16] While Camera Obscured was firmly lodged in the analog world (film, negatives, darkrooms, etc.) it is interesting to observe that these visits in the 1990s were happening on the cusp of a significant shift from analog to digital forms of documentation and storage within many of these institutions; a process that, not surprisingly, led to later debates concerning the potentially negative impact of digitisation on photographic collections and archives.^[17]

In 1996 an invitation was received from the Photographers’ Gallery in London to consider producing an exhibition based upon my museum photo archive research.^[18] In accepting the offer, I decided to use a conventional-appearing art historical exhibition form but, as an artist, to intervene in certain of those conventions in an attempt to create space for viewers to arrive for themselves at some of the questions that arose through archive research such as issues around tensions between photographic aesthetics and informational value, inconsistencies concerning image authorship and metadata and the hierarchy of labour in the museum. The intention was for the exhibition to feel familiar yet somehow strange and to bring special awareness to the work of “producing” the museum and, consequently, to its status as a historical artifact in its own right.

Social anthropologist, Georgina Born, viewed the London exhibition and observed that:

“Central to the curator’s intention has been to stimulate a consciousness of the social relations of the museum as a working institution and of its varied and constituent labours. It is explicit in the curator’s own labours, which sketch out in the exhibition a visual anthropology [that] taken back inside the museum has the potential to contribute to an unprecedented reflexivity concerning its practices and history.” ^[19]

Camera Obscured was loosely organized thematically with no master narrative proposed. Subjects were diverse: labour in the museum (including photographers at work in the museum or their studio); exhibit construction; renovations of the museum; copy stand setups; infrastructure; gift shops; visitors; and museums during wartime (when the usual sense of distance between public museum and state collapsed). The 89 images spanned a period of approximately 100 years from the 1860s to the 1960s, the time during which large format view cameras were used almost exclusively for documentation resulting in an astonishing level of detail in some images.

Figure 5 – Copy of 1924 photograph of photographers at work in the ‘operating room’ (in the High Attic), The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museum reference #: MM1029B. Photographer: not recorded.

A strategic intention was to clarify how the contents and function of these archives differed from the mechanisms of the photography market (which increasingly saw vernacular historical photographs as new commodities to exploit). This was done through the act of ordering new prints from each museum archive – as one does from any public archive – and to not include so-called “vintage prints” (by definition, prints made close to the time of the taking of the photo). The museum reference number was always given, if available, and, theoretically, anyone could have reproduced the entire exhibition by simply ordering the same prints from the museums. Constructed scarcity was rejected in favour of informational value. Not surprisingly, one major Canadian museum turned down the exhibition, objecting that some “copy prints” rather than all “originals” were contained, a seeming misunderstanding of how the photo archive in their own institution operated. Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, had questioned how the fiction of the “original” was used to create artificial value for photographs when he pointed out: “From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.” Here, Benjamin resisted the application of fine art models to photography that assign special value to works seen as rare through being singular, hand-made objects (paintings, in particular) in favour of the democratization of information and content that photography can provide.^[20] This can obviously include copy prints and is, in fact, the basis upon which institutional photographic archives function.

Figure 6 – Sample exhibition photo caption from Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum. All captions used this template.

Additionally, the photo captions were used to impart key information about the workings of the photo studios: caption descriptions reflected only information supplied by museums (conveying what was known – or not known – about the subject and image use); whether a photographer’s name was recorded or not was noted; copy photographs were identified as such (common in older working archives containing breakable 19th century glass plates); copy photographers were acknowledged; photo studio printers of the exhibition photographs were given credit; and, the above-mentioned image reference number provided to allow for ordering of prints.

The exhibition also included seven text panels that were not placed at the beginning of the exhibition where didactics normally are found in historical presentations. Their subject matter was not directly linked to specific images but explored a range of issues: early examples of the use of photography in museums; subjectivity and arbitrariness in the archive; the rendering of the institution itself as historical artifact through documentation; the question of copy photographs; and, the repression of the aesthetic dimension of record photographs.

Lastly, Camera Obscured featured a set of six images framed to the same size as the text panels [four of these are visible in Fig. 7].

Figure 7 – Installation view showing section of text panels and mirror images, Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum, Gallery TPW, Toronto, 1998. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics.

These images, all from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archive, were originally meant as documentation of mirror frames dating from the 1860s to the 1920s. The earliest images show an unacknowledged reflection of the museum photographer or the camera in the mirror. By the 1920s photographers had learned how to efface themselves from the mirrors as the mirror only contains a blank white space, a fitting metaphor for the unwillingness of the museum to recognize its own historicity, an acknowledgement that would also have opened the doors to questions around tenets of objectivity and realism that underpinned the museological enterprise from its earliest days. ^[21]

Figure 8 – Detail of audio cassettes, interviews with museum photographers and archivists, 1993-94. All interviews by the author.

Apart from the exhibition itself, a further “intervention” was the recording of audio interviews with some of the museum photographers and librarians and archivists working with their photographs. This initiative arose from the ambiguity of the photographers’ situation within the museum (“re-productive” as opposed to “productive” labour, as Georgina Born put it) ^[22] and the frequent absence of accreditation for their work (attributed usually to the institution). My intent was to literally insert the voices of the museum photographers into their own institutional archives. Copies were made of interview tapes (analog audio cassettes) and donated to each museum’s archives with the hope that future researchers might make use of them.

To conclude my discussion of Camera Obscured it is important to highlight a particularly perplexing observation that arose during my research. In too many institutions the collection of negatives and prints that reflected a museum’s institutional history were stored under exceedingly poor and even actively destructive conditions. For example, in a 1994 application to the National Endowment to the Humanities a Metropolitan Museum of Art conservator seeking financial aid to conserve the institutional photo archive materials described the dire situation as follows:

“The negative collection has been continuously housed [in the High Attic/Photo Studio of the museum] over the last 90 years in what may be the worst possible conditions for the stability of photographic materials… In terms of the negative collection, however, this means that the environment resembles that of a poorly moderated greenhouse with temperatures reaching over 100°F on sunny summer days and dropping considerably on cold winter nights. No attempt is made to control the relative humidity, which can fluctuate between 50 and 90% RH on any given day. …”^[23]

In addition, the fragile negatives had been housed in acidic paper sleeves inside oak cabinets. Cumulatively, this led to large numbers of negatives being lost annually by that time. Conditions were no better at some other major museums. In the British Museum’s negative storage room, the presence of “vinegar syndrome” – characterized by a pervasive and unmistakeable vinegar-like odour – was a sure sign of the disintegration of their acetate-based negatives.

While these museums have since begun conservation and preservation efforts, what I encountered then was baffling: why, in the 1990s, at some of the world’s largest and richest museums, when the destructive effects of poor photo storage were already well-known, had museum administrators still not addressed the fragility and on-going damage to the photographic materials in their own archives? Why was the visual evidence of their own histories not given higher priority?^[24]

While the specific circumstances within each museum cannot be accounted for here, some more general observations made while carrying out research can be offered. A long history of treating documentation photos like ordinary paper records due to a lack of knowledge of specific issues related to their stability often meant decades of poor photograph and negative storage practices. As a result, even once the ongoing damage was recognized, the economics of stabilizing the photo archive, saving thousands of negatives and introducing proper conservation storage standards was daunting and, indeed, seemed to paralyze museum administrations. As well, a long-standing hierarchical differentiation often existed between the spaces in which museum collections were stored and the space of the photo and negative archives. Controlled environments were created for collections materials but not for the archives thus maintaining adverse conditions for institutional materials.^[25] To further complicate these problems, within some museums the institutional photographs and negatives were not located in a centralized archive at all but spread throughout the museum in the filing cabinets of various departments mixed with other types of documents so their true numbers were unknown.^[26]

Photographs tended to be seen as simply illustrative or adjuncts to museum histories defined by “authoritative” figures so photographs’ potential informational status as revelatory texts in their own right (as Victor Burgin discussed in his 1977 essay, “Looking at Photographs”) ^[27] was often ignored. However, the digitization of the photo archives that begins in the late 1990s presented the potential for greater dissemination (and monetization) of the photo archive contents ^[28] and, perhaps coincidentally, aligns with the beginning of many museums’ efforts to deal with the fragility of their institutional image repositories.

Following is a small additional sampling of photographs from the exhibition. They are drawn from larger groupings within the exhibition including: museum labour – here revealing the historical nature of museum security at the Art Institute of Chicago; museum labour again (highlighting gendered roles) in the assembling of a dinosaur skeleton for exhibit; the militaristic roots of the museum guard profession; and, the disturbing degree to which the authority of German museums was usurped by the Nazi government in the 1930s to validate racist ideologies. Even these few images begin to demonstrate the possibilities for rich new research paths that museums’ institutional photography archives offer.

Figure 9 – Billo and Bella, museum guard dogs, with trainer in painting galleries, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1941. Museum reference #C13946. Photographer: not recorded.

Figure 10 – Construction of Diplodocus forelimb, The American Museum of Natural History, 1916. Museum reference #35059. Photographer: A. E. Anderson.

Figure 11 – Museum guards’ winning shooting team, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1930. Museum reference #MM2930. Photographer: not recorded

Figure 12 – Opening of the anti-Semitic exhibition Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), The Deutsches Museum, 1937. Museum reference #L029. Photographer: not recorded.

The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla

Figure 13 – Installation view of opening section of Edward Milla’s exhibition, Up at the Photographers, Gallery B-13, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1951. Photographer: Edward Milla.

“…it becomes plain that the museum photographers themselves are suspended discursively in a liminal space somewhere between ‘artists’/authors and anonymous technicians or functionaries, at some mid-point in the social hierarchy of the museum. Neither consistently accorded authorship of their own representations, nor consistently anonymous, it is as though the museum is not sure of the museum photographers’ place.” ^[29]Georgina Born, 1998

This second project was premised upon the observation that museum photographers – still at times designated simply as “operators” of cameras – often had an unclear status within their own institutions. Were they creative individuals or simply skilled technicians? Were they historical interpreters in their own right or museum workers just following orders? This project moved from a survey of many photographers’ works at numerous museums, as in Camera Obscured, to considering one photographer at one museum – Edward Milla at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The following discussion of his work, its reception and my exhibition is adapted, with revisions, from my 2008 essay, “Unsettled Tensions.” ^[30]

The project took the form of an art installation and is based upon a specific instance of institutional amnesia, a “forgetting” of its own history that occurred at one of the world’s most prominent museums. It highlights that the histories of major institutions are rarely “written from below”.^[31] What was forgotten by the Met was the occurrence, in May 1951, of an unusual exhibition produced by the museum’s then-chief photographer, Edward Milla, to celebrate his 50th year at the museum. Milla was accorded this honour by the museum’s trustees in recognition of his lengthy career, and he was the first (and perhaps only) museum employee to

exhibit his work in one of the museum’s public galleries. However, for undocumented reasons those same trustees decided to exclude the show from the following year’s annual report on the museum’s activities. This essentially sent his exhibition into historical obscurity. What remains in the museum’s various archival repositories is a press release and a few poorly copied news clippings. ^[32]

Figure 14 – Press release sent out by Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding Milla’s 1951 exhibition.

Milla’s exhibition, Up At The Photographers, which ran for sixteen days, from May 18 to June 2, 1951, was impressive in its range and ambition. Key to its uniqueness was that a museum employee who was not a designated curator or historian was de facto functioning as one in relation to the institution itself. It really could not be otherwise as his life’s work produced many of the images from which the visual history he presented could be constructed.

Figure 15 – Installation view of historical section of Edward Milla’s exhibition, Up at the Photographers, Gallery B-13, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1951. Photographer: Edward Milla.

His exhibition comprised over 100 photographs accompanied by texts that featured personal commentaries on the museum and his involvement. Reflective of photography’s multivalent nature, Milla structured his show in several parts. In one he featured images that depicted the architectural and social history of the Met (rare photographs of museum employees such as educators, guards and photo studio staff at work). In another he presented an abbreviated tutorial on museum photography that, from our perspective, reveals the subjectivity, contingency and transformative potential that is part of the documentation process. Even though the ideal of documentation entails attaining as close a resemblance as possible to the photographic subject, Milla makes obvious through his examples that there is a range of possible resulting images when an artifact is subjected to the technical and aesthetic choices available to a photographer such as camera angle, lens, film format & type, lighting, contrast filtration and paper choice (if printed).^[33] A perhaps inadvertent result is the provision of evidence that the greater the variation of possible acceptable results, the greater the degree to which any notion of photographic objectivity or the existence of a ground zero of reference is undermined.

Finally, in his third section he presented his favourite record images as aesthetic objects (differentiated by his use of white mattes). This “exhibition within an exhibition” had the effect of confusing the conventional separation of the photography of art from art as photography. By doing so, whether intentionally or not, Milla challenged the institutional denial of the fact that all photographs (all images) have a formal dimension and the so-called record photograph itself embodies a specific aesthetic and is not simply an objective transcription of the real.^[34]

Figure 16 – Installation view of the “artistic” section of Edward Milla’s exhibition (right wall), Up at the Photographers, Gallery B-13, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1951. Photographer: Edward Milla.

No catalogue or publication appears to have been produced, an indication that the museum had no intention of preserving Milla’s formidable knowledge of the institution. The museum was willing to acknowledge Milla’s competence as a photographer and to honour his loyalty but seemed unable to grant him any sense of authority in relation to his perception that the museum’s history was, in fact, also a social history that included the labour and activities of not only its directors, curators and donors but the many other individuals working throughout the museum. This labour also included the very production of the photographic documentation necessary to produce any form of museum history. An exhibition concerned so deeply with the process of documentation at the Met was in the end barely documented.

The exhibition receded quickly from institutional memory, noted publicly probably for the last time in Milla’s 1959 obituary. It would have remained in oblivion had it not been for the 1998 discovery by Milla’s grandchildren of a box of his museum ephemera in the home of their deceased father (Edward Milla’s son). The box contained a small number of 8 x 10 inch black and white installation photographs that Milla himself likely made of his exhibition, now the only visual traces of it. The grandchildren alerted the Met to the existence of the material. The offer to donate Milla’s museum materials back to the museum was, however, turned down. This ambivalence towards recognizing Milla’s unique summarizing moment at the museum motivated one of its archivists to get in touch with me and initiated this project. She felt that this decision was a missed opportunity to reinstate this small but rich moment within the museum’s institutional history.

Initially, a more literal “re-construction” of his exhibition was proposed to Milla’s family, an idea that ultimately proved impossible due to a lack of information about the exhibition, barriers to locating the negatives from which his exhibition prints were made ^[35] and, lastly, the fact that Milla’s own documentation was, sadly, at times inadequate to making out some of the fine detail such as his hand-written image captions. These difficulties made clear that the original exhibition would remain forever inaccessible and that the true subject of the artwork must be its traces – Milla’s surviving photographic documentation. A digital scanner became my “camera”.

Figure 17 – maquette produced as overview of sequencing and layout of Milla’s 1951 exhibition. Not to scale.

A maquette of the original exhibition was produced based on Milla’s existing documentation to aid in understanding the sequence and placement of his images and texts. Then high-resolution digital scans were made from his original documentation of the 1951 exhibition. Scanned were the large panels upon which his images were affixed and the texts that took several forms, from handwritten captions accompanying individual photographs to three-dimensional lettering on the wall that gave the exhibition title and short statements in Milla’s own words.

For my installation all of the scanned exhibition elements were digitally straightened and then printed to approximately their original scale and sequenced as they appeared in Milla’s documentation.

Figure 18 – scan of small section of Edward Milla’s documentation of his 1951 exhibition, Up at the Photographers. Scan: Vid Ingelevics

The digital scanner was used with the same intent with which Milla used his camera except that being “documented” were Milla’s photographic records of his exhibition rather than his actual exhibition. In a sense, an overarching “copy photograph” was made of his documentation. The effect of scanning small sections of a two-dimensional photo is that the photographic qualities of Milla’s photos – receding perspective, focus (or its lack), print contrast, accidental camera movement – became heightened when enlarged again. Although referencing secondarily his original 1951 exhibition, these limitations, distortions, omissions, and aesthetic qualities of the record photograph itself were foregrounded in this process. The line between aestheticised fiction and supposedly uninflected fact in photography was intentionally rendered elusive.

As Milla’s exhibition is re-presented as a total entity (an exhibition as a complete three-dimensional visual and conceptual form) rather than as a series of discrete images and texts (as in the original exhibition), it also made critical the presence of the viewer’s body in the space of the installation. The re-production of the appearance of the exhibition simultaneously re-produced the space that it once took up. In this way it restored a missing sense of depth that photographic documentation removes from its subjects as it reduces them to two dimensions.

The contemplation of Edward Milla’s work as a photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his lost 1951 exhibition and its documentation focused on making the viewer aware of the space between photographic images and their referent (here, Milla’s documentation). In addition, it also sought to build upon observations made in Camera Obscured regarding the institutional archive’s ability to more deeply historicize the museum – through “reading the archive against the grain” as Okwui Enwezor put it ^[36] – and on the tension between the art of photography, understood as a mix of aesthetics and technical mastery, and the photography of Art as a supposedly transparent and objective form of documentation .^[37] It is the ambiguity and irresolution produced by the latter that became a central motivation for the third project, Between art & Art, discussed in the next section of this essay.

Figure 19 – scan of small section of Edward Milla’s documentation of his 1951 exhibition, Up at the Photographers, in which he used actual photo work orders (reversed to black) as a base for his wry comments. Here he writes: “Opportunity – good record shot. Can you have your men and lights downstairs in 10 minutes?” Scan: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 20 – Installation view, The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, 2009. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics.

Figure 21 – View of hallway outside Met photo studio, 2000. Visible through the door is a mural-sized version of the 1924 image of Edward Milla at work (see Fig. 5). Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Between art & Art

“… much more is at play in the evidentiary status of photography that goes beyond the indexical nature of the single image. What happens when we consider the abundance produced through photography and film, which has led to an ‘ineradicable surfeit’ of detail that characterizes photography and film as objects and the archives that contain them?” ^[38]Gregg Mitman and Kelly Wilder, 2016.

Figure 22 – Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum #17, Rotterdam, 2006. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 23 – Sprengel Museum #8, Hannover, 2006. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 24 – Victoria and Albert Museum #3, London, 2005. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 25 – Kunstmuseum Thun #2, Thun, 2005. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 26 – Sprengel Museum #16, Hannover, 2006. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 27 - Metropolitan of Art #22, New York, 2000. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 27 – Metropolitan Museum of Art #22, New York, 2000. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 28 – Victoria and Albert Museum #23, London, 2005. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 29 – Vancouver Art Gallery #13, Vancouver, 2008. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Figure 30 – Art Gallery of Ontario #4, Toronto, 2005. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

In discussing Between art & Art, the third of my related projects, I would like to briefly return to Reesa Greenberg’s quote at the beginning of this essay in which she notes the discrepancy between the virtual invisibility of a consideration of the use of photography within museums and the outsized influence many of the same museums have had in the shaping of conventional histories of photography. In the 1990s, as postmodernist criticality deconstructed notions of photographic objectivity and the sense of indexical realism upon which it depended, many art institutions began to exhibit the work of artists engaged in such a critique of photography. However, the implications of the resulting skepticism towards the seemingly transparent nature of photography were never brought to bear upon the work produced by museum photo studios. Between art & Art was my attempt, as an artist, to bring that scrutiny to the museum record photograph through art; through making my own museum “record” photographs.

The core of this project is a performance, an “impersonation” of a museum staff photographer. In this regard, the same type of photographic equipment and analog film was utilized – a large format view camera and film that produced richly detailed images – as was in use from approximately the 1850s to the 1960s in most larger public museums.^[39] The taking of photographs with a large format camera is an elaborate and highly visible activity – situating a hefty tripod supporting a relatively large unusual-looking (to modern eyes) camera that requires pulling a black cloth over one’s head to focus is not unobtrusive. The very act of making a photograph with such apparatus is performative but, in addition, I imagined I was carrying out non-existent assignments within the museum. Subject choices – banal staircases, inter-gallery hallways, construction, museum guards, fire extinguishers, etc. – reflected observations of typical subject matter (see Fig. 31 below) made originally during my archival research. In some cases, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, permission was requested and a return was made to the same museums whose archives I had visited.

While carrying out the earlier research it was found that a surprisingly minimal amount of contextual information (metadata) was assigned to many images at the time of their taking. This made it difficult to be sure of the specific intent of an image nor how it might have been used by the museum. The notion, seemingly held by the original photographers and commissioners of these photographs, that they would be enduringly self-evident, was mistaken. This assumption appeared to be based on a belief that intentionality alone inherently produces some kind of singularly stable and timeless meaning even when unrecorded. In my experience the result of the meagreness or outright absence of a textual anchor did not necessarily make the images “meaning-less,” but actually made them, in a sense, more “meaning-full”. Curator James Lingwood speaks to this seeming contradiction in a discussion of the suggestive power of the deadpan photographs of plant forms by Karl Blossfeldt in the 1920s and 30s^[40] when he states: “What Blossfeldt’s work communicates, in its rigid clarity, is the paradox whereby the most distanced, objective use of the camera is precisely that which releases most successfully the transformational and associative properties of the photographic work, in book or print or exhibition form.”^[41]

Figure 31 – Uncaptioned Guard Book photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, c.1915. Photographer: not recorded.

To offer an example, one can compare Fig. 31, a pair of uncaptioned images originally shot in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1915 and copied from the V&A’s Guard Books during my research, with Fig. 28, also from the V&A but shot by the author 90 years later in 2005. All three of the images are descriptive, neutral-seeming descriptions of museum infrastructure. My 2005 photograph mimics the technical acuity and purposefulness of the historic images (the difficult to produce images constitute proof of intention) but, at the same time, figuratively “flattens” the importance of everything within the image to the point that there is no singular subject to focus on for the viewer – i.e., there is a lack of an obvious hierarchy of attention.

In this visual democratization process all of the elements within an image become potentially significant and especially when the originally intended purpose nor subject has been made clear. In addition to considering James Lingwood’s insight regarding the evocative power of descriptive images one can also return to Victor Burgin here and his contention that photographs are always

“…texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse’, but this discourse, like any other, engages discourses beyond itself, the ‘photographic text’, like any other is the site of complex ‘intertextuality’, an overlapping series of previous texts ‘taken for granted’ at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture.” ^[42]

My goal became to take photographs that gave the impression of intentionality but resisted resolution thus triggering for the viewer the experience of “intertextuality” that Burgin describes. In taking this approach the goals were not the same as the postmodern artists of the 1990s, referenced by Reesa Greenberg, who recorded “loading docks, store rooms, ceilings, stairs, signs, guards, views from the museum.”^[43] Rather than propose the infrastructure of the museum as a kind of theatrical framing device (which I felt my earlier projects had foregrounded through the images made by the museum photographers themselves) I wanted to consider the epistemological instability of the historical museum photograph itself. I hoped to do so through producing a contemporary parallel to my early perplexing experience of coming across many textually unanchored images – similar to those of Fig. 31 – in museum photo archives – undocumented documents as it were.

Between art & Art was carried out between 2000 and 2008 (overlapping with the Milla work), ending when the large format analog film being used was discontinued by Kodak as a consequence of the digital turn. Conceptually, this seemed a fitting symbolic ending for this project. Digitisation had wrought so much upheaval within the field of photography and in how we began to store and access archival materials (and, indeed, even as to what constituted archival material).

Figure 32 – Metropolitan Museum of Art #40, New York, 2000. Photographer: Vid Ingelevics

Conclusion

Figure 33 – Carved walnut wood frame with glass mirror, Victoria and Albert Museum, c. 1890-91. Photographer: Isabel Agnes Cowper.

“Yet, against the tendency of contemporary forms of amnesia whereby the archive becomes a site of lost origins and memory is dispossessed, it is also within the archive that acts of remembering and regeneration occur, where a suture between the past and present is performed, in the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument.” ^[44]
Okwui Enwezor, 2008

The above photo of an ornate mirror frame reflects in its glass a photographer and view camera draped under a dark cloth. This image was included in Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum (see Fig. 7). It was part of a selection of six Guard Book images from the Victoria and Albert Museum (discussed earlier in this essay) that were chosen to make apparent the disappearance of the photographer from the space of the mirror between approximately 1860 and 1920.^[45] My assumption at the time of my research in the 1990s was that this image was taken by a male photographer, perhaps one of the “Sappers” (Royal Engineers) trained by Thurston Thompson, the South Kensington Museum’s first official photographer (now the V&A). I encountered no information at that time that contradicted this inference and the Guard Books, in which Cowper’s photos were placed did not include credits for the photographers.^[46] In spite of the obviousness of the photographer’s reflection in the mirror the image was only identified as being of the wooden frame which alludes to questions concerning photographic metadata that in part motivated the Between art & Art project.

The fact that it is now attributed to Isabel Agnes Cowper, identified as the first female head of photography at this museum (and, significantly, perhaps any museum), is indicative of an ongoing exploration of the museum institutional photo archive that has continued and intensified well after my own archive-related projects. While I was an “outsider” concerning myself with exploring institutional photo archives that then often seemed to be benignly or even willfully neglected by museum administrators, some of the more engaging new research is now coming from individuals working within those very institutions.

Much information about Isabel Agnes Cowper’s history and presence as a photographer at the V&A has been unearthed by Erika Lederman, Cataloguer of photographs at the museum. Lederman’s essay “The Official Museum Photographer: Isabel Agnes Cowper” is included in the book, What Photographs Do.^[47] This 2022 publication, co-edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious, Curator, Architecture and Design at the V&A, reflects deeply on the historical and current status of photography at the V&A. And, in an echo of my own 1990s audio interview initiative, it also includes numerous interviews and texts involving actual museum photographers discussing their work.

To pursue these parallels a little further, the posthumous revelation of Cowper’s historical significance in the early history of photography at the V&A has some correspondence with the Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla and that project’s recovery from historical oblivion of Milla’s long-forgotten exhibition, Up at the Photographers.

The work being carried out at the V&A (and at other institutions) is an acknowledgement that the once neglected history of the use of photography by public museums is, in fact, no longer quite so obscure. Still, a comparative history of the use of photography across public museums, whose absence Camera Obscured endeavoured to point to in the 1990s (perhaps naively given the scope!), remains a challenging prospect. The museum’s photo archives continue to be a rich, barely-mined resource but what has become clearer is that, within specific institutions, productive research is being done today. That research is based on a recognition that a fuller uncovering of the institutional uses of photography can also lead to a more nuanced, self-reflexive and inclusive understanding of museums as social and historical subjects, influential and influenced. Through allowing the fullness of their histories to become an integrated part of their present more clarity can be brought to the museum’s search for future directions.

I am grateful to Erika Lederman and Ella Ravillious at the Victoria and Albert Museum for generously offering their time to discuss current and recent projects as well as their knowledge of relevant work in this field.

About the Author

Vid Ingelevics is a visual artist, independent curator, writer and educator. Working primarily with photography, video and installation, his work has been shown in North America, Europe and Australia. His curatorial projects have been exhibited in North America and Europe and his writing has appeared in arts journals in North America and Europe. He holds the position of Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, where he taught graduate courses related to documentary practices as well as photography preservation. He has had a long-standing interest in all of his work in the representation of the past and the roles of museums and archives.

[1] Simon, Cheryl, “Introduction: Following the Archival Turn”, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 2002. pp 101-107.

[2] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, (New York: Random House, 1970); Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”, Screen, Vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring, 1972); Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, (New York, Schocken Books, 1969).

[3] Enwezor, Okwui, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, copublished by the International Center of Photography, New York & Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, 2008. Pg. 18.

[4] Greenberg, Reesa, “Objects of Curiosity: Photographs of Museums”, Trois, Vol. 7, Nos 2-3, Printemps-été, 1992.

[5] Museum photography, as a practice, does not have a well-documented history, developing as museums increasingly used photography for a variety of purposes over the course of the 19th century. There were no training programs for museum photography. Museum photographers originally seemed to have come from commercial and, in the 20th century, even military photo backgrounds. They adapted their practical knowledge to the specific needs of the museum and, at the same time, shaped the expectations of how a museum photo studio operated. Photo studio apprenticeships were also a way that photographers were trained for museum photography. For example, Edward Milla, subject of the second project discussed in this essay, started as a young boy at the Met as an “umbrella boy” and then was trained by the museum’s photographers, eventually rising to become the Met’s chief photographer. I touch upon the relationship between commercial photography and museum photography in my essay “The Mirror Stage of the Public Museum”, published in the book Lost in the Archives, edited by Rebecca Comay, Alphabet City Media, 2002. pp 109-125.

[6] Krauss, Rosalind, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”, Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 311-319.

[7] The definition of “museology” itself appears to have begun to shift in the late 1980s, moving from primarily addressing concerns with the administration and technical functions of museums to become more about critical reflection on museums’ representational strategies and claims of authority. Tellingly, the book, The New Museology, edited by Peter Vergo, was published by Reaktion Books in 1989 discussing precisely this shift.

[8] John Tagg’s incisive comment from his 1988 book, The Burden of Representation, comes to mind regarding his view that photography “has no unity. It is [but] a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. And it is this field which needs to be made intelligible, not photography as such.” As well, Abigail Solomon-Godeau observed “…I would submit that the history of photography is not the history of remarkable men, much less a succession of remarkable pictures, but the history of photographic uses.” From the introduction to her 1991 book, Photography at the Dock.

[9] Gabrielle Mark, Lisa, “Recurring images: historical photography as contemporary art,” C magazine, Issue #61, Feb-Apr 1999

[10] The only other I located at the time was a more purely historical essay by Christopher Date and Anthony Hamber, “The Origins of Photography at the British Museum, 1839-1860”, History of Photography, Vol. 14, No. 4, Oct-Dec 1990. Hamber’s work was expanded upon in the book “A Higher Branch of the Art” Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839-1880, Routledge, 1996.

[11] For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum – then known as the South Kensington Museum – was one of the first museums to begin to collect photographs, starting in the 1850s through the influence of its Director, Sir Henry Cole. The museum used photography for many purposes. Its photo studio, with a wide mandate to document the South Kensington’s collections, loan objects and infrastructure improvements was created in 1856 and the studio’s photo production was eventually secured in two locations – in the National Art Library and within more than 800 volumes of 17x22inch Guard Books, still available for study by appointment. As well, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have also long been recognized for their definitive collections of photography as art.

[12] Greenberg, Reesa, pg 72, “Objects of Curiosity: Photographs of Museums”, Trois, Vol. 7, Nos 2-3, Printemps-été, 1992.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ross, Richard, Museology, Aperture, 1989. Also, for a more recent example see Museum. 55 Lichtbilder, Institut für Buchkunst, Leipzig, 2003 with photographs taken in a variety of former East German museums by Andre Köhler.

[15] Tuer, Dot, “The Camera and the Museum,” Canadian Art, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1999. pp46.

[16] I visited the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The American Museum of Natural History, New York; The Field Museum, Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The British Museum, London; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Natural History Museum, London; The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris; The Louvre, Paris; and The Deutsches Museum, Munich.

[17] Joanna Sassoon, in her essay, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, published in 2004 in the book, Photographs Objects Histories, ed: Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart, specifically drew attention to the fact that, in the stampede to digitise photo archive collections that began in the late 1990s, “there has been less discussion about what is lost in the process of digitising original photographs and the impact of this loss on research [that is] based on photographs.”

A concrete example of the effects of digitisation in the museological realm would be the discontinuation and removal from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s publicly-accessible Picture Library of the Guard Books for digitisation. The Guard Books are a set of 859 large volumes that contain the entire output of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s photo studio (and more) from approximately 1856 to their discontinuation in 1997. While one could still request special access to view them, the first level of access became the museum’s website as the increasingly fragile volumes were removed and slowly digitised. High resolution photographs taken with large format view cameras lost their rich detail when viewed online due to variables such as scanner and/or screen resolution of the time. Thus, elements once visible when viewing original physical photographs were potentially diminished or lost when viewed on a computer screen. The Guard Books themselves have now been recognized by the V&A as artifacts and The Guard Book Project, focused specifically on these volumes is underway – vam.ac.uk.

[18] Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum opened at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, April 30, 1997 – June 20, 1997. It subsequently toured to galleries in Germany, Sweden and Canada and in 2016 the entire exhibition was donated to the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto.

[19] Born, Georgina, “Public Museums, Museum Photography, and the Limits of Reflexivity”, Journal of Material Culture, 1998, Vol. 3(2), pg 225

[20] In the world of fine art photography scarcity is often artificially created through the production of “limited editions” of images made from original negatives or digital captures with a consequent increase in value.

[21] “Realism… and the illusion of unmediated vision have been central to several kinds of museums for at least two hundred years.” Ludmilla Jordanova, “Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums”, The New Museology, Vergo Press, 1994. pp 35.

As well, I wrote about these images separately from the Camera Obscured exhibition in the previously-mentioned essay, “The Mirror Stage of the Public Museum”, Lost in the Archives, edited by Rebecca Comay, Alphabet City Media, 2002. pp 109-125. I proposed that, due to the lack of specific museum photography training in the earlier years of the photo studios, commercial photography imperatives – i.e., that the bond between consumer (viewer) and product must not be distracted from – were adopted by museum photo studios. As well, the museum itself may have also encouraged the effacement of the distracting photographer from the mirror, which has the effect of reading as a symbolic denial of (literally) self-reflexivity on the part of the museum.

[22] Georgina Born, 1998, pg 242

[23] pg. 26, Pt. XII, Report of the 1995 Condition Survey of the Negative Collection, sub-heading, “The Environment”, by Nora Kennedy, Conservator of Photographs, Paper Conservation Department, from a grant application to the National Endowment to the Humanities by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with the goal of duplicating Museum negatives in immediate danger of deterioration.

[24] Bain, Allen, in the article “The Museum’s Memory”, Museum News, Nov./Dec. 1991 made the following observation in this regard: “How strange that museums, being institutions dedicated to the preservation and study of human and natural phenomenon, should overlook their own duty to organize, preserve, and support financially their own institutional behavior and history.”

[25] Up until at least the time that I was carrying out research at the museum in the late 1990s, the negative storage site in the Met’s High Attic, where the Photo Studio was located, was not designated as an area accessible to researchers nor as an official collections area which resulted in no administrative directives being issued to control the environment in that space.

[26] This was the situation I encountered at the Royal Museum of Ontario, Toronto in the 1990s.

[27] Burgin, Victor, “Looking at Photographs”, Thinking Photography, The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1982. Originally, published in Screen Education, No. 24, 1977. As well, Jean Baudrillard noted that “…For me, image and text are very different and without connections. And so the process of dealing with images was a counterpart to writing. It was the opposite of writing, and not at all an illustration of it.” “The Art of Disappearance”, World Art, Nov. 1994, pg 79.

[28] Public museums have offered sales of their images from early in the intertwined history of museums and photography. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s photo studio was established in the 1850s while, at the same time, private photography companies also negotiated rights to photograph and sell images of objects in museum collections. One of the largest was the Italian company, Fratelli Alinari, founded in Florence in 1852.

[29] Born, Georgina, 1998, pg 242

[30] Ingelevics, Vid, “Unsettled Tensions: The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla,” Questioning History: Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008. pp 58-69. The art installation, The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla, that this essay was based on was presented as part of the 2009 group exhibition, Questioning History: Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam.

[31] “History from below” or Alltagsgeschichte is a Marxist concept developed in the 1980s by then-West German historians and referred to the placing of importance on creating historical accounts drawn from the kinds of individuals earlier histories had systematically ignored – workers, peasants, underclasses, generally. It was the title I used for an installation artwork I produced in the 1980s that foregrounded the stories of non-combatant family members in WWII.

[32] While the meagre relics of Milla’s 1951 exhibition are deeply buried in the Met’s archives, he, as a photographer, does have a presence on the museum’s website. Six of his work-related photographs are listed as “artworks” that were “gifts of the artist”. Ironically, although textual information is given about each photograph, in each case, where an image should be there is either only a text stating “no image available” or just a blank gray space.

[33] Milla showed examples of the effects of different lighting, filtration and photographic paper contrasts on the final appearance of the art object.

[34] Well-known American photographer Walker Evans, who himself worked as a museum photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s, famously acknowledged the aesthetic of the record photograph as follows: “Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.”

[35] As noted, the negative storage area housed in the Photo Studio was off limits to researchers as printing was still being carried out from some of the original negatives (at least, those that remained printable).

[36] Enwezor, Okwui, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, pg. 18.

[37] Krauss, Rosalind, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”, Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 311-319. In particular, her discussion of the use of Timothy O’Sullivan’s 1868 photograph, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake as both an example of his artistic practice and, in a different context, as a record illustration in the King Survey report of 1875.

In addition, the resistance to acknowledging the unavoidably aesthetic aspect of photographic images is encapsulated in the following quote from Sherman E. Lee, former director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, in the “Forward” to the 1986 book, How to Photograph Works of Art, by Sheldan Collins: “…there are major disadvantages in having the services of a photographer who is recognized as a creative artist in photography considered as an end in itself…The resulting dominance by an artist-photographer may result in interesting, even memorable photographs of works of art, but the primary emphasis perceived may be that of the image, and not the art. When one particular audience sees a photograph of a marvelous Greek archaic marble or a bronze by Riccio, we want to hear the comment “What a sculpture!” –not “What a grand photograph!” ”

Interestingly, recognized “art” photographers, Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler, both worked at times in New York at major museums as photographers.

[38] Mitman, Gregg and Wilder, Kelly, ed., “Introduction”, Documenting the World: Film, Photography and the Scientific Record, University of Chicago Press, 2016.

[39] In my research I observed that, generally, starting in the 1960s there was a shift towards using a 35mm camera for most documentation of museum activities other than the photography of museum collections and artifacts, which remained the province of the large format camera. The result was a considerable lowering of the quality and informational level of the resulting images but was probably considered more cost effective and efficient.

[40] Blossfeldt, Karl, Urformen Der Kunst: Photographische Pflanzenbilder, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth A.G. Berlin, 1929.

[41] Lingwood, James, “Working the System”, Typologies, Newport: Harbour Art Museums and New York: Rizzoli, 1991, pg. 92

[42] Burgin, Victor, “Looking at Photographs”, Thinking Photography, The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1982. Originally, published in Screen Education, No. 24, 1977.

[43] Greenberg, Reesa, pg 72, “Objects of Curiosity: Photographs of Museums”, Trois, Vol. 7, Nos 2-3, Printemps-été, 1992.

[44] Enwezor, Okwui, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, pg. 47.

[45] I wrote about these images separately from the Camera Obscured exhibition in 2002. I proposed that, due to the lack of specific museum photography training in the earlier years of the photo studios, commercial photography imperatives – i.e., that the bond between consumer (viewer) and product must not be distracted from – were adopted by museum photo studios. As well, the museum itself may have also encouraged the effacement of the distracting photographer from the mirror, which has the effect of reading as a symbolic denial of (literally) self-reflexivity on the part of the museum. “The Mirror Stage of the Public Museum”, Lost in the Archives, edited by Rebecca Comay, Alphabet City Media, 2002. pp 109-125.

[46] For Camera Obscured, a photograph of the entire guard book page on which Cowper’s photograph was pasted was made by then V & A studio head, James Stevenson (for which he was credited). Barry Chappel then made the exhibition print (for which he was credited). Stevenson made copies of all six of the guard book pages selected for the exhibition that showed mirror frames with photographers reflected (or not) in the glass as described earlier.

[47] To download an open access pdf of this book go to: uclpress.co.uk.