9781800082991
9781800083004
A collective case study of photographic culture through the lens of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A massive quantity of museums’ photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.
A massive quantity of museums’ photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.
354 pages | 120 color plates | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2022
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword - Joanna Norman
Museum Cultures of Photography: An Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious
Part I Disseminations
1 Little marks of ownership: the introduction and production of museum postcards 1913-1939
Elizabeth Edwards
2 The museum and the image factory: The South Kensington Museum, the Brothers Dalziel, and the making of Victorian museum catalogues
Bethan Stephens
3 The image as asset
Tom Windross
Part II Collections
4 The official museum photographer: Isabel Agnes Cowper
Erika Lederman
5 Photographing the Eltenberg Reliquary
Ken Jackson
6 Photographing theatre and performance
Graham Brandon
PART III Histories
7 Collecting India: Photographs, pedagogy and power
Divia Patel
8 The digitised guard books: another history
Steve Woodhouse
PART IV Reworkings
9 Condition report: drawing things together
Simon Fleury
10 K.A.C. Creswell’s photographs of Islamic architecture
Omniya Abdel-Barr
11 Two dimensions among three: Museum photography in the V&A’s refurbished cast courts
Angus Patterson
PART V Visibilities
12 A submerged collection: Photographs in the National Art Library, 1853-1977
Ella Ravilious
13 Revitalising research: the fall and rise of the furniture image collection
Kate Hay
PART VI Digital
14 In the photographic studio
Richard Davis
15 The backs of things
George Eksts
16 Computations and complications: Value systems of institutional photography
Catherine Troiano
Afterword
Duncan Forbes
Index
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword - Joanna Norman
Museum Cultures of Photography: An Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious
Part I Disseminations
1 Little marks of ownership: the introduction and production of museum postcards 1913-1939
Elizabeth Edwards
2 The museum and the image factory: The South Kensington Museum, the Brothers Dalziel, and the making of Victorian museum catalogues
Bethan Stephens
3 The image as asset
Tom Windross
Part II Collections
4 The official museum photographer: Isabel Agnes Cowper
Erika Lederman
5 Photographing the Eltenberg Reliquary
Ken Jackson
6 Photographing theatre and performance
Graham Brandon
PART III Histories
7 Collecting India: Photographs, pedagogy and power
Divia Patel
8 The digitised guard books: another history
Steve Woodhouse
PART IV Reworkings
9 Condition report: drawing things together
Simon Fleury
10 K.A.C. Creswell’s photographs of Islamic architecture
Omniya Abdel-Barr
11 Two dimensions among three: Museum photography in the V&A’s refurbished cast courts
Angus Patterson
PART V Visibilities
12 A submerged collection: Photographs in the National Art Library, 1853-1977
Ella Ravilious
13 Revitalising research: the fall and rise of the furniture image collection
Kate Hay
PART VI Digital
14 In the photographic studio
Richard Davis
15 The backs of things
George Eksts
16 Computations and complications: Value systems of institutional photography
Catherine Troiano
Afterword
Duncan Forbes
Index