Found in the UK's National Collection of the Art of Photography

Abstract

Even so, it is clear that one does not collect paintings by Old Masters in the same spirit that one collects cigar bands. --The System of Collecting, Jean Baudrillard Thirty years ago, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London set in motion a process that resulted in the formation of a prestigious national collection of the art of photography. In 1977, around 300,000 prints began a journey from an archive in the art library, where they were classed by subject, to the department of prints and drawings, where they were destined to become exemplars of the art of photography, classified according to author. In pursuing this ambitious aim, the V & A (as it is better known) conformed to a long established trend in the highest institutions in the United States to enshrine photography within an aesthetic discourse of medium autonomy that was originally developed by modernist historians for art history. (1) With the consolidation of the art collection at the V & A came many of the trappings of modernism: the hegemony of the photographer's print, the narrative of the artist's oeuvre and the mystique of taste. So it might be surprising to learn that within the heart of the V & A's photography collection is a fascinating assortment of worthless photographic ephemera. More an archive or assemblage than a collection, this is much smaller than the art collection that houses it, but no less specialized. It is of interest because it contains rich, visual items that can be attributed to established photographers. The items that comprise this collection are photographers' Christmas cards. It is unusually personal because the recipient of every card was the museum's first curator of photographs, Mark Haworth-Booth, who donated them on his retirement in 2004. The dates indicate that the earliest are from the late 1970s, the time that the national collection began to be built. The presence of recent cards, addressed to a new curator, reveals that the archive is to some degree self-replenishing. It is not unusual to find photographers' Christmas cards within the context of a serious photographic collection. The fact that some photographers (among them Philippe Halsmann and Angus McBean) are represented in major collections by pictures made for dissemination as Christmas cards suggests that this is a genre in its own right. The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, devotes a section to photographers' Christmas cards as a type of vernacular, without distinguishing between well-known names and anons. The V & A keeps Christmas cards by photographers dispersed over various departments of the museum, including one that keeps interpretative materials such as personal papers, promotional material, and so on. Cards have been known to surface in a few low-key displays by the design department. The material that resides in the art collection, however, has the distinction of being proscribed from the catalog of art objects. One effect of this is to render it invisible to the visiting public even though it is, strictly speaking, publicly accessible. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Comprising over one hundred assorted objects by photographers of two generations, the material resides within a small, anonymous box with a hinged lid. The present curator, Martin Barnes, thinks of the box (classified as FID or found in department) as a holding bay where items are kept on the off chance that their status and value might change when conditions change. So, if the V & A decides to follow the example of the George Eastman House and establish a special collection, then it can be built on this material. For the moment, however, it occupies what Barnes likes to call institutional limbo. (2) What is the meaning of the ambiguous space it occupies? Culture reserves a special imaginative place for the box of photographs; readers of Camera Lucida (1981) will recall that it was from such a box that Roland Barthes extracted the fabled winter garden portrait of his dead mother and experienced the wound of the punctum. …