NON-COLLECTIONS? OLD COLLECTIONS OF REPRODUCTIONS AND DOCUMENTING PHOTOGRAPHS IN MUSEUMS: SELECTED EXAMPLES

Abstract

Elizabeth Edwards, a British researcher into the relations among photography, history, and anthropology, used the term of non-collections to define numerous photographs of unidentified status which can be found in contemporary museums. They are not collector’s items, such as e.g., artistic photography or unique specimens of the first photography techniques. What she rather means are various items: prints, slides, photo-mechanic reproductions, postcards, namely objects once produced on a mass scale, with copies present in many institutions worldwide, thus being neither unique nor extraordinary. They present works from a museum collection, historic pieces of local art, or universally known works of world art. They exist in a hierarchical relation with other classes of museum objects, yet they are often pushed to the margin of curator’s practice and kept as ‘archives’, namely outside the system of the museum collection. They can sometimes be found in museum archival sections, in other instances in libraries, yet it is on more rare occasions that we come across them in photo departments. However, owing to the research into archival photographs conducted in the last decade (the studies of afore-mentioned Elizabeth Edwards and also Constanza Caraffa as well as the teams cooperating with the latter), such collections are experiencing a certain revival. Forming part of this research, the paper focuses on the collections of reproductions produced at the turn of the 20th century in museums in Toruń, Poznań, and Szczecin, which were German at the time; the reproductions later found their way to and continue being kept in Polish institutions.