Photography and Museums of Mutuality: A Metaphor

Abstract

This article employs photography as a vehicle to explore museums and their increasing attempts to gain an open, discursive, democratic, and inclusive character. It suggests that drawing a parallel between photography and museums, at a time when globalizing technologies, aesthetics, and politics demand the radical redefinition of both, can provide a useful ground from which to examine the role of photography in the development of museums and vice versa, as well as notions of engagement, participation, and inclusion. In the last 150 years photography has performed a number of unique roles—evidentiary, artistic, commercial, and vernacular—that have all had a great impact on the history of representation, as well as the way in which photographs communicate inside museums (i.e., as artworks/artifacts, as evidence of objects and phenomena found outside the museum, as a record of objects contained in the museum, and as a marketing tool). All of these functions also have an impact on how photography is understood within and outside museums. However, within museums—this applies both to museums of art and other kinds of museums, including anthropological, archaeological, and history museums—photography was originally conceived and still operates predominately as a document; that is to say, as evidence of some kind, whether of an object, culture, or an artist’s work. The definition of a document is here taken from Suzanne Briet’s seminal 1951 work, What is Documentation.[1]