Download or read book Uncertain Images Museums and the Work of Photographs written by Professor Elizabeth Edwards and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.

Download or read book Uncertain Images Museums and the Work of Photographs written by Elizabeth Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of ’difficult histories’. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.

Download or read book Photographs Museums Collections written by Elizabeth Edwards and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The status of photographs in the history of museum collections is a complex one. From its very beginnings the double capacity of photography - as a tool for making a visual record on the one hand and an aesthetic form in its own right on the other - has created tensions about its place in the hierarchy of museum objects. While major collections of 'art' photography have grown in status and visibility, photographs not designated 'art' are often invisible in museums. Yet almost every museum has photographs as part of its ecosystem, gathered as information, corroboration or documentation, shaping the understanding of other classes of objects, and many of these collections remain uncatalogued and their significance unrecognised. This volume presents a series of case studies on the historical collecting and usage of photographs in museums. Using critically informed empirical investigation, it explores substantive and historiographical questions such as what is the historical patterning in the way photographs have been produced, collected and retained by museums? How do categories of the aesthetic and evidential shape the history of collecting photographs? What has been the work of photographs in museums? What does an understanding of photograph collections add to our understanding of collections history more broadly? What are the methodological demands of research on photograph collections? The case studies cover a wide range of museums and collection types, from art galleries to maritime museums, national collections to local history museums, and international perspectives including Cuba, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Together they offer a fascinating insight into both the history of collections and collecting, and into the practices and poetics of archives across a range of disciplines, including the history of science, museum studies, archaeology and anthropology.

Download or read book Picture Work written by Diana Kamin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In this book, Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Download or read book Collections Vol 13 N1 written by Juilee Decker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue of the journal features a note from the editor, two articles, four book reviews, and supplemental material.

Download or read book Museums and Photography written by Elena Stylianou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums—history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums – and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology written by Alice Stevenson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides a transnational reference point for critical engagements with the legacies of, and futures for, global archaeological collections. It challenges the common misconception that museum archaeology is simply a set of procedures for managing and exhibiting assemblages. Instead, this volume advances museum archaeology as an area of reflexive research and practice addressing the critical issues of what gets prioritized by and researched in museums, by whom, how, and why. Through twenty-eight chapters, authors problematize and suggest new ways of thinking about historic, contemporary, and future relationships between archaeological fieldwork and museums, as well as the array of institutional and cultural paradigms through which archaeological enquiries are mediated. Case studies embrace not just archaeological finds, but also archival field notes, photographic media, archaeological samples, and replicas. Throughout, museum activities are put into dialogue with other aspects of archaeological practice, with the aim of situating museum work within a more holistic archaeology that does not privilege excavation or field survey above other aspects of disciplinary engagement. These concerns will be grounded in the realities of museums internationally, including Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe. In so doing, the common heritage sector refrain 'best practice' is not assumed to solely emanate from developed countries or European philosophies, but instead is considered as emerging from and accommodated within local concerns and diverse museum cultures.

Download or read book Holocaust Memory and National Museums in Britain written by Emily-Jayne Stiles and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the Holocaust exhibition opened within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2000; setting out the long and often contentious debates surrounding the conception, design, and finally the opening of an important exhibition within a national museum in Britain. It considers a process of memory-making through an assessment of Holocaust photographs, material culture, and survivor testimonies; exploring theories of cultural memory as they apply to the national museum context. Anchored in time and place, the Holocaust exhibition within Britain’s national museum of war is influenced by, and reflects, an international rise in Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. This book considers the construction of Holocaust memory in 1990s Britain, providing a foundation for understanding current and future national memory projects. Through all aspects of the display, the Holocaust is presented as meaningful in terms of what it says about Nazism and what this, in turn, says about Britishness. From the original debates surrounding the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery at the IWM, to the acquisition of Holocaust artefacts that could act as 'concrete evidence' of Nazi barbarity and criminality, the Holocaust reaffirms an image of Britain that avoids critical self-reflection despite raising uncomfortably close questions. The various display elements are brought together to consider multiple strands of the Holocaust story as it is told by national museums in Britain.

Download or read book The Handbook of Photography Studies written by Gil Pasternak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-13 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Download or read book Photography and Sculpture written by Sarah Hamill and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the new medium of photography was pressed into service to illustrate sculpture, photographs of sculptural objects have directed viewers as to what, in the course of ambling around a sculpture, was the single perfect moment to stop and look. What is the photograph’s place in writing the history of sculpture? How has it changed according to culture, generation, criti-cal conviction, and changes in media? Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction studies aspects of these questions from the perspectives of sixteen leading art historians. Their essays consider iconic photographs, archival collections, new and forgotten technologies, and conceptual challenges in photographing three-dimensional forms that have directed changing historical and stylistic attitudes about how we see, write about, and narrate histories of sculpture. Chapters on such varied topics as picturing Conceptual art, manipulating sacred images in India to be non-photographs, and framing Roman art with an iPad illustrate the latent visual and narrative powers and ever-expanding potential of these images of sculpture.

Download or read book Contact Zones written by Justin Carville and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid-nineteenth century photography has played a central role in cultural encounters within and between migrant communities in the United States. Migrant histories have been mediated through the photographic image, and the cultural practices of photography have themselves been transformed as migrant communities mobilise the photographic image to navigate experiences of cultural dislocation and the forging of new identities. Exploring photographic images and the cultural practices of photography as ‘contact zones’ through which cultural exchange and transformation takes place, this volume addresses the role of photography in migrant histories in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Taking as its focal point photography’s role in shaping migrant experiences of cultural transformation, and how migrant experiences have re-configured culturally differentiated practices of photography, case studies on migration from Europe, Central America, and North America position photography as entwined with cultural histories of migration and cultural transformation in the United States.

Download or read book Gendered Tropes in War Photography written by Marta Zarzycka and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities. Uniquely, this book deconstructs – in a systematic, gender-sensitive way – the repetitive circulation of certain images of war, conflict and state violence, in order to scrutinize the role of photographic tropes in the globalized visual sphere. Zarzycka builds on feminist theories of representations of war to explore how the concepts of femininity and war secure each other’s intelligibility in photographic practices. This book examines the complex connections between photographic tropes and the individuals and communities they represent, in order to rethink the medium of photography as a discursive and political practice. This book interrogates both the structure and transmission of contemporary encounters with war, violence, and conflict. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars of gender studies, visual studies, media studies, photography theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and trauma and memory studies.

Download or read book What Photographs Do written by Elizabeth Edwards and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect? What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem. These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but 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. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

Download or read book Documenting the World written by Gregg Mitman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-12-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that defined historical moments and generations. Today such a history feels insubstantial and imprecise, even unscientific. And yet photographic technology was not always a necessary precondition for the accurate documentation of history. The documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to capture the world visually, order it, and render it useful for future generations. This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. It explores their creation and production as well as the collecting practices of librarians, archivists, and corporations. Together, the chapters of Documenting the World call into question the canonical qualities of the authored, the singular, and the valuable image, and transgress the divides separating the still photograph and the moving image, as well as the analogue and the digital. They also definitively overturn the traditional role of photographs and films in historical studies as passive illustrations.

Download or read book Genre Trajectories written by Garin Dowd and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on genre and identifies developments in genre studies in the early 21st century. Genre approaches are applied to examine a fascinating range of texts including ancient Greek poems, Holocaust visual and literary texts, contemporary Hollywood films, selfies, melodrama, and classroom practices.

Download or read book Egyptian Archaeology and the Twenty First Century Museum written by Alice Stevenson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element addresses the cultural production of ancient Egypt in the museum as a mixture of multiple pasts and presents that cohere around collections; their artefacts, documentation, storage, research, and display. Its four sections examine how ideas about the past are formed by museum assemblages: how their histories of acquisition and documentation shape interpretation, the range of materials that comprise them, the influence of their geographical framing, and the moments of remaking that might be possible. Throughout, the importance of critical approaches to interpretation is underscored, reasserting the museum as a site of active research and experiment, rather than only exhibitionary product or communicative media. It argues for a multi-directional approach to museum work that seeks to reveal the inter-relations of collection histories and which has implications not just for museum representation and documentation, but also for archaeological practice more broadly.

Download or read book S mi Research in Transition written by Laura Junka-Aikio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several decades now, there have been calls to decolonize research on the Indigenous Sámi people, and to make it accountable to the Sámi society. While this has contributed to the rise of a vibrant Sámi research community in the Nordic countries, less attention has been paid to what extent, and how the "Sámi turn" in research has been implemented in practice. Written by prominent Nordic and Sámi scholars anchored in the Sámi research communities in Finland, Norway and Sweden, this volume explores not only the meanings and implications of this turn across disciplines, but also some of the challenges that efforts to create space for Sámi voices, knowledges and perspectives still meet today. The book provides a timely, interdisciplinary engagement with the central themes that have framed the development of Sámi research, and a critical appraisal of the impact that efforts to decolonize research in the Sámi context have had upon Nordic societies and state policies so far. Sámi Research in Transition is valuable for scholars and students interested in Sámi history and society, Arctic and Circumpolar Indigenous studies and critical studies on the relationship between knowledge and social change.