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Museums and Photography: Some Observations

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Museums and Photography: Some Observations MUSEUMS AND PHOTOGRAPHY Museums and Photography: Some Observations By Carol Payne Today, photographs are fundamental few examples and tendencies and hope tools through which museums manage that these preliminary remarks will draw collections, provide didactic information, attention to the growing and dynamic promote themselves and engage relationship between Canadian museums audiences; just as visitors often participate and photographs at this important in museums through a camera lens and moment. social media. Photography is a mainstay in Canadian museums. The Canadian “Museum Latecomers” Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, for example, fosters an awareness of the The current surge of photography thousands of immigrants who arrived in exhibitions, festivals and collections Halifax through photographic portraits; is a relatively recent international Sight Unseen, the current Canadian phenomenon. British scholars Elizabeth Museum of Human Rights exhibition, Edwards and Christopher Morton recently paradoxically, uses smart phone cameras noted, “Photographs are museum and new software applications to make latecomers”; they generally “occupied an visual displays accessible to the seeing- ambiguous space between institutional impaired; and across the country digital and personal property, between photographs document myriad object historical document and transient or collections, making them available in- disposable record, both materially and house and online. intellectually.”1 Although there were a few notable exceptions, including the Carol Payne is associate professor of As the most popular form of visual Museum of Modern Art and the George Art History at Carleton University and a media in the early twenty-first century, Eastman House International Museum former curator at the Canadian Museum photography is enmeshed in the art, of Photography; museums usually of Contemporary Photography. She is culture, history and science practices treated photographs as lowly, utilitarian author of The Official Picture: The NFB’s that are at the core of museum missions. documents. They were valued for their Still Photography Division and the Image Museums and other cultural institutions semblance of factuality rather than as of Canada, 1941-1971 (2013) and as well as citywide festivals increasingly objects inherently worthy of collection, co-editor with Andrea Kunard of The feature photographs themselves as key display and analysis. Cultural Work of Photography in Canada forms of expression, communication and (2011). cultural meaning. By the 1960s and 1970s, museums — particularly art museums — began to Thanks to Andrea Kunard for editorial I offer a few observations on the history collect and exhibit photographs more suggestions. of photography collections and new purposefully. This newfound interest developments in Canadian museums and reflected the contemporary introduction photography in this essay. I’ll explore a of photography as a studio practice 30 muse z july/august 2016 Top: Watson, Edith S., 1861-1943. Image of an iceberg taken from a small handmade album of a trip to Newfoundland and Labrador in the summer of 1913. Photo: Library and Archives Canada. Bottom: Entrance to the exhibition Where are the children. Photo: Owen Melenka, Glenbow, Calgary. in art schools and the art market’s unequivocal embrace of photography at the time. The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou’s Musée national d’art moderne and the Museum Folkwang were among the many art and cultural history museums that established curatorial collections of photography at the time.2 The link between photographic practice and art museums (as well as the discipline of art history more broadly) shaped the ways that photographs have been presented and understood for years. Although photography is a remarkably interdisciplinary and largely vernacular medium with applications ranging from surveillance images to personal mementos to photojournalism and advertising, it has more often been presented by museums strictly as a form of personal aesthetic expression. Museums approached photography through conventional art historical methods, emphasizing technique, proposing a formal language distinct to the photograph, and establishing a canon of heroic individual photographers. Even New York’s International Center of Photography, an institution dedicated to documentary images and photojournalism, for many years approached photography through the tenets of Art History. Often the rich current critical debates around photography — from such academics and public intellectuals as Roland Barthes, juillet/août 2016 z muse 31 Pierre Bourdieu, Susan Sontag, John century and American photography of shaped the photography collections Tagg, Martha Rosler and many others the twentieth century; however, the and exhibitions since the 1970s. — were at odds with art photography collection extends beyond those regions Presentation House (Vancouver), the collections. and includes Canadian photographic Banff Centre, the Photographers Gallery practice seen within an international in Saskatoon (now Paved Art + New Developing Canadian context. Early in its history, the NGC — Media), Toronto’s Gallery 44 and the Photography Collections under founding curator of photography, Toronto Photographers Workshop, the and Exhibitions James Borcoman — chose to collect Montreal centres Vox and Dazibäo and extensively within the work of individual Quebec City’s Vu are among the most In Canada, photography’s relationship photographers. As a result, it has amassed influential regional photography centres. with the museum since the 1960s a valuable collection for teaching and Major urban art museums — including has reflected some aspects of the research. the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery international history sketched above of Ontario and the Musée des beaux-arts while departing from the emphasis on The CMCP was established as a museum de Montréal — also began developing art historical approaches in others. As in 1985;7 however, it originated in the important collections of photography Andrea Kunard and I discussed in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still in these years; while such institutions 2011 collected volume The Cultural Photography Division, which in turn was devoted to history as the Glenbow Work of Photography in Canada, the established in 1941.8 Beginning in the Museum and the now Canadian three most influential federal collections 1960s, the National Film Board developed Museum of History began to present of photography have been Library and an ambitious photography exhibition, their archival photographic collections Archives Canada (LAC), the National touring and publications programs. more extensively. In these years, the Gallery of Canada (NGC) and the This work was expanded by the CMCP, burgeoning international reputations Canadian Museum of Contemporary which promoted the work of Canadian of contemporary Canadian photo- Photography (CMCP).3 photographers — both documentarians based artists also impacted collecting and photo-based artists — in a collection practices. They include the work of such With holdings of more than 20 million of about 160,000 photographs and Vancouver-based photo conceptualists photographic objects, LAC is easily one photo-based works. From 1992 to 2006, as Jeff Wall, Ken Lum and Stan Douglas of the largest collections of photography CMCP was located in a purpose-built as well as that of Jin-me Yoon; photo- in the country.4 LAC has also shaped the space along the Rideau Canal in Ottawa based reflections on the body and gender study of historic photography in Canada and is now housed at the NGC. formation by such Quebec-based artists by advocating for a social historical as Sorel Cohen, Evergon and Genevieve approach that embraces a wide range While federal institutions held a great Cadieux; and Lynne Cohen’s well known of photographic practices including the deal of sway, regional museums, contemplations on artifice and deception vernacular.5 In this way, it has challenged galleries and artist-run centres have also in human-made environments. the hegemony of art historical approaches to the photograph. Its online exhibitions as well as periodic physical displays and publications have provided models for the treatment of photographs as important historic artefacts. Its influence is seen, to name just three examples, in exhibitions at The Rooms in St. John’s, Newfoundland; the extensive collection of Montreal’s McCord Museum; and recent exhibitions at Presentation House in Vancouver. In 1967 the NGC established a Photographs Collection.6 Modelled in part after the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, it has been in many respects a classic art museum collection of photography. International in scope, it has particular strengths in British and French photography of the nineteenth 32 muse z july/august 2016 Photography and the projects, which involve the collaboration amassed by David Thomson, chairman Museum Now of local indigenous communities. An of the Thomson Reuters news agency. example is the Whyte Museum of The AMC, which contains a diverse Today, photography has an unquestioned the Rockies’ “Recognizing Relations” range of photojournalism and vernacular position in Canadian museums and other collaboration with the ģyãĢé Nakoda photography, pushes the NGC and CMCP cultural institutions. Indeed, it would people. collections in new directions. be hard to imagine any exhibiting
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