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 1. MMA #05 |
 2. MMA #18 |
 3. MMA #38 |
 4. MMA #19 |
 5. MMA #35 |
 6. MMA #20 |
 7. MMA #34 |
8. MMA #22 |
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Project description • Between art & Art The title refers to perceptions of the work of the art museum staff photographer - located somewhere between the “art” of photography (i.e., technique) and the subject of the photographer’s work, “Art”. My earlier project, Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum has had a great influence on the issues that are considered in Between art & Art. Click here to see it. Also related is my recently completed installation work, The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla. Click here to see that project. Between art & Art explores observations concerning the nature of photographic documentation and, specifically, that of the public art museum. It is in the institutional photography archives of the museum that the complexity of the relationship between photography and institutional memory becomes obvious. I have observed that the "documentation" of photographic documents themselves (metadata) is often far from adequate - record photographs are seen as "self-evident". A significant result has been that the image remains but its original intention becomes obscure or lost over time. Attention is displaced from a specific, motivating "event" to the entire picture space. The paradox of such photographs is that while everything within the image is of high resolution and recognizable, its meaning can never be fully understood. The photographs that comprise this ongoing project attempt to intentionally reproduce some of the above-described effects that normally come with the passage of time. They are often based on earlier images seen in museum archives. Their nominal subjects are usually, but not exclusively, the transitional, "liminal" spaces of the museum - those that, as visitors, we often pass through on our way to the museum's display galleries. |
Project description • Between art & Art The photographs have been taken, beginning in 2000, with equipment similar to that that used by museum staff photographers - a large format camera on a tripod. They refer to a particular period - approx. from the 1860s to the 1960s - when almost every photograph made within the museum, no matter how mundane the subject, was produced using such a camera. Since the 1970s, the use of the 35mm or medium format cameras for certain kinds of documentation increased dramatically. These became the medium of choice for almost everything except images of museum objects, which required the high resolution results possible only with large format equipment and film. Today digital technologies reign in major public museums but the same division of types of documentation occurs - lower megapixel cameras are used for general documentation while digital backs are used on large format cameras for documentation of the collection. To date work on the Between art & Art project has been carried out in the following museums (some of whose institutional archives I have also explored): the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; Fotomuseum Winterthur & Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Switzerland; Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (the sample images presented on this site represent only a small percentage of the total number of photographs taken in these museums). Click on 'next' above to see other museums. NOTE: A subtheme that has emerged from this project is the situation of the guards within the museum's spaces. To see a selection of images from Between art & Art that focus on this subject, please click here. |
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