Public Museums,Museum Photography,and the Limits of Reflexivity

Abstract

This essay gives an interpretation of the first exhibition ever held of photo graphs from the archives of the in-house photographic studios of major public museums. It argues that the photographic images sketch out a rich visual anthropology of public museums as social and cultural institutions; and that this can potentially contribute to an enhanced reflexivity and a cultural poli tics concerning the museums' own sociality and hierarchy, and their chang ing representational techniques. This is a reflexivity, however, which the museums seem officially to resist. Museum photography reveals the labour, artifice and construction in the practice of both museum and photographic representations. In contrast with anthropological photography, the 'realism' of museum photography is shown to be characterized by generic and aes thetic instability and experiment, and this is linked to the relatively marginal role of museum photographers within the public museums. Analytically, the essay proposes that semiotic approaches must be broadened beyond textual representations to include the material and social forms of different media. On this basis, despite their apparent convergence in museum photography, the essay develops an analysis of the distinctive nature of the museum and of photography as representational regimes.