What Photographs Do

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.

Praise for What Photographs Do

'What Photographs Do, combines recent and urgent questions in the history of photography and museum practice with essays from often invisible museum practitioners, such as museum photographers, digital teams and conservators. As a result, this is the first book-length investigation of the material and human traces of what Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien have called the ecosystem of photographic images in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) settings'
Science Museum Group Journal

'offer(s) a rare internal point of view on their relationship to the photographic object and its place in the functioning of the institution.'
Critique D'Art

'What Photographs Do offers an illuminating tour through the various areas of the diverse museum, in which photography is part of everyday working practice in very different ways - the photographic machine rooms, so to speak, that underpin and enable all museum work. The connecting bracket is the institution under consideration. In the best sense of the word, it is an anthology that can also appeal to readers with a wide range of interests, but more at the level of individual contributions than the volume as a whole. It is all the more pleasing that the publication was published as an open access edition and access to the individual articles, all of which are worth reading, is easily possible'
Rundbrief Fotographie

'This volume has great scope and will be particularly relevant to institutions with an expansive photographic culture and to museum professionals with responsibilities for collections and non-collections of photographs.'
Museum Worlds