MY MUSEOLOGY

In the publications  Photography/Politics: One  (1979) and  Photography/Politics: Two  (1986), Jo Spence as part of Photography Workshop sought, through an expansive definition of the titular terms, to address interferences between photography and politics across the history of the medium. Through also focusing on the role of institutions, and particularly as financing entities, the editors and contributors demonstrate the multifarious ways that we are unconsciously subject to the camera’s and photography’s power. While our consciousness of this potential may be comparatively better understood in today’s photographically saturated and occasionally more sceptical cultures, pondering on the revelations of  Photography/Politics  proves nonetheless instructive. For instance, we learn that ways we are presented and present ourselves to the camera are often already determined by internalised modes of seeing, behaving and image-making through our exposure t...

Stopping is surely fundamental to art. That one should pause to consider, however briefly, is central to art, whether it be to admire, to despise, to question, to contextualise, to recognise, or to appraise. That art should carry the potential to make one think seems therefore logically to follow, for if art can arrest one's progress in space, then its effects on the conscious mind are indubitable, however apparently brief. So, with stopping and thinking we might conjecture that the capacity for action is augmented by the presence of art thus defined; that, indeed, art is the stimulus for directed action in the world towards a goal motivated by artist, curator-editor, and the subject who stops and thinks because of the artistic product. To what extent is photography a peculiarly political and sad genre in art production? This question and the introductory paragraph have been motivated by recent exhibitions, Richard Mosse The Enclave at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæ...