Project description • Between art & 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.

Between art & Art is based on observations formed about the nature of photographic documentation and, specifically, documentation of the public museum. During almost 15 years of experience doing research in the institutional photography archives of a number of major museums, the complexity of the relationship between photography and institutional memory has become increasingly obvious. Observed is the fact that the "documentation" of photographic documents themselves has often been far from adequate - record photographs are often seen as "self-evident". One significant result has been that the original intention of an image becomes obscure over time, leaving the viewer/researcher uncertain as to why a certain image was taken. Attention is displaced from a specific, motivating "event" to the entire picture space. The paradox of such photographs is that everything within the image is recognizable but little, in the end, is 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.