Reconsider: Photographs In (and Out) of the Museum

This intervention is concerned with how America chose to depict the national landscape across alternate historical moments. In addition to displaying artist books by Ed Ruscha (see previous post), late 19^th and early 20^th century photography will be exhibited from the California Historical Society archive in Special Collections at the USC Doheny Memorial Library. Specifically, the majority of images are from an extensive photography collection within the CHS’s holdings assembled between 1860 and 1930 by relatively unknown photographer C. C. Pierce. 

The collection includes images taken by Pierce but also numerous works by other western photographers. Some of the most well known images within the collection to be shown in the intervention are by George Fiske, whose photographs of Yosemite were widely distributed tourist items sold in the national park at the end of the 19^th century. In fact, an advertisement for Fiske’s studio was featured in Galen Clark’s 1910 tourist guidebook The Yosemite Valley: its history, characteristic features, and theories regarding its origin. In addition to Pierce and Fiske, the intervention will also utilize images by photographer Adam Dove (who I have been able to find no information on), as well as other anonymously produced pictures.

 George Fiske, Galen Clark on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, ca.1900, Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library

Advertisement for Fiske's Studio in The Yosemite Valley (1910)

The images to be shown are not “art photography” in any contemporary sense. These images were conceived outside the pursuits of art and the museum, and their exhibition within an institutional setting—a space that emphasizes quality, authorship, and aesthetic value—is inherently problematic. This is, of course, a well-investigated discourse of photography; the assimilation of photography into the art museum has been of critical discussion since the 1970s, a reaction to the increasing presence of the photographic image within contemporary art as well as the construction of a pre-history of the medium as an aesthetically oriented “Art,” largely the product of the Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Department. (See Martha Rosler’s “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience” and Christopher Phillips’ “The Judgment Seat of Photography”) As extensive photography collections were established in the later half of the 20^th century (at the Getty for example), images not conceived as art were often treated as such; photographs were attributed aesthetic importance in hindsight. This is most clearly evident in the positing of Timothy O’Sullivan stark survey photography as aesthetically modem works worthy of museum exhibition.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Black Canyon, Colorado River from Camp 8, Looking Above from Geological and Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, 1873, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York)

This summary is too simplistic, however it points out the problematic of this intervention: Reconsider presents a collection of photographs within a museum never intended to be understood as art—never intended to be seen through the museum’s frame—and this is a long-standing issue of concern. Thus, the intervention could be misguiding the viewer (with regard to the history of photography) by attempting to reconsider another history (that of the American landscape).

With this in mind, the intervention has made an obvious choice not to frame the images for exhibition. The museum practice of framing photography—placing it under glass and then hanging it on the wall—only intensifies viewing the photographic image in an aestheticizing mode, like one views a painting (not that one could approach a photograph without an aesthetic eye). If this intervention is intended to disrupt standard museum practice, while positing these photographs as objects of distribution intended to show and claim the Western landscape, then treating them as “art” objects would be disingenuous to the project. With that in mind, the photographs will be shown in display cases, laid flat, positioned throughout the gallery. While they are still “under-glass” (actually plexi), it is my hope that viewing them off the walls, not framed as singular works, will signal their alternate existence as objects of tourism and commerce verse their confusion as “art.”

Three women and a boy with an arched Yucca in the Mojave Desert, Antelope Valley, California, ca.1880-1940, anonymous photographer, Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library

It is also my hope that displaying the images outside “the frame” (not that they could escape the greater frame of the museum) will highlight certain particularizes often suppressed in museum settings. Some of the photographs selected for exhibition clearly show ware as objects of use: some are frayed, bent, or have marks on the print. Some images are printed on different photo papers: while many are on a typical glossy surface, others are one thinner, tinted paper or thick board. Still others show a considerable amount of fading and deterioration.

Similarly, the books by Ed Ruscha also show signs of ware and use. The page creases of Every Building on the Sunset Strip have yellowed. The pages of Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles are close to falling out of the book’s spine. These minor idiosyncrasies, these small marks of use, will be a subtle reminder that the books and photographs had alternate lives prior to entering the library and (for a short while) the museum.

-David Evans Frantz