The Accommodation of Photographic Arts in the Art Museum
- Submitting institution
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University of Sunderland
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1450
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Programme of research
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/13241/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Lasting for almost two decades, the research for this monograph involved complex archival and oral history research in ten art and photography institutions in Europe and North America, five of which were analysed in depth. In some cases what material was kept in the museum’s archives was either limited or not accessible to external researchers, so extensive research and triangulation via secondary sources, press materials, and interviews were necessary. In this period, there were many changes in photographic and museum practices. The long writing phase allowed for these complexities to be comprehensively captured and evaluated with critical distance.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Except for a limited number of essays published in the context of the postmodern discourse and even fewer anthologies on exhibition histories, the interface of photography and the museum has not been researched in depth. Moschovi’s monograph explores this largely uncharted history: photography’s accommodation in and as contemporary art in the art museum. Examining exhibition and collecting practices of art museums in Europe and America since the 1970s, it posits that this accommodation resulted in a reassessment of photography’s status in art and culture while contributing to the rebranding of the art museum as a social site.
Drawing on extensive archival research, this research affords new insights into the aesthetic, technical, curatorial, and political considerations behind the accommodation of photography as art in the museum, examined against photographic, art historical and museological debates, developments in art practices using photography and concurrent phenomena in culture, society, economy, and politics.
Beyond the impact on photography’s physical and aesthetic properties, Moschovi originally claims that photography’s intermediality was often restrained within the modern art museum and that the reinvention of a post-media ‘photographic’ in the 1990s was a consequence of the repositioning of the photographic image in the postmodern condition and new technological developments as much as it was part and parcel of constructing a unifying narrative umbrella for heterogeneous museum collections. The book questions what photography’s place is now that ‘we are all photographers’ and online platforms for cultural consumption question the functionality of the physical museum._x000D_
Further dissemination in academic and art channels explored: the valorization of the photographic document as art in a German anthology on documentary film (Verlag Vorwerk 8/Documentary Film Initiative) and issues of inclusivity and gender around the accommodation of photography as a museum art in an international conference on female work at Tate Modern.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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