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September 8, 2011
Julian Stallabrass starts his Museum Photography and Museum Prose article----in New Left Review (65 Sept-Oct 2010)--- with the observation that:
The status of photography in the museum has changed radically over the last twenty years. What had been a marginalized, minor and irregularly seen medium has become one of the major staples of museum display, and has taken its place alongside painting in terms of scale, sophistication and expense. The defence of photographic work in criticism and art history has acquired much of the portentousness and high seriousness that were once reserved for painting.
He then asks:
This extraordinary development raises various questions: what has the museum done to photography in this accommodation (as well as vice versa)? How has it been framed, liter- ally and conceptually? What are its viewers encouraged to think about it, and how? Has there emerged a form of photography, distinct from the mass of photographic production, that it is worth calling ‘museum photography’?
He explores these questions by looking at the large scale ‘cinematographic photographs’ of Jeff Wall, who makes frequent reference to painting and art history, as a way to place his mechanical products firmly within the ambit of high art.
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