Elizabeth Edwards: From Museum to Library and Back Again: An Enthography of Photographic Presence in the Victoria & Albert Museum

This paper considers the cultures of photography in museums beyond formal ‘collections of photographs’. It explores the ways in which their flows, categorisations and work reflect and perform the epistemic structures which shape museum knowledge. I shall suggest that historical studies of the archive of photographic documents have perhaps placed too much emphasis on the centripetal model gathering and the consequent practices of the storeroom and the filing cabinet. Such approaches have tended to overlook the complex ecosystems of photographic production which are located in a fluid meshwork of multiplicities where original and copy, collection and non-collection become blurred. Drawing on new work in the V&A, London, as a case study of these wider processes, I trace and account for the placing and performance of photographs of the V&A's own objects across four key overlapping spaces of gathering and dissemination - the ‘guard-book’ albums, the library, the curatorial departments and through illustrated publications for the public. In particular I shall argue that the matrix of photographic practice and purpose can be understood as a 'distributed object' and interrogated through anthropological concepts of assemblage, meshwork, purification and multiple temporalities. I argue that such an attention to the relations between ‘collections’ and ‘non-collections’ reveals the shifting hierarchies of photographic value in museums that in their turn, shape research endeavours andhave a profound effect on how histories of photography and histories of museums are written.