In 2010 le Musée d'Orsay in Paris banned photography-taking by visitors. Targeted at visitors, French intellectuals seemed to be the most affected by this new regulation: what about the museum's mission? Didn't the collections belong to all of us? Was this to increase postcard revenues? Outraged academic blogs were uploaded, photographing mobs entered the Musée in protest and articles nervously written, but the ban is still in place and visitors continue to stretch their arms in front of Monets to photograph lily pads. Museum visits, like any 'special' event (see below the image of St Peter's Square during the Pope's election), have become fascinating instances to observe how living the experience is increasingly cohabiting with its own mediation.
La Documentation française's recent publication Les visiteurs photographes au musée ponders about this evolution from a legal as well as anthropological and technological perspective. The "problem" isn't new. Wanting to reproduce special artifacts (like art works) is decades old (think cave-paintings and hunted animals, Roman sculptures and emperors, royal painters and kings, daguerreotypes and dead children), but till quite recently this was mostly reserved to elites and limited in production. Today, as cameras become smaller, better at capturing light in dim spaces and drastically cheaper, photography-making is a practice available to practically anyone above the age of four with a smartphone-owning parent. In the book, the editors Serge Chaumier, Ann Krebs and Mélanie Roustan brought together a multi-disciplinary bunch of researchers to think about questions like: what are the laws in place to restrict museum photographers? What are these regulations' foundations? What are the strategies museums engage in to encourage or use this growing practice? And obviously why are visitors taking photographs in the first place?
Back in 2008 I wrote my Masters thesis about why people take photographs of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum (this has become a chapter in their book). The iphone was a few months old back then, and things have changed a whole lot since, but overall the roots of why we archive visually have not radically shifted. Through photographs we reassure ourselves that we wouldn't forget, we commodify objects or situations that may feel overwhelming, we curate ourselves for others, we gather evocative material to socialize with others, etc. What evolutions in technology have, in fact, done is affected the experience of the now, and hence the museum experience itself... What the book makes clear is that what is at stake here is finding a way to insure that the museum's mission is fulfilled with the museum's reality taken into account.
[In a similar vein I came across this video recently. It makes a good case for street fashion photography's arguable existential crisis: too many street photographers taking too many street photographs is killing the authenticity of the genre, and of the street, and of the fashion, and of the street fashion, and of all its players... argh, existential angst, where has authenticity gone?]
