Notes de lecture
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Notes de lecture |
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n° 4, mai 1998 |
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In Photography: An Independent Art, Mark Haworth-Booth tells the story of how and why a public institution, known since 1899 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, collected photography from its beginnings in 1852 until the present. Haworth-Booth is the Museum's photography curator and his extensive knowledge and love of his subject is apparent on every page. Haworth-Booth's tale begins with Henry Cole, an enthusiastic reformer and amateur photographer who was the Museum's first director from 1856-1874. For Cole, photography's role in the museum's founding mission of mass education and edification was crucial. With a keen understanding of the way the camera could, among its other functions, shape the imaginative hold of the distant outposts of the Empire and improve industrial competitiveness by influencing good design at home, Cole founded the world's first museum photographic service, oversaw the quality of the prints he commissioned or bought, collected photographs as art, and even mounted international exhibitions. But as the underlying theme of the book makes clear, classifying this new medium was a problem. Haworth-Booth traces the change in the perception of photography from its beginnings to the present by brilliantly interweaving the history of the museum's collecting practices with a number of other histories that are usually treated separately: photographic invention, technology and processes, private and public exhibition practices in Britain, France, Germany and America, and stylistic and critical trends influencing the vagaries of production and reception. Along the way, he details the importance of touring exhibitions and the celebrations attending photographic centenaries (1939 brought a large Fox Talbot collection to the Science Museum and Clementina Hawarden's prints to the V & A, and saw the publication of Newhall's History of Photography ), he traces the ascendancy of the printed page as the primary photographic venue from the 1920s (avant-garde photography was only shown at the museum in the 30s to illustrate an exhibition on typography), he ascribes the re-emergence in the 60s of fine-art photography to television's appropriation of mass-communication, and he demonstrates the importance of private galleries in creating a new audience for creative photography in the 70s. The book is an insider's view told by one whose association with the Museum began in 1970, the great period of institutional acquisition. Full of anecdotes, it treats of the canonical figures with refreshing wit. Here, for the first time are the stories of Robert Capa's mother selling his prints by the kilo, and the attempt and failure of the Gersheims to sell their collection to the museum, as well as conversations with other collectors and curators, behind-the-scenes activities at auction, and some of the actual prices paid. Mark Haworth-Booth writes about photographic history, collecting and connoisseurship with great erudition in an effortless prose. This is a very important book, the first one hopes of many on institutional collections and the ways in which they have constituted photography as "an independent art." Marta BRAUN |
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