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- Title
Photography as a museological tool. Commemorating human loss in the contemporary museum.
- Authors
Leventaki, Elli
- Abstract
Photography is a powerful means of creating, reproducing and preserving memories. Due to the importance of sight in the western culture, photographs have always had the ability to influence people's feelings and emotional state, especially when it comes to tragic events that involve human loss. A single photograph is a fragment of the past that can be used as a material proof of a previously existing situation, while simultaneously being considered a memory and a memento itself. But what about a body of photos linked to challenging events? How can difficult memories be shaped in a museological representation? Museums are the primary institutions that deal with the past, by creating different narratives depending on their strategy. The majority of them is attributed to important, local or national, events, each of them presenting another viewpoint of history. When it comes to commemorating tragedy and human loss, however, representations can get more complicated and less objective, due to people's sensitive stance on the subject. In this paper, the comparative case study between two contemporary museums that used photographs as a structural tool, aims to showcase the diverse results in memory shaping, through two seemingly similar approaches. The National September 11 Memorial Museum (USA) and The Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Chile), have selected alike methods of representing national painful circumstances, by employing vast amounts of photographs. However, the appliance of the same museological tool does not necessarily imply the production of the same type of memory. While trying to identify the different types of memory that could potentially occur on the long-term, the French-Bulgarian historian Tzvetan Todorov introduced the dipole of 'literal' and 'exemplary' memory, which is affected by the way memories are handled in the short-term. Hence, the interpretation of a photograph is highly subjected to the context in which it is presented and the narrative it wishes to support. When it comes to commemorating difficult aspects of the past with the use of photography, museums may need to re-evaluate what is presented as "unique', in order for future generations to be able to deal with their history and better understand its multifaceted nature.
- Subjects
PHOTOGRAPHY exhibitions; EMOTIONAL state; PHOTOGRAPHY museums; COMMEMORATIVE art; PHOTOGRAPHS
- Publication
Dagerotyp, 2020, Issue 3/4, p91
- ISSN
1233-2445
- Publication type
Article