PORTFOLIO The Museumification of Perception The “Boîte d’Arts Graphiques” at the Musée du Quai Branly 124 (Right) Installation 1 Distance, Confidently Photographed. 8 November 2012– 6 January 2013. This inaugural installation focused on the photographic experience, notably the relationship between the photographer and the subject being photographed as a context similar to negotiation. FIG. 2: A. Bernhard Hagen, “Batak man, aged twentyfive years, from the Foba clan of Pageh village.” © Musée du Quai Branly. In November 2012, the Musée du Quai Branly opened a new exhibition space dedicated to its graphic arts and photography collections, located on the same floor where the permanent collection is shown. The objective is to present the museum’s holdings in these areas, which are all but unknown to the public, in a series of temporary exhibitions that will remain on view for three or four months each. These works largely derive from the former collections of the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, but the Branly has enhanced them with new acquisitions in recent years. From Document to Work of Photography The boîte, or white-box gallery, is consistent with the museum’s dynamic and ever-changing spirit and style. The project has its roots in the museum’s first temporary exhibition, D’un Regard l’Autre, curated by Yves Le Fur in 2006, which was an investigation of the various ways in which Europeans from the Renaissance through the present day viewed and approached so-called primitive societies. The works shown, primarily from the museum’s collection, were compiled in a book titled D’un Regard l’Autre: Photographies du XIXe Siècle (One Perception to Another: 19th-Century Photographs), which examined how the European perception of “otherness” and the construction of the “primitive” identity evolved through the nineteenth century and into the 1930s and the birth of French academic ethnology, founded by Paul Rivet, Henri Rivière and Marcel Mauss, among others. That project established that it was possible to change the status of the photograph, which was increasingly being treated as a creation rather than a document, and that the image represented a photographer’s perception rather than a moment of objectivity. Until then, when photographs entered into the Musée de l’Homme’s collections, By Hasan López Sanz they all received the same archival treatment that followed a consistent process of logical documentation. All of the photographs were pasted onto the same kind of board annotated with information on geographic location, identification of the cultural group, and sometimes explanatory notes, which could come from various sources. These notes sometimes included information supplied by the photographer or excerpts taken from texts or articles in which the image had been reproduced or mentioned. When it was known, the date when the photograph was taken was given. The ethnographer or photographer who had taken the shot was also identified along with the context in which the photo was taken, as well as the date of its entry into the museum. In the words of the Branly’s curator of photography, Christine Barthe, “This procedure tended to treat a photograph as an object that had been collected in an excavation, as a fragment of objective reality, and not as the vision of an individual.”1 The fact that a photograph captured an image as a reflection of reality allowed for all the photographs in the collection to be put on an equal footing and given a limited meaning. The simple fact of incorporating them into the photographic archives of an anthropology museum converted them into documents useful for analytical purposes and for the dissemination of knowledge. All of this changed in 19982 when a new system of classification that emphasized the photographer’s identity was put into place, distinguishing the work of the individual from the document. The change was a logical consequence of the time. On the one hand, it indicated a consciousness of Walter Benjamin’s idea that in photography, the eye that looks through the camera “liberates the hand from its most important artistic obligations.”3 On the other, it accepted one of the basic theses of North American deconstructionist anthropology by affirming FIG. 1: View of the Boîte d’Arts Graphiques on the permanent collection level of the Musée du Quai Branly. © Musée du Quai Branly. Photo: Cyril Zannettacci.
CoverT70 FR corr_Layout 1
To see the actual publication please follow the link above