Description
At an international conference exploring photography and the museum, this paper focused on how the Kodak Museum Collection has been utilised to tell the story of popular photography for the last thirty-five years at what is now known as the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM), Bradford, in the Kodak Museum turned-Kodak Gallery.The Kodak Museum Collection (KMC), collected by industry leader Kodak and displayed at their company museum in Harrow, UK, between 1927-1984, represents over a century of film-based photographic technology and apparatus. Comprising 60,000 cameras, technological apparatus and photographs as well advertising material and ephemera, the KMC has been utilised to tell the story of popular photography for the last thirty-five years at what is now known as the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM), Bradford, in the Kodak Museum-turned-Kodak Gallery.
Predominantly pre-digital, the Kodak Gallery presents a number of challenges for both NSMM and its twenty-first century visitors. Although NSMM continues to offer valuable histories of popular photographic practice, the technology used to snapshoot, and the infrastructures used to share such images today, are fundamentally different to those represented in the object-rich KMC. A small number of new displays have been built to stage interventions to redress these shortcomings by representing digital-based practices but, as I will show, these have encountered their own practical and thematic challenges. With NSMM seeking to adapt its approach, and as visitor expectations and pre-digital knowledge of photographic practice change, there is a pressing need to re-evaluate the existing story of popular photography on display, and to consider how the next chapter of this story can be developed as a new opportunity.
| Period | 24 Nov 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Museum Dialogues: Photography and the Museum: Re-evaluating the Past, Capturing the Present, Anticipating the Future |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Sunderland, United KingdomShow on map |