A collective case study of photographic culture through the lens of
the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A massive quantity of museums' photographic holdings resides not on
gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections,
including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the
workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are
defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism
of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks
complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs
create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a
museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic
interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and
image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who
address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices
of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of
accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the
critical discourse of both photography and museums.
