Stylianou, Elena

This paper examines how artists employ photography to investigate and challenge the museum. It makes particular reference to the work of three women artists: Louise Lawler, Sophie Calle and Diane Neumaier. Their work is discussed with reference to the concept of the fictional and the ways in which photography can function as a frame within which museum hegemony, the viewing experience and arts commodification are questioned. Finally, digital photography and online manifestations of imaginary institutions are considered, suggesting that perhaps a new virtual frame emerges for the production of fictions that allows us to reimagine both photography and the museum.

Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums-history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums - and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

This visual essay examines Sharqi, a collection of 27 polaroid photographs that are the result of Nicos Philippou’s decade-long photographic and theoretical investigation of Cypriot topography. The essay explores the ways in which Sharqi challenges existing photographic representations of Cyprus, produced mainly in the early-to-mid twentieth century by photographers, by travellers and by the state itself, while raising relevant questions about how: (a) Cypriot landscape photography often carries a romanticized and orientalizing gaze that attests as much to the island’s specific colonial past as to photography’s ties to imperialism, and (b) photography has often become a vehicle for perpetuating a Greek-Cypriot nationalism on the island. Finally, the essay addresses the documentary, autobiographical and self-referential nature of polaroid photography by discussing specific photographs from the Sharqi series. This article also looks at Sharqi in relation to relevant historic examples from the work of Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans.

This paper examines the exhibition of everyday war-related objects as ‘real things’ in museums. Specifically, it focuses on the bombed car that the artist Jeremy Deller used for his project It is What it Is: Conversations about Iraq–exhibited in various art museums in the US, then as a travelling show, and finally in the Imperial War Museum in London and Manchester. It also discusses the Alfred Rosenberg Diary, a permanent exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which can also be seen online. The paper identifies four different, interrelated, spheres of engagement within which to examine these objects: an excessive mediation of trauma, the museum as an ideologically charged space, the visitor’s relation to the object, and the virtual online apparatus. These form a wider interpretive framework that allows us to better understand the war-related objects’ political potential to offer an embodied, transformative experience in the museum.

This chapter begins by making reference to the image of Cypriot identity, constructed by colonial discourse and various travelers, photographers, geographers, and pseudo-anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While artistic practices from mid-twentieth century onwards were apparently in close dialogue with both local artists' studies in Europe and with the mainstream European avant-gardes, the earlier artistic practices on the island also tell of the beginnings of an alternative modernity in an area still defining its identity on the margins of Europe. The chapter identifies three main forces that have influenced the emergence of this contentious alternative modernity: British colonialism; Greek nationalism; and an organized Left and labor movement. Some references to vernacular photography and wider vernacular culture will also be made to further trace Cypriot modernity and its relation to the established orthodox narratives of European modernity.