Museums and Photography

Displaying Death

Elena Stylianou, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317528968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

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.

1 Approaches to Displaying Death in Museums

An Introduction

Elena Stylianou and Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

Most recent theories view both museums and photography as socio-cultural constructions that are highly selective and prone to influences by various stakeholders and socio-political forces. Their selective processes are often defined by—as much as reflect—a complex set of parameters: what is available to use, what is considered most appropriate for a museum narrative, what is socially acceptable or aesthetically pleasing, or what is assumed to be effortlessly perceived and consumed by the visitor. These selections form a crucial, but also invisible, photographic ecosystem in museums¹; an ecosystem that defines what is exhibited and how, what becomes present, visible, evidential and influential.

But, if photography as well as its museological display are both culturally controlled and regulated practices that are highly selective, then questions are raised regarding the kind of “presences”² (and thus “absences”) exhibited and the kind of witnessing performed by museum visitors in their engagement with photographs. This edited volume is interested in this exact paradoxical and continuous exchange between presence and absence, in its consequent effect on curatorial and museological decisions, the implications and challenges that derive from it, and in visitors’ cognitive and emotional processes when faced with displays of death.

The individual chapters of this book adopt a strong theoretical approach in their discussion of a wide array of international case studies of museums that display photographs of death. These photographs propose a visual language of possible trauma, victimhood, violence, the afflictions of scientific experimentation or false rationality. The case studies deal with a variety of photographs of death, such as appalling images of the consequences of war, shocking images of murder found in police archives, funeral photographs found in personal albums, studio portraits of people who are no more or photographs that simply allude to the idea of death through various other signifiers. Faced with the diversity of such photographs, their purpose and possible impact, the museum is called to respond to a number of challenges and dilemmas in its handling, displaying and curating; dilemmas that are aesthetic, political and ethical. Collectively, then, the chapters offer an in-depth investigation of the varied approaches of displaying photographs of death—and subsequently of presence and absence—in various types of museums (anthropology, history, art, ethnographic and science museums). In doing so, the book offers insight not only into the wide-ranging strategies museums adopt for the display of photographs of death, but also into the museum’s responsibility when explicitly dealing with a photographic genre that can be immensely diverse and controversial.

More specifically, the chapters that follow demonstrate that museums and galleries seem to employ at least four different approaches when it comes to the photographic display of death that are often interrelated and not necessarily exclusive of each other.³ The first approach—Evidencing the Past—is perhaps the most common, especially in history museums, and uses photography as a form of evidence for predetermined narratives that are ideologically and politically charged. Photography, text and museum objects support each other to narrate the past as a single, often uninterrupted, narrative. The second approach—The Spectacle of Death—asks of photography of death to speak for itself, bare of any explanatory material. With minimal text and objects to contextualize and “remote-control”⁴ photography’s meaning, photographs of death often appear controversial by fetishizing and aestheticizing death. The third approach—Empathy and Escaping Anonymity—tries to avoid the pitfalls of re-victimization and anonymity that are often evident in the previous approaches. It tells the story of the victims from the victim’s point of view and not that of the perpetrator (as is often the case) making anonymous suffering personal and public. Finally, the fourth approach—Museums as Agents of Change—sees the museum as a space for critical reflection and tries to challenge ideological structures by proposing new readings of both the past and the present. The chapters of the book are organized into four sections, each one illustrating one of the above museological approaches and discussing their advantages and challenges. This introduction in turn, attempts to contextualize the book’s diverse chapters, grounding them in a common theoretical framework.

Evidencing the Past

Museums, and especially history museums, often display a significant number of photographs of death as visual evidence and as documents of atrocious historical events that are otherwise well described by texts and other exhibition media. In these cases, museums seem to rely on these photographs to further illustrate and support particular narratives in a forceful and convincing manner. Barthes mentions that “the photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”⁵ In the case of photographs of death in such displays, we argue that photography is violent twice: it displays violence and it fills the sight by force.

Apart from photography’s visual force, though, there is also a false sense of transparency bestowed on what is classified as documentary photography. Documentary photography is still often considered, by both museum professionals and visitors alike, as a transparent, unmediated mechanical reproduction of reality, despite the wider acknowledgment that a number of selective processes direct and alter its appearance and meaning. Moreover, photographs displayed in museums borrow from the credibility and authority of the museum in the process of becoming visual evidence for museum narratives. For this reason, photography in museums constitutes a vulnerable and thus dangerous medium that can be easily manipulated.⁶ Vulnerable because it changes according to the museum’s context, and dangerous because it can help construct or activate an imaginary one-sided collective memory, or “collective instruction,”⁷ which excludes the “other.”

Indeed, more often than not, photographs of death in history museums are enveloped by explanatory textual information that directs meaning and narrows down individualized interpretation. This first section examines how the museum’s context and surrounding content can influence photographic meaning by favoring one interpretation over others regardless of the original context of a photograph. It also examines the selective processes that might take place when deciding which images of death to display and how.

In Chapter 2, JM Hammond presents the case of the Metropolitan Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum, in which photographs are used to chronicle the struggle for the visual representation of the momentous earthquake that vastly devastated the region of Kanto in Japan in 1923. The images selected for the museum display are much less graphic than those in the museum’s archives, revealing a museological strategic decision of self-censoring, a type of restraining from overtly showcasing death. Instead, photographs of dead bodies are chosen when no faces are clearly visible or when objects stand for the dead bodies, while smoke—a deliberate added manipulation on images that responds to viewers’ expectations (and even morbid curiosity)—was chosen as the most appropriate visual vehicle for constructing this part of Japan’s history.

In the case of the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum, images might not be of bloody dead bodies, but they are still haunting in that death is implied. This is similar to the images captured in what Susie Linfield calls the “waiting room of death” in concentration camps.⁸ She mentions that “these photographs are of terror,” not because of what they show, but because of the histories to which they testify.⁹ Certainly, there is a fundamental difference between death caused by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, and massive death caused by human cruelty, such as is the case of the Holocaust. But, nonetheless, the museum’s use of images of dying people or of people who are soon to die is equal to the display of “death-in-process,”¹⁰ an almost always powerful form of visualized human anguish. The suggestive power of these photographs raises what Barbie Zelizer considers the important question “of whether the ‘as if’ of visual depictions may at times work better than journalism’s fuller documentation of the ‘as is’ ” and whether “a trope of visualization that draws from the imagination, the emotions and contingency to show less than what is known” might be more effective in capturing the public’s attention.¹¹

When Iro Katsaridou (Chapter 3) discusses the Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki, she similarly proposes that a museum that wishes to escape a certain Holocaust iconography fixated on death—which is often the case with Holocaust museums—should present a differentiated narrative that diverts from the overt iconography of a massacre. Although she is critical about the degree to which the specific museum has managed to show the extent of the city’s responsibility for the deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews to their ultimate death or for the destruction of their necropolis, she nonetheless acknowledges that the museum was created on the assumption that empathy and the restoration of the victims’ individuality would only be achieved through showing the lives lived.

A preference towards the display of images of everyday life, instead of death, might also be the result of a recent acknowledgement that “no representation can even begin to communicate the truth of the traumatic experience”; to represent that which remains unrepresentable.¹² Although different in their intention from the “as if” images discussed above, there is considerable doubt whether these photographs manage to do anything more than still reinforce mainstream narratives and textual discourse around the devastating results of Nazi brutality. Instead, in the context of a Jewish museum and indirectly charged with the burden of the Holocaust, even photographs of the life lived often fail to escape the future of their protagonists and in effect are deemed inadequate “to remember or redeem the experience of the traumatized victim”;¹³ they always remain photos of the victims’ ominous future, of their death.

The absence of photographs of the dead is also evident in Chapter 4, where Sheila Watson discusses the display of photographs of World War II aerial bombings. Watson argues that images of civilian deaths were often avoided in World War II museums in different countries and this was a decision based on different political choices. This was done as a means of building a collective memory of a unified Germany, as in the Deutches Historiches Museum and the Deutches Technikmuseum in Berlin, or as evidence of national superiority and ability to persevere as in the National War Museum, Scotland and the Imperial War Museum, London. Despite the museums’ best efforts to avoid passive voyeurism, however, documenting crimes without at least opening up the space for discussing multiple perspectives can also become problematic. The museum that choses to avoid showing multiple perspectives or opening itself up to institutional critique also needs to consider addressing its own role in reiterating violence through the display and circulation of images of death, both explicit and implicit.

This is even more evident when examining the photographic material in museums in Cyprus, a divided island where a decades-long political conflict penetrates all facets of life including museum displays. Yiannis Toumazis, in Chapter 5, discusses different memorial sites and museums in Cyprus that aim to stir historical memory by both glorifying and sanctifying victims and martyrs, whose iconic representation serves to build a personal and collective sense of belonging and martyrdom. In his chapter, Toumazis argues that photographs in these different sites—either of corpses in the museum’s glass cases or children’s portraits of children displayed in what once used to be a school—along with personal belongings of the deceased and other objects, gain a macabre materiality that may move the visitor emotionally. However, affective responses are not here utilized for critical reflection. They are instead viewed as a means for validating a tailored historical consciousness and nationalism, thus raising a series of significant questions regarding the museum’s ethical responsibility in allowing images of death to become a semi-religious iconography that supports ethno-national narratives and identities.

What becomes apparent then in the chapters of this section is that photography can become malleable material for highly selective, politically and ideologically charged one-sided narratives. Photography is often used as evidence or documentation to support textual discourse, while the museum context influences the meanings and narratives produced. These museums seem to acknowledge that photography, and especially documentary photography, still holds sway over visitors as it is seen as a truthful, unbiased documentation of what has been. It goes without saying that selective processes and political aims that are camouflaged and rendered invisible in such displays retain many dangers. Museums in these instances can easily turn into places of horror, pain and shame rather than dialogue, empathetic engagement or critical consideration. They can also reinforce and construct, rather than deconstruct and challenge, narratives that are one-sided, exclusive and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Approaches to Displaying Death in Museums: an Introduction
• Part I Evidencing the Past
• Part II The Spectacle of Death
• Part III Empathy and Escaping Anonymity
• Part IV Museums as Agents of Change
• Index