Approaches to Displaying Death in Museums: An Introduction

Abstract

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.