Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848–2020)

Abstract

As long ago as 2007 Florence Derieux was able to claim that ‘the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions’. Exhibition histories allow a shift away from individual works, artists or art movements, to contingences across space that also invite social and political critique. In Australia, while there have been many studies of exhibitions at home and abroad, it is only relatively recently that an examination of the impact of art exhibitions on art history has been undertaken. Unlike some of these recent studies that embraced exhibitions across multiple media, Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly’s Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), focuses on a single medium, photography, albeit in many permutations over the last 170 years. Installation View draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which photography has been exhibited, and in so doing steps aside from the usual run of photography monographs on individuals, technologies or collections. It would seem that the first exhibition of photography for other than commercial gain was in 1854 when the Australian Museum enabled local audiences to preview diverse works, including daguerreotypes, from the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales before despatching them to the Exposition Universelle (1855) in Paris. By the final chapters, and there are 37 in all, the reader is reminded that photographers have long used posters, billboards, electronic screens and projections to take photography into the streets. The narrative centres on visual records of exhibitions; in the authors’ own words, it is ‘driven by installation photographs’ sourced from institutional and private archives. Arranged roughly chronologically, the visual material in each chapter is supported by mini chapters, or ‘vignettes’, ranging from less than 400 words to maybe 3,000. To document photo exhibitions from 1854 to 2020 is no mean feat, and it is very likely that established scholars in the field will encounter new information. While the specific focus perpetuates a separation of photography from other art forms, it also enables a vastly more comprehensive account of photography exhibitions than is possible in cross-media studies. Even so, a predilection for a single (if not singular) medium warrants a sustained argument, one that takes into account the very disciplinary-diverse readership and scholarship on photo histories. It may be that researchers across the humanities and the social sciences find